Just imagine that a Formula 1 team was fined nearly £50m by the FIA and disqualified from the constructors’ championship, as a result of its chief designer having been caught in possession of top-secret technical data belonging to its closest competitor.

Just imagine that, the following winter, rather than buckle under and give up, that team’s workers instead put stout shoulders to the wheel, despite the mood of terrified and defensive pessimism that had enveloped them over the previous months, and that in the spring they flew to Melbourne and, weeping with relief and joy, they won the season’s first F1 grand prix.

Just imagine that, as the F1 campaign unfolded, the battle for the drivers’ and constructors’ titles became a two-horse race, fought between the organisation that had been fined and its cut-throat rival, the outfit whose intellectual property the heavily fined team had had in its possession.

Just imagine that one of those teams won the Belgian Grand Prix, then lost it to its F1 world championship rival as a result of a post-race penalty, the integrity of which was derided left, right and centre, and indeed caused a retired three-time F1 world champion to rage in his distinctive Austrian monotone the words: “This is the worst judgement in F1 history, the most perverted I’ve ever seen. It’s absolutely unacceptable when three functionaries [the FIA stewards] influence the championship like this.”

Just imagine that, as a diverting sub-plot, the Singapore GP was won by the driver who had left the heavily fined team at the end of the previous season, after a furious row, and that he had secured victory in that first ever F1 night race by means of a deliberate shunt wrought by his young and biddable team-mate, timed perfectly to trigger a safety car deployment that would advantage his team leader’s pitstop strategy. Just imagine that that team was never stripped of the win despite the later discovery of the nefarious manner in which it had been finessed.

Just imagine that, after 17 of the season’s 18 races, the two men still in contention for the drivers’ championship were racing for the two teams whose most senior managers’ relationships had deteriorated from bad to terrible, and that the F1 constructors’ title was also teetering between those two teams.

Just imagine that the final grand prix of the season, in São Paulo, was won by the local hero and that he, his team, his family, his friends and his fans were celebrating his world championship with delirious elation, only to see triumph snatched by his fiercest rival, who nicked a crucial extra point by delivering an overtaking manoeuvre on the very last corner of the very last lap.

And just imagine that the new world champion was the first black man ever to race in F1, and that the driver he beat was still trying to challenge the result in court 16 years later.

It could never happen, could it?