Here's to another 500

It seems a bit odd to be celebrating Lotus' 500th grand prix when the team is only nine races old, but that's what we did in Valencia... and it felt right.

Lotus Racing (as it is known so as to differentiate itself from the original Team Lotus that Colin Chapman established back in 1954) have gone about their debut season in a respectably understated way. They worked miracles to get a reliable car designed and built in five months. Since then they've set achievable targets, and they've delivered. You can't ask for more than that.

Of course, being the best of the new teams is one thing when you're up against an outfit which was in financial crisis just weeks before Bahrain, and another whose car was designed on a Commodore 64. Okay, that's really mean. CFD may well be the way forward. But Lotus Racing was 1.4 seconds quicker than Virgin in Valencia qualifying.

No, it's one thing to blow Hispania and Virgin into the weeds, but it's quite another task to emulate the success of Team Lotus, a team that won 13 titles.

I asked Mike Gascoyne today if he truly believes he can one day take the fight to Ferrari and McLaren. His response: "Bring it on".

It won't happen over night, but Mike is building the blocks of a team that really could be a giant killer in the not too distant. After a recent shopping spree at Force India, he's fast assembled one of the most talented and experienced technical and aero teams in the pitlane. With the visionary Tony Fernandes keeping the coffers full, but also keeping a wisely tight reign so there's no wastage, this is a team with a real future as well as a glorious bloodline.

The name on the nose on the car is more than a nod to the past. The team is based in Norfolk, just 15 minutes from Group Lotus' base in Hethel. Several of the staff are ex-Team Lotus. And between 'Gazza' and Tony, you've got a combination of no-bullshit tech-spertise and marketing savvy that Chapman himself would have loved.

Fernandes was a Lotus fan as a kid who burnt a hole in his parents carpet playing with a model Type-49. Taking on the Lotus name made commercial sense and fulfilled a school boy dream. But essentially, Fernandes wanted to do his own thing. He could have bought Toyota and had an easier winter. But it just didn't appeal.

"I think life is about creating something of your own, and buying an existing team is not your own," he explained to me aboard his rented yacht in Monaco some weeks back. "I mean, I have bought an existing airline, but that was two planes and it was losing tonnes of money, which I was able to turn around. An existing team comes with 500 people, who already have their way of doing things. That wasn't something that really appealed to me. Everything that I do with my partners is to create something we can be proud of, and it's much easier to do that from the beginning. My talent is for bringing the right people together and giving them a working environment in which they can thrive. That's much harder to do with an existing team. That would be a battle."

He likes to do things his own way, does Tony. Old man Chapman would have approved.

"I'm prepared for the down days, and there will be some, but we're moving in the right direction and faster than I had dared to dream," says Tony.

"Not only does the car perform well, and the recent upgrades have met expectations, but the drivers are great, the whole team looks good. We deserve to be here, and we'll be here a long time yet."