Lewis Hamilton has a world title, millions of dollars in his Swiss bank account and a pop star girlfriend who dreams of having 'beautiful angel babies'.

As Formula One embarks on another season, the sport's high-octane attraction for girls and glamour looks as powerful as ever, despite its cash and charisma crisis.

Hamilton dates Pussycat Dolls singer Nicole Scherzinger, while 2008 champion Kimi Raikkonen married a former Miss Scandinavia.

Jenson Button's mediocre career behind the wheel has been more than compensated by a romance with a TV reality show winner and now a Japanese model.

But despite even international motorsport federation boss Max Mosley being at the centre of a lurid tabloid sex scandal, F1 drivers of the 21st century are more ‘mild bunch’ than ‘wild child’.

It wasn't always so.

In the 1960s and 1970s, drivers, less cocooned by corporate concerns and strapped into what were often four-wheel death-traps, were acutely aware they could be living on borrowed time.

One of Hamilton's predecessors as world champion, James Hunt, who took the title in 1976, was a playboy racer of the old school; in his case, the school being Wellington.

Hunt had a succession of beautiful girlfriends, including supermodel Jane Birbeck, and was married twice.

His first wife Suzy, a model, left him for hellraiser actor Richard Burton while his second marriage to Sarah ended in divorce. Hunt was to be married a third time, but he died of a heart attack just hours after proposing. He was only 45.

The blond Hunt was never an establishment figure, too fond of the bottle and a good party who'd often arrive at official functions dressed in jeans and T-shirt.

Another blond British driver Mike Hawthorn was also a world champion.

His glory came in 1958; a year later he was dead, just 29 years old.

Hawthorn, who often raced wearing a bow-tie, was engaged to 21-year-old Vogue model Jean Howarth and the two planned to be married before Hawthorn's death on a public road in southern England.

The sport's first world champions, still scarred by memories of the Second World War, never attracted similar, wild headlines.

Nino Farina, who won the inaugural 1950 championship, married Elsa Giaretto, an elegant businesswoman who ran a Turin fashion house.

Five-time winner Juan Manuel Fangio, who once claimed 'women rule our lives, don't they?', never married, but the balding, bow-legged Argentine enjoyed a 20-year relationship with one woman.

Stability worked too, four decades later, for Michael Schumacher whose seven world titles came about through talent, devotion as well as settled domestic life. Schumacher met his wife Corinna in 1990, before he had made it into a Formula One team and all of its traditional distractions.

"I was looking for the life I started to live together with Corinna," he once told a interviewer. "That was my dream because I don't like to be alone."

Maybe that explains why Scherzinger told The Sun newspaper that her desire was to have 'beautiful angel babies' with Hamilton and why Hunt, with his wild days behind him, spent his last years rearing budgies.

AFP

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