In 1976 Niki Lauda drove for the Scuderia. He was burned up bad enough in a crash that a priest delivered his last rites. He returned to racing six weeks later and won the championship that year. He retired from from racing in 1978 to pursue other ambitions. In 1982 he came back because he needed money for a business venture. He won another championship in 1984 for McLaren.

You can't compare brown ball dribblers to F1 drivers. Schumacher is already making his teammate Rosberg look very bad this year which isn't good because Rosberg is the highest paid driver who hasn't won a race.

The current Mercedes GP team started as Tyrell back in the 50s. In '98 they became BAR (British American Racing) and used Supertec engines (Renault). In '99 they partnered with Honda. Eventually Honda bought the entire team in '05. Honda didn't have a lot of success and in '08 they decided to withdraw due to the financial crisis. They cut Ross Brawn a sweet deal to take over the team because Japanese corporate culture does not like to do lay offs. They basically sold him the team for $1 and they handed over everything including a bank account with around 100 million euros. He started negotiations with Mercedes who supplied him with engines for the '09 season at no cost. They even supplied him with engineers to adapt the chassis from Honda to Mercedes engines. That year Honda became Brawn GP. Brawn won the Championship in '09 and Mercedes promptly bought the team from Brawn.

Most of the track records were set in '03 and '04 because that was the peak of unrestricted 3 liter v10s. They didn't have RPM limits so by '04 they could turn up to 20K RPM and were making close to 1000HP. There was also a lot of aero freedom. In '06 the engine formula was changed to 2.4 liter v8s that can actually run at 22K RPM but are limited to 18K. Prior to the V8 era, most teams would use at least 2 engines per car for one weekend. Now the engines must last for 2 weekends. Gearboxes must go for five. In the turbo era of the 80s, the big teams were using 3-4 engines per car, per weekend. They actually had special engines for qualifying that were sometimes referred to as "grenades" because they could only hold together for about 4-5 laps because they ran with 6 bar (around 75 psi) of boost. They were capable of deforming the titanium gearbox cases and rendering them useless as well. And there were special qualifying tires back in the day as well. They lasted as long as the engines.

With the switch to the v8s there was also a development freeze on engines in '06 that will last through next year. Mercedes is considered the best overall engine in terms of reliability, power, and fuel efficiency. Ferrari is next. They make as much power as the Mercedes engines, but have worse economy, and are probably not as reliable. Renault are down by about 30HP on Ferrari and Mercedes, but are extremely reliable and very efficient. Their power shortfall is made up for with reliability and more importantly, their efficiency. Cosworth engines are another 30-40HP down on the Renault engines. It makes their efficiency and reliability a moot point since they're basically not competitive.

Straight line speed in F1 is of moderate value. Red Bull dominated last season and aside from HRT and Marussia, they had the slowest straight line speed of anyone. Force India tends to have the highest top speeds, