This year marks the 75th anniversary of the very first Formula One world championship in 1950 which featured seven races and was won by the Italian Giuseppe Farina.

AFP Sport picks out six things to know about that first summer of speed.

Grand Prix racing dates back much further than 1950, almost to the moment that the first automobiles appeared on the road. In fact the first recorded race took place in 1894 when Count Jules-Albert de Dion won the 126km Paris-Rouen rally at an average speed of 19kph (12mph).

The first closed-circuit race came in 1903 in Athy, Ireland and the first race to carry the label of Grand Prix is thought to have been at Le Mans in 1906 - although some vouch for Pau in 1901.

A manufacturers' championship took place in the 1920s but it was only after World War Two and the emergence of the FIA as the new governing body that the new competition would begin.

The previous three years had seen a variety of one-off Formula One races with no overall competition. That changed with the 1950 championship which comprised six races in Europe - Britain, Monaco, Switzerland, Belgium, France and Italy - and one in the US.

The Indianapolis race was effectively a........

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