On the eve of the new Formula One season, racing fans would be forgiven for thinking the sport is not quite as exciting as it was in the good old bad days. But is that really the case? As a paddock insider for the past 15 years, allow me to dish the dirt on the men who live at 200mph.

Despite their high-octane day job, the present generation of F1 drivers are often compared unfavourably to their predecessors in the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle stakes. But while the anecdotes of excess may be in shorter supply, are the current crop really behaving any better? In previous eras – and the one everyone seems to look back on most rosily is the Seventies – every driver wore rebel colours. Back then, sex was safe and racing was dangerous. They were all barking mad, oversexed and privileged. Because their life expectancy was so short, they wanted to pack as much fun in as they could. Consequences were never considered.

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The biggest tearaway was James Hunt who, legend has it, bedded 33 British Airways stewardesses at the Tokyo Hilton on the eve of winning the world championship. He raced with a badge sewn onto his overalls that read: “Sex, the breakfast of champions.” He was also almost permanently under the influence of booze, cannabis and cocaine, and this began to affect his driving.

Then there was Alain Prost, who blames losing the 1984 world championship (to Niki Lauda) because he had been up all night before a key race seeing to the needs of Princess Stephanie of Monaco.

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Indeed, of all the great F1 drivers of that era, perhaps only Ayrton Senna could be held up as an upstanding role model. Senna was the first really professional driver who just focused on driving and fitness. That’s not to say he wasn’t glamorous – far from it. He had movie-star looks, palatial homes, helicopters and a couple of high-profile girlfriends (including a romance with supermodel Carol Alt, who was married at the time), but none of that ever dented his ruthless obsession with winning. When groupies asked for his hotel room number, he gave them teammate Gerhard Berger’s, who was justifiably grateful.

Back in the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties, even the sponsors were macho and dangerous. Mostly cigarette companies, they got into bed with motor racing because of the sex appeal, danger and testosterone. But as the new millennium dawned, tobacco was forced out and banks, energy drinks and telecoms companies took their place. In short, it all became terribly clean cut.

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I recall sitting a job interview in 2003 with McLaren’s PR and marketing chiefs. It came at around the same time a woman had sold her story to a tabloid about sharing a bubble bath with then McLaren driver David Coulthard. This, I told them, was the perfect image to promote their sponsors and that Mr Coulthard should receive some kind of bonus for his efforts. However, the team had been advised by their clients to try to contain all of DC’s playboy exploits. Whatever happened to “sex sells”, I wondered? Suffice to say, I didn’t get the job.

I blame Michael Schumacher. Sure, he’s an F1 legend (and we’re all rooting for his recovery), but his record 91 wins and seven world championship titles are simply statistics. In the Nineties he ushered in a new era of soulless, unsmiling corporate drivers that all but marked the end of the F1 playboy era. There’s a telling old Fry and Laurie sketch, loosely based on the German, in which Stephen Fry interviews a taciturn young racer. Growing increasingly frustrated with the driver’s lack of enthusiasm, the reporter eventually screams: “You do a job that half of mankind would kill to be able to do and you can have sex with the other half as often as you like – I just need to know if this makes you happy!”

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The one time Schumacher did let his hair down, after winning his fifth title in Japan, he stole a forklift truck and threw a fridge through a window. My photographer friend James Moy managed to get the only photos and sold them to the Sun. The headline read: “Schu Trouble Macher”. Rather than tarnish his image it made him easier to relate to, more human.

But team PRs now insulate the media so that stories such as these – controversial and of a personal nature – don’t meet a wider audience. Sponsors are attracted to the youth, glitz and inherent risks of F1, yet are uncomfortable when it starts getting a bit too real.

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Kimi Raikkonen, who switches from Ferrari back to Sauber this season, first gained tabloid notoriety in January 2005 when he showed a London lap dancer the real reason he wears a six-point harness. Fuelled by vodka, I recall Kimi being caught in the ladies’ loos at a Red Bull party I attended in Shanghai that same year. His chaperones carried him back to his hotel and practically strapped him to the bed. They closed the door and walked down the corridor only to have their route blocked by a room service trolley bearing: “Twenty Heinekens for Mr Raikkonen.”

These events look rather less laudable through the post-Weinstein prism, but fans love his couldn’t-give-a-toss attitude. The Schumacher era had produced drivers who were robotic and, frankly, boring. We yearned for the characters of the Seventies, like “Hunt-the-Shunt”. Kimi, too, is seduced by that period. He once entered a speedboat race dressed as a gorilla, so as to preserve his anonymity and chose “James Hunt” as his nom de guerre.

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Kimi loves driving, but he hates doing any kind of PR. This is obviously not ideal when there’s £80m worth of stickers on his car, but the lack of lip service is viewed as refreshing. Shrugged silence seems to make him all the more magnetic.

His on-track rivals are perfectly articulate, when they can be bothered. But you sense they’re reading from a script and stage-managed by their uniformed cronies, who will blacklist journalists if they ask a question that’s not suitably bland. This is sport: you want to see anger, conflict and joy. It’s also fantasy: these guys are doing what every young man dreams of – racing cars, earning millions and getting their pick of the high-heeled trophies. Yet seldom do we see them unguarded. And never do you hear about Champagne-soaked ménage à trois aboard trackside yachts in Monte Carlo, which is a shame because they do happen.

