Attend the launch of Jaguar's new Formula One car? Yes please, we could all do with a bit of glamour in our lives. So, what exotic hot spot are we off to, eh? The Seychelles, Kuala Lumpur, Goa? Close: an industrial estate in Whitley, a suburb of Coventry. Lovely.

Last year Jaguar had their launch at Lord's cricket ground, a glitzy, ritzy affair by all accounts, all trumpets and flashing lights. But then they had what their new boss, American Bobby Rahal, describes as a "disappointing" season (i.e. humiliating, with only the pointless Minardi and Prost teams finishing behind them in the constructors' championship). This time around the unveiling of their car is done in a near diffident fashion, with not a trumpet to be heard. Modest expectations, modest surroundings, it seems.

So, here we are, on an icy January morning in Jaguar's design and engineering centre, located in a place our Birmingham airport taxi driver wasn't aware existed. We're two and half hours early, just enough time for the F1 press pack to outline their travel plans for March to October: "Australia, Malaysia, Brazil, San Marino, Spain, Austria, Monaco, Canada, France, England, Germany, Hungary, Belgium, Italy, the USA and Japan. Yourself?" "Oooh, Kinnegad in March, God willing."

"But it's not as glamorous as it sounds, you know," they insist. "Bla, bla, bla . . . all hotels and airports and airports and hotels . . . bla, bla, bla . . . we work very hard, you know . . . bla, bla, bla . . . we're talking blood, sweat and tears here . . . bla, bla, bla." Jeez lads, ye sound like Westlife.

Only Peter Collins, RTE's Formula One commentator and self-confessed Shirley Bassey fan, gets any sympathy after his experience in a Magny-Cours (the least popular F1 venue, by common consent) hotel last year. "I was just drifting off to sleep when I felt something tickling my foot," he says. "I jumped up, saw a mouse in the bed, freaked, kicked it 10 feet in to the air, it landed on the floor and scurried in to the bathroom." Waiter? Smelling salts please.

"Problem was there was a big gap under the bathroom door so I blocked it with some t-shirts. Hardly slept. Got up, stared at the bathroom door and thought `I can do this'. Stormed in, but there was no sign of him." And you had to commentate that day? "I did." Heroic. Bet you Murray Walker never shared a bed with a mouse.

Someone suggests that Eddie Irvine probably had his foot tickled in a Magny-Cours hotel last year too but there was a fair chance the tickler wasn't a mouse. Where is Eddie any way? "He's on his way, I just saw him on the motorway - overtook him in my Punto," giggles a just-arrived English member of the press pack. Cue jokes about Jaguar's clutch problems.

So, what's Irvine like, then? Consensus: it depends on his mood. He's either (a) a tiresomely insufferable, bad-mannered, pampered, spoilt, puerile smart ass who's never grown up and probably never will (when Jane Nottage wrote a book with him on his Ferrari years she concluded that "at 33, he's probably just passing adolescence") or (b) an uproariously hilarious, entertaining charmer, one of the few drivers in Formula One to possess a personality and one who is capable of acts of big-hearted generosity, especially to up-and-coming drivers. Usually one or the other, rarely anything in between.

Mention Irvine and the conversation, invariably, turns to models of the female rather than vehicular variety. And that's the problem for the F1 press pack, they want to talk rear suspensions with Irvine, the other half of the room want to talk `babes'. They never have this problem with Michael Schumacher.

But Irvine obliges. You know you shouldn't laugh but, sometimes, it's hard not to. The Eddie archives?

Do you have any role models?

"Role models? No, but models? Oooh, I've had hundreds of them."

Liz Hurley says she thinks you're sexy.

"Well, she's only human."

Who's that pretty Italian woman walking around your yacht?

"She's the torso in the Benetton black and white ads."

He probably didn't actually know her name, but then this is the guy who went out with a Brazilian supermodel who didn't speak English. The same guy who when asked "is there any truth in the rumour that you are seeing a supermodel?" replied "does a bear **** in the woods?"

"I have to admit that I'm pretty shallow when it comes to women," he said in an interview with Superbike magazine last March (on being asked - no kiddin' - "wouldn't you fancy bedding some 20 stone, hairy-armpitted, ugly old boiler with halitosis for a change?"). True, in comparison, Benny Hill's relationships with women were cavernously deep.

