Spectator sport: Forget this year’s Formula 1 championship – here comes 1976

Even if you don’t have a head for petrol, you can’t have failed to have noticed that the Formula 1 season thus far has been somewhat unsatisfactory. ‘Degradation’ and even ‘delamination’ (no, me neither but it does exist) have been the key words in Grand Prix chatter as tyres with a working life that can be measured in yards rather than miles have virtually eliminated the word ‘racing’ from the sport. But if you have two minutes and 31 seconds free — a Sunday afternoon just after a Grand Prix has started is as good a time as any — access YouTube and take a look at the trailer for Ron Howard’s new film, Rush, and your F1 blues will be swept away as quickly as the smile disappears from the face of the freshly goosed grid girl.

Until Senna was released in 2010, motor-racing films had rather stalled. John Frankenheimer’s Grand Prix in 1966 and Steve McQueen’s Le Mans five years later were both so full throttle with action that the plot was left at the start. The beauty of Senna is that it is true, a biopic of the last racing driver to have any air of myth about him. Rush is not a documentary, but it is a true story and if it even gets close to the standard set by the trailer then September can’t come soon enough.

The summer of 1976 was long and hot. England’s cricketers succumbed to ‘pace like fire’ at the hands of the West Indies, Johnny Miller torched the Open and Chris Evert and Bjorn Borg were melting hearts at Wimbledon. The Formula 1 world championship was being conducted without even a highlights show, let alone its own channel. But this was an epic tale, the rivalry between James Hunt and Niki Lauda.