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It feels strange to be writing my final blog as the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's F1 presenter, just over four years after I sat down in a nondescript office in Television Centre and was offered a job that would change my life.

However, this blog also feels like the perfect place to say farewell as it's here, and via my Twitter account, that I would hope we've taken you at home closer to the sport than ever before.

I also credit this blog with helping to change the perception of me when I first got the job. I've told the story many times of how my wife Harriet rang me in floods of tears shortly after it was announced I was taking on the F1 presenting gig.

She'd read on the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ website about 12 trillion messages saying I'd be rubbish. Some of them under the headline: 'Sack Jake Humphrey Now'. This was a full four months before I hosted my first show!

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I must confess, at the start of the year I wasn't sure what to expect from Formula 1 in 2012. The question for me was: how could a sport that has enthralled us so much in recent seasons deliver again - while at the same time hold its own in a year so packed with stunning sporting spectacles?

We've had the European Football Championship, now followed swiftly by Wimbledon and then almost immediately the London Olympics will be upon us. It's a veritable feast for those sports lovers keen to sit down on the sofa in June and not get up again until late August (if I wasn't working I'd be one of them!).

Among such sporting riches I wondered just how F1 would make its voice heard. Well, here we are, almost at the midway point of the season and it seems I needn't have worried.

Due to the fact that my brain has probably only a hundredth of the power of Adrian Newey's and works at roughly a tenth of the speed of Sebastian Vettel's, there are many things I still can't work out about this sport. One of them: just how does it manage to keep on delivering storylines that even Brookside in its heyday would have been proud of?!

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My flight back to London from the Spanish Grand Prix was full of tired mechanics, exhausted race engineers and sleepy drivers - all of them recovering from an extraordinary weekend of mixed emotions in Barcelona.

It was a very strange feeling on the plane, alongside plenty of Williams personnel who were torn between celebrating a monumental win for the team, yet understandably concerned about their colleagues who remain in hospital after the pit lane fire on Sunday evening.

People know motorsport in inherently dangerous, and that F1 can never rest on its laurels as far as safety is concerned, however, that doesn’t mean it’s not easy to become blasé about our working environment.

Let’s take the pre-race show we do for example. Along with plenty of other media personnel, photographers and guests, we’re in a pit lane surrounded by fuel, electronically charged KERS units, all manner of other mechanical equipment, not to mention F1 cars leaving garages or scorching past at 60mph. The same applies to the grid.

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