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Jenson Button came in for a lot of flak when he arrived in F1 in 2000. The 20-year-old purchased a yellow Ferrari 355, moved to Monaco, bought a yacht and traded up girlfriends. Too many distractions, warned the critics. Team principals didn’t take him seriously, thinking he lacked commitment. But when Button was finally given a winning car to drive, he was able to prove them wrong. On the eve of the 2009 Australian Grand Prix – his championship winning season – in a display of his work ethic, Button went on a self-imposed sex ban with lingerie-model girlfriend Jessica Michibata ahead of the race. Half an hour after the chequered flag they made up for lost time in the Brawn GP hospitality unit. Interview opportunities were postponed.

The Button-bashing served as a warning to many of the youngsters coming through the ranks: don’t be too flash. And if you must have a G450 and an island, try to keep it out of the papers.

Most drivers these days start racing before they’ve hit double digits. They miss out on a normal childhood. Few emerge well-rounded. Lewis Hamilton is a prime example. The sport’s first driver of colour, he was signed to McLaren’s young driver programme at the tender age of 12, groomed to be a racing superstar from that moment on, with the media taking a strong interest.

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A little while ago, as we drove around East London in the back of his chauffeured Maybach, I put it to Lewis that his upbringing was a bit like The Truman Show, under an intense public spotlight. “That’s a cool interpretation, it was a bit like that,” he agreed. “I was groomed and restricted and felt that was the only space I was allowed to be in”. He was surrounded by PR handlers, adhering to the corporates and walking a press tightrope where they build you up then knock you down. He had to wear what he was told to wear, keep to the key messages, “look like this and behave like that” and be, ultimately, who McLaren boss Ron Dennis – the man who a ten-year-old Lewis first approached at an awards dinner and pledged he’d race for one day – wanted him to be. It was the opportunity of a lifetime, no question, but it also restricted his personal development. It bound and clipped him like a bonsai tree, stunting his growth.

“For me, it was all about racing. I was generally quite shy as a kid.” So, it took everyone by surprise when in September 2012 Lewis announced he was leaving McLaren for Mercedes’ team. “It was only then that I started to make my own decisions in life.” In the seasons that followed, this proved an absolutely inspired move. McLaren sunk into irrelevance. Mercedes, on the other hand, provided the car that would take Lewis to his second, third, fourth and fifth world titles. But, for me, the most striking thing about his time at the three-pointed star is how he has blossomed as a character. “I started to take down some of the shields that had been put up around me.”

Lewis has discovered who he is. “I’ve been finding out who I’m comfortable being.” He is embracing his background, his future and his off-track interests. He is out there living the life of a multimillionaire celebrity and he’s not afraid to show it. In the process he’s building a brand, he’s reaching an audience that would never normally tune into motor racing but might to see him, and he’s annoying jaded F1 purists who think racing drivers should stick to the Grand Prix Ball, rather than the Met Ball. The trips to Barbados, LA, New York and his Colorado ranch (known as the Megazone, with tracks for high-speed buggies and bikes) between races in his custom red and black Challenger jet, sometimes with Rihanna, Rita Ora, Winnie Harlow or Nicki Minaj by his side, make some question his commitment, but the fact is Lewis doesn’t sleep. He has more energy and drive than the rest of the grid combined. He loves nothing more than proving people wrong.

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“It doesn’t matter what the pundits say – ‘Oh, he’s off travelling and partying’ – I turn up and I win. Don’t talk to me about what I can and can’t do. I define who I am and I’m not defined by what people say. I might be in ten different countries in a week, but I’ll turn up at the track and kill it.”

His championship foe, Sebastian Vettel, is an altogether different character and it’s this, as much as their natural speed, that makes theirs a rivalry for the ages. Vettel arrived in F1 aged 18 and I immediately warmed to his easy-going charm and sense of humour, which he’d picked up in England racing in the lower formulas. But he still looked like a choirboy and was just as innocent. He turned up at the Pacha nightclub in Sao Paulo in 2007, his debut year, wearing a black turtleneck and looking like an adolescent James Bond. He had his eye on a girl there but was so nervous about approaching her that his trainer and I had to physically drag him over. Not long afterwards, having won his first grand prix, a reporter asked him if it was the best day of his life. He replied: “You obviously weren’t there when I lost my virginity.” I reckon I probably was.

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Ultimately, it’s difficult to find a balance between pleasing the sponsors, appealing to the fans and living your life. With the pressure that comes from having 450 staff and £200m of investment dependent on you, plus engineering meetings, press junkets and demanding fitness regimes, you can’t go boozing and inviting girls back to your presidential suite until you’ve got the race out of the way – that is, unless you’re a test driver. The reserve racers have the best deal of all; the sex appeal of driving F1 cars for a living and a license to stay out late because they don’t work Sundays.

I was in a cave-like booth at the Zouk club in Kuala Lumpur late on a Saturday night once when a “third driver” stumbled in, tripped and landed on a table of 20 Champagne flutes. God knows how he explained all the cuts to his physiotherapist.

F1 still knows how to let its hair down, but it’s also a proper job for these guys. The public wants to see heroes who live fast on and off the track. They still do, it’s just you rarely get to read about it.

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