Fans.

Fans are a funny lot. Real fans are a very strange lot, usually so blind to their particular devotion that it becomes religious.

Visit Melbourne, the current home of the Australian Formula One Grand Prix (please note the use of the word "current" there ... as I'm now based in Adelaide, the old home of the GP, I still live in hope) in winter and you could be forgiven for thinking that the outside world doesn't exist. You see, they have football.

To understand Melburnians and football even a little (and I'm certainly not claiming that I understand either), we have to digress slightly - and, please, no messages asking what is so unusual about a Ramble that digresses!

I don't know if you've noticed, but there are certain codes of football that have very little following outside their own areas. The two codes that spring to my mind are Gaelic Football and Australian Rules Football, no doubt there are others.

I understand the finer points of neither. The former, apparently played only in Ireland, seems to be a mix of soccer and rugby. Personally, I find it a great spectacle and fascinating to watch on the good old TV. Sadly, I've never been able to actually go to a game.

On the other hand, I have been to many Australian Rules games, ranging from local teams on muddy ovals through to the top teams in the country on beautifully prepared and grassed grounds. I've been told that the code was developed so that cricket ovals and cricket players would have something to do in winter. Apart from that, the appeal of the game totally evades me; and that also just about fills out my knowledge of it, too.

While it may seem that these two codes have nothing in common, they have played "Tests" against each other, which I find even stranger

...but that's by-the-by.

What does fascinate me about both these local codes is that they attract HUGE crowds into their games in their areas of influence. And that they seem to be quite happy to stay as "big fish in small ponds".

All this was brought on by one recent event, and by another event from some months ago. This weekend just gone was "That One Day In September". The day in September when the premier Australian Rules league, the Australian Football League (AFL) - based in Melbourne - held its Grand Final day.

At about the same time, qualifying day was getting underway at this year's other German ... ooops, sorry ... LUXEMBOURG GP. You might well think that an event in a small part of a country some thousands of kilometres away would have little, if any, interest in the the F1 arena.

And you might well be wrong.

There are quite a few Aussies in F1, and for many of them the prime interest of the morning was "Who won the Grand Final?" (for the record, Adelaide beat St Kilda).

And in Melbourne, there is - speaking simplistically - nothing but the "footie". I remember seeing a newspaper billboard once which said something like: "Gordon suspended for four games" in big, black letters ... and down in the corner in much smaller letters was: "Pope Assassinated".

Starting to get the idea about Melbourne and football now?

If we were to look at the TV ratings for the AFL Grand Final, I'd have little doubt that the game would have demolished everything else in Melbourne and Adelaide, and probably would have easily won in the rest of Australia. I suspect that the Gaelic Football's All-Ireland Final would do similarly in Ireland.

But outside their own areas, how many people have heard of these codes? How many have actually been to a game, or seen one on TV?

Flip the argument over completely, and catch the TV figures for F1. If you want to be amazed, these are figures worth reading. The release is somewhere in my mess of papers, so I can't quote the actual numbers, but the F1 authorities claim a vast viewing audience for F1 - somewhere in the billions over a full year, unless I'm very much mistaken.

The problem I have with this is that I know only too well that F1 just isn't that popular. In North America, for example, F1 is very much a minority form of motor racing. Even in Europe, there are many areas where GP motorbikes and rallying are more popular just in terms of motor sports, let alone any other sports. put soccer into the equation and F1 pales into insignificance.

So, why do these people claim such big viewing audiences when it seems screamingly apparent that many of us feel instinctively that those figures are a load of [insert here your phrase of choice denoting derision].

I mean, really, you can't honestly tell me that that many people sit down and watch each GP, can you? Well, no. It seems that what the figures actually say is that so many people watch a GP, OR PART THEREOF (my stress).

What all this means is that if you sit down at some unearthly hour of the night to watch the live telecast of a GP from some far-flung place, then you count as one viewer. Then, the next evening, if your family of four sits down to watch the evening news together, and there just happens to be a mention of the GP, with a 10-second clip of the race, then that's another 4 viewers.

All of which has started me wondering if F1 is as big a global sport as I like to think it is, or whether it's just another global sport. And, although I might think of Gaelic Football and Australian Rules football as being minority sports, is F1 actually a minority sport as well?

But that's just me.