h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

We don't have to be the best at everything - leave that to countries with huge populations or less restrictive drugs policies.

The truth is that we brits are actually better than 90% of the world at Cricket (we'd wallop the United States, China and Russia at it for example), better than 75% of the world at football (aka Soccer), fairly good at athletics and are about to be crowned 6 nations champions (barring disaster) at Rugby. We make the majority of the worlds best Formula 1 cars and have a couple of top class drivers; We're there or there abouts in world rallying. Our golfers are amongst the top 10 nations in the world. We even have a competitive bob-sleigh team despite the complete lack of snow.

Not bad for a small island (+ bits) with a piddling 5% of the worlds population and next to no spare land to practice these sports on! We should take a tip from the Aussies - stop wingeing and start crowing over our sportsmen and women

In motor sports most of the leading Indy car teams use british built chassis (Lola and Reynard). As for F1 there are only two or three teams which aren't based in Britain (Ferrari, Prost and Sauber - I think)