A blade of grass. It's a fragile little piece of the environment.

Stand on it and you crush it. But a little while later, perhaps only hours, it has sprung back to place. Mow it down, and it re-grows. Pull it up, throw it away, and it will re-grow just about wherever it lands. Not so fragile after all, is that blade of grass?

I am always fascinated by one of the camera shots at the Indianapolis 500. I think it's at turn 2, where they put a camera right beside the track and the cars go "whoomp ... whoomp ... whoomp" past it. But, just off to the side of the shot is a flower-bed, which is full of - surprise - flowering plants.

When that shot comes on, I never watch the cars, but the flowers. As each car goes past, the plants whip back as the slipstream wind comes off the car. But the plants, and their flowers, are still there at the end of the race ... and many of the cars are not.

Some of the cars would have had some part fail. Others of them would have gone into the wall. And in an F1 race, there are also break-downs, there are also cars going off into gravel traps, into tyre barriers, and into walls.

It seems to me that humans are pretty bad at making things, and especially F1 cars, that can withstand damage. An F1 car goes over a little bit of a bump and, within a few laps, the driver pulls into the pits, climbs out and walks away, race over, a typical quote being, "It was undriveable."

I'm happy to agree that F1 cars are throroughbreds, finikity cars that need to be tuned in every conceivable manner to the finest degree in order to perform in the way that it is intended. But surely, they should be able to withstand a modicum of biff-and-bash?

Of course, there are some very good reasons why our driver pulled out of the race. The main one must be that he no longer felt safe in the car at the speeds required to maintain (at the very least) his position, that the car was even closer to "the edge", and that he felt that his own body might possibly suffer some damage.

Which brings me, rather neatly, onto the subject of the human body itself.

Our blade of grass has remarkable self-repair processes; all it needs is some sun, some air, some water and some dirt. Our F1 car has no self-repair processes whatsoever; break it, and it comes to a complete stop. Somewhere in between is the human body. On the most simplistic level, all the body needs is some air, some water, some food and some sleep.

But if you were to impose comparatively the same sort of demands on the human body as those imposed on our blade of grass, the human body would need all sorts of medical assistance to recover, if indeed, it was actually able to recover. Impose those loads on an F1 car, and the thing would be thrown away.

A blade of grass is, however, an infinitely less complex organism than the human body or an F1 car. But which is the more complex between an F1 car and the human body?

Of course, there's no real comparison. The human body is much more than the sum of its parts, and it does have some limited self-repair facilities (which I think are pretty good, really). The F1 car is merely the sum of its parts and, many times, less than that sum.

You can take the finest parts in the world, put them together, and still get a car that lurks at the back of the grid. (Although, in these days of 107%, it may well be lurking back in the garage.)

Then you can take other cars, that are comparatively put together on a shoe-string budget, which manage not only to qualify reasonably well, but also manage to pick up quite a few points along the way.

Each year, the F1 designers try and come up with something that is going to give their team the edge over all the other teams. Millions of dollars are spent investigating ideas that may well lead nowhere. Each part is designed and manufactured to the finest possible tolerances - and still they fail.

To go back to the human body, it usually complies to some basic design rules, as in F1 - a head (the nose), two arms (front wings), a torso (the body), two legs (rear wings), bones (chassis) and so on. And within those basic design rules, there is some room for variation, as in F1.

But the more and more that F1 cars look the same, so the human race looks more and more different. And it's pretty adaptable too, surviving in conditions that no decent, self-respecting F1 car would be seen in.

Really, the more you think about it, the more you realise just how fantastic the design of the very simple blade of grass is. And so is the design of the hugely complex human body. No wonder they seem to be able to survive. And neither were designed by humans.

The average F1 car, on the other hand, was designed by humans. And what a fragile beast it is.

Perhaps us humans aren't as good as we like to think we are.

But that's just me.