In the velodrome in Beijing during the Olympic Games this summer I turned to a respected cycling correspondent during the incomprehensible Madison race. “Am I right in thinking our Great Britain boys are falling behind?” I asked. The response: “To be honest, I'm not sure yet.”

Which brings us neatly to Formula One.

Sport is principally for the combatants, but at the professional level it is also a lot to do with the spectators. For their money, they like to know who is winning or losing, which seems less straightforward than ever in motor racing.

Yes, someone always crosses the line first, but the chequered flag all too often marks the start of the drama. The result is known only once the wheel nuts have been weighed, the winglets have been measured, the complaints sifted through, the tapes examined by the stewards and at least half a dozen conspiracy theories have been kicked around the media room.

At Interlagos in Brazil in October last year we sat until it was pitch black waiting to discover if the result of the World Championship was going to be overturned on a technicality. Something to do with fuel temperatures, apparently, although I am still not sure what it was about. Lewis Hamilton graciously declared afterwards that he wanted to win on the track and not in the courtroom. He knows where heroes are made. But eventsin Spa-Francorchamps on Sunday, when he was relegated from first to third after he had finished spraying the champagne, have fuelled the idea that the racing is just an excuse for a row.

If you want a laugh, go online and read the responses to Edward Gorman's report from Belgium. They remind me of the postbag that would typically follow a match report from a Liverpool-Manchester United epic. One letter postmarked Salford would accuse you of being a biased Scouser, another from Bootle would say the report must have been penned by a “soft Manc b*****d”. They were insistent in their views, but both could not be right.

Petrolheads are even more polarised in their opinions about Hamilton, Ferrari and the FIA, the sport's governing body, and so convinced of sinister plots that it is a wonder they have not turned their backs on Formula One. You can only conclude that they love it, that the chicanery off the track is as much fun as the overtaking. Last year's Spygate scandal was often described as a threat to the sport's credibility, but the fans could not get enough of the drama.

The love life of Max Mosley, the FIA president, was none of their business, but they loved to kick that around for weeks, too. The sex was just the part of it. Was it a plot? Who was behind it?

If they simply wanted to know who was the quickest driver, they would give everyone identical cars. But where is the controversy in that? More important, where is the money? In Formula One it is sometimes hard to tell where the commercial imperatives stop and the sport starts. These are big corporations at work and the fans love all the details of who is copying whose fuel pump.

They must have been slavering yesterday over the detail that, on the printouts in the pitlane, Hamilton had dropped to 6km/h (less than 4mph) slower than Kimi Raikkonen, of Ferrari, and had seemingly surrendered any advantage from taking his shortcut.

The wider question is whether the rest of us, the floating fans, are drawn to or put off the sport by the complexities. The Madison did not work for me in cycling, nor does Duckworth-Lewis as a means of settling rain-affected cricket matches. And I found it immensely frustrating that one of the few great races of the season, behind Monaco and the sodden chaos of Silverstone, is in the hands of lawyers and could take weeks to unravel.

Generally, sport is at its best when you are instantly able to comprehend the brilliance, or the woefulness, of what you have seen. You tend to go off sports in which you are not sure whether you can trust your eyes. Ask the Tour de France organisers.

Even the simplest of sports, football, can tie itself in bureaucratic knots. There is the banning of video replay evidence if the referee has seen an incident. So we can watch footage of a punch on the nose, but because, in the mêlée, the referee thought that he saw something different, his warped view of events stands. It is a strange justice, but at least it does not change the result.

In Formula One, who knows who won the Belgian Grand Prix? No one even seems sure if an appeal by McLaren Mercedes against a time penalty is permitted. Still, it gives fans the chance to debate the issue for weeks, along with Tyrrell being thrown out of the championship in 1984, the BAR car that was too light by 6kg (about 13lb) in 2005 and the rest of the scandals.

“I have often said the race is not over until the official results are published,” Stefano Domenicali, the Ferrari team principal, said on Sunday. Even then, everyone will row over the rights and wrongs.

“FIA = Ferrari International Assistance,” Brit, from Edinburgh, writes online. “The penalty was fair,” Richard, from London, says. “Thats the end of F1 for me,” Mike, from Berlin, says. Yeah, right.

Carragher's caveat narrows the field for future

Jamie Carragher once peed on my feet. We were sitting around a table in a bar in Malaysia on an England Under-20 tour and, as he explained at the time, he had had a few and it was a long way to the lav.

I do not tell the tale to embarrass him but to record how far he has come from since his days as a hedonistic 19-year-old. The journey to upstanding professional, and all-round good guy, is colourfully chronicled in Carra, My Autobiography. In the book, Carragher discloses that he wants to go into management, which is no surprise, given how he loves to analyse the game. Some footballers are experts on the price of Bentleys. The Liverpool stopper knows the name of the Real Betis left back and, probably, whether he is any good on the overlap.

Trouble is, Carra no sooner raises hopes that one of our shrewder footballers will move into the dugout than he adds the rider that “if I couldn’t still live in Liverpool, forget it”. That does rather limit the horizons.

Andorrans on a slippery slope

As England players prepared to face Andorra on Saturday, panicking officials charged around the Olympic Stadium in Montjuic looking for corner flags. In the end, they had to make do with borrowing some yellow bibs, fixing them to the posts with sticky tape. It was another reason to ask whether England should be playing ski resorts in competitive matches.

Still, as last-minute preparations go, my favourite remains queueing up in the gents’ toilets shortly before an England match in Sofia to hear Gareth Southgate, in full kit and with boots clattering on the tiles, asking if he could jump ahead. “David Seaman’s in the only cubicle we’ve got,” Southgate said, “and he’s taking his time.” Perhaps that's why they called him "Safe Hands”.