But, as a rule, you don't fund Irvine's class of lifestyle doing a paper round so, now that the new season is less than two months away, it's time for him to put away his toys and start earning his annual salary of £6 million from Jaguar. Today we get to see the car in which he will attempt to do it in the 2001 season.

Bobby Rahal, a legend in Indycar and CART racing, opens proceedings by addressing the assembled press pack in what looks like half a basketball court. "Tough decisions were made late last year regarding staff," he tells us (F1 speak for `a bunch of people were sacked') and refers to Jaguar's "driveability issues" last season. Eh? "F1 speak for when the engine doesn't start - and when it does it doesn't keep going," I'm told.

Then Bobby introduces us to Rick (Mr Roscitt to you), president of American communications company AT&T who have just formed a relationship with Jaguar (you don't have sponsorship in F1, you have mutually beneficial `relationships' or `partnerships'). Rick assures us that he'd been driving a Jag even before AT&T started dating Jaguar and "as the New Jersey state police will attest it's a very fast vehicle". Bobby chuckles and Rick flashes a smile that you only ever see in toothpaste ads.

"Now, let's talk about the car," says Bobby, and he tells us about the new longitudinally mounted magnesium-cased seven-speed gearbox and the AP Racing triple-plate pull-type clutch. Just as we're beginning to lose the will to live the drivers are introduced.

Irvine evidently lost a bet during the off-season because his hair, once again, is peroxide blonde, only this time it looks like he bleached it himself in the sink at home (with one of those sachets that cost £2.99 at all good chemists). He and Jaguar's new number two driver, Brazilian Luciano Burti, whip the dust-sheet off the new car and, well, there's silence. If a pin had dropped at that moment we'd have been able to locate the exact spot it landed. You're tempted to clap, out of the goodness of your heart, but you kind of reckon no clapping at all is better than one person clapping at the back of the room.

Psst. Press pack? Why is no-one clapping? "Well, they never do. You've seen one car you've seen 'em all, unless they've put the back wheels on the front, which in Jaguar's case is entirely . . . ". Behave. (Is there one for everyone in the audience? "No.").

Questions for Eddie? "Do you think you can improve on last season?" "It will be difficult to do that bad again - if we did then we would deserve a good kicking," he says and Rick and Bobby beam. Nervously. Then the drivers mingle, answering questions from groups of four or five at a time. "Do you think you can improve on last season, Eddie," ask the first. "Do you think you can improve on last season, Eddie," ask the second. "Do you think you can improve on last season, Eddie," ask the third. The fourth is more adventurous. "Eddie? Do you think you can improve on last season."

The queues to speak to Burti are, at a guess, a twelfth the length of Irvine's. But then Irvine is the king of the quotable quotes and even if it took him three minutes to get from nought to 60 he'd never be short of interview requests from the press pack. "There is a constipation about Formula One, because many are frightened to speak out in case they upset one or two people," Jackie Stewart once said. The `many' doesn't include Irvine who has a penchant for upsetting people and will never be in need of a verbal laxative.

Looking on, like a couple of wide-eyed kids in a toy shop, are 19-year-old German Andre Lotterer and 20-year-old Australian James Courtney, who've just been signed up as drivers for Jaguar's new F3 team. "I haven't stopped smiling since I found out - I think my jaw is going to snap off," says Courtney, who wouldn't look out of place on the set of Home and Away. "Yes, I'm very happy," says Lotterer, who looks like a Chemistry student. Where are you both living? "Milton Keynes," says the Sydney native. Hmm. "It's very nice," insists Lotterer. Courtney bursts out laughing. Lotterer shrugs. Schumacher and Irvine? Fast forward. Lotterer and Courtney? Mmm, maybe.

Meanwhile, Irvine's still answering questions. "Do you think you can improve on last season, Eddie?" His eyes are beginning to glaze over but he's on his best behaviour today and has managed to avoid offending any one, much to everyone else's disappointment. Give him time, though, the season's only just begun.

Then there's lunch, the cost of which, for Jaguar, would probably buy you the television rights to Premiership football (featuring parts of animals you didn't know were edible) and then the press pack bid adieu to each other, with cries of `see you in Melbourne'. Well, you get a better view on telly and, any way, at least there's no danger of picking up deep vein thrombosis on a trip to Kinnegad.