Gallery: F1 pictures of the year

Christmas mornings in childhood homes of Top Gear's Sunday Afternoon Club were usually spent looking through that year's Autocourse annual and, frankly not much else unless there was some Scalextric in the stocking.

Yup, that's how hardcore we were/are. 

Autocourse is, of course, the grand prix annual and has been published since 1951, although the highly collectable yearbooks didn't become a fixture until 1959. This year's is out now, with its usual race-by-race season report, photographic portfolios, enough stats to take you through ‘til Boxing Day and its often controversial Top Ten Drivers (although we bet they're not as controversial this year as our own which we'll publish next week).

If you fancy a copy, it's is available directly from the publishers at autocourse.com and the exact price of £42.46 includes free UK postage and a year's access to the annual's covetable digital archive.

In the meantime enjoy this selection of images from the album, snapped by Peter J Fox of peterjfox.com...