[EvilPumpkin]

I'm with paul on this one in terms of advertising promoting smoking. I remember tobacco advertising but it didn't influence me to smoke. The lack of advertising doesn't seem to have seriously hit the amount of new smokers coming along - I see youngsters of 12 or 13 smoking - much the same as I used to - so obviously it still has some kind of "cool points". To be honest, with the vehement anti-smoking backlash, I wonder if that is why it's becoming popular again. When I was that age, it was frowned upon and the correlations between smoking and lung cancer were all but proved - but there wasn't the hysteria about it that there is now. We did it because we thought we looked grown up - and that was about it.

Now smokers have become the great satans of the world. If I was a 13 year old looking to act grown up and rebel, smoking is the first thing I'd do - it's even more attractive than drinking these days.

But I digress...........

I don't believe that the enforced "nicotine withdrawal" on motorsport has had a significant impact on the sponsorship. You only have to look at the new sponsors coming in to see that the shift is now very definitely towards large technology companies - and there is plenty of money there, dot com crash or not.