Pre-season testing and the early races of each Formula 1 season always spark some controversy based on creative interpretations of the 105 pages of technical regulations that govern the design of the cars. It's the first time that rival technical directors get a look at the opposition, and inevitably this leads to discussion of the semantics that may be used to form the understanding of those regulations.

I've mentioned oil burning briefly before, but since interest in this abstruse subject - which many thought had been put to rest - has been sparked afresh, it's worth revisiting and examining in more detail.

Perhaps the first thing to point out is that the use of lubricating oil to enhance power through improved combustion is not new. In the last era of turbocharged engines some pretty exotic but highly lethal fuels were used. These were pioneered by BMW, which had supposedly found the formula through reading papers regarding fuel development for the highly boosted engines used by the Luftwaffe fighters in World War II.