Love.

Try and define it. Many people have tried and all have failed, because love is such as personal thing. Yet, the silly thing is that we all think we know when we are "in love".

There are different sorts of love. There's the love you have towards members of your family. There's the love you have towards your few really close friends. There's "lust" love.

Recently, a old drinking friend of mine split from his wife. This was not a decision that was taken lightly. She had been cheating him financially for many years. From time to time, he found out about it, she would promise to behave herself, and then she'd do it again but be even more cunning than before.

I only found out about all this just before the break-up, but it had been going on for years, it seems, with him bailing her out every time. His theory was she knew that he'd bail her out, she just went on and on.

Okay, so I only heard one side of the story. Perhaps he treated her badly - perhaps he was beating her up - I don't know. But, one afternoon, there was one little thing he said that got me thinking.

"She is not honest with me. Without honesty, how can there be trust? And without trust, how can there be love?"

Very simple and very true. (He told her to leave the next morning.)

And on that basis, are F1 drivers in love with their mechanics? The answer to that has to be "no, don't be silly" ... or is it?

Look at Jacques Villeneuve. He's arrived in F1 as the reigning IndyCar champion. He's the son of a former F1 star. He's young. He's charismatic. And, it would seem from what you hear around the place, he's going to be the F1 champion before too many more years have passed.

Wow! I don't know about you, but I reckon that Villeneuve is carrying a fair load of emotional baggage with him. That would be enough to throw most people off their strides completely, but Villeneuve has been carrying some of that baggage around for a while, so he might just be used to carrying it.

Then he has to race at all these tracks where he hasn't raced for many years, if at all. He's come into a series where he doesn't know the "ropes" at all, and has to learn from scratch.

But, perhaps, most importantly, he's working with a team he barely knows and with the people in that team ... who he doesn't know at all.

How would you feel about driving an F1 car out of the pits, not 100% confident about the people who have been working on it?

For the past few years, Villeneuve has been having an affair with the people from Barry Green's team in North America. From Indy Lights through to IndyCars, he has had the stability of working with the same people, on the same circuits. Although there were some changes along the way, he has basically developed a trust in the people around him.

All of a sudden, he's been pitched into F1. He's lucky that he has joined the Williams team where the mechanics are generally regarded as being among the best in the F1 business.

So, his confidence in the mechanics has to be fairly high. And, by doing as much testing as he possibly can, the confidence has grown. But testing is different to actual racing, so there must have been some niggling, naggling little doubts, probably sub-conscious, in his mind as he took the car out of the pits for the first time in Melbourne.

Meanwhile, down pit road, Michael Schumacher has just moved from Benetton to Ferrari. Apart from a single race with Jordan, his entire F1 career has been with the Benetton team, and the Benetton people. He has to get used to a new car and new people, too. Just like Villeneuve.

If either of these drivers don't do very well this season and, say, Damon Hill, does, all this may be part of the reason. Hill has come to put trust in his mechanics and their abilities. He knows, when he takes his car out of the pits, the guys who have been working on the car and their abilities. For Villeneuve and Schumacher, they have to rely on their instinct that the people who have been working on their cars knew what they were doing.

At the pinnacle of the mechanics is the race engineer - although he might see himself as slightly more than a mechanic. To use computerese, the race engineer is the interface between the driver and the mechanics. The driver comes in after a session and tells the race engineer what he feels about the car and the way it is handling. The race engineer can then tell the mechanics what changes to make to the car, so that the driver can, hopefully, improve.

The way the driver interprets the car's actions, passes that information onto the race engineer, the way the race engineer receives that information, and the way the race engineer passes that information onto the mechanics are all crucial. If there is any misinterpretation at all, the car will not be tuned as perfectly as it could be, and the results will suffer.

The driver has to be honest with the race engineer. The driver has to totally trust the race engineer. So does the driver love the race engineer? Or, does it help if the driver loves the race engineer?

While it may be, in a highly successful partnership, that both of them would deny it, the probability has to exist that the two of them are "in love". I don't think that it is sufficient to say that they respect each other highly. To be successful it must surely go beyond that level. And it doesn't seem sufficient to say that they have "bonded". Again, it must go beyond that.

So what does that leave? Love?

But that's just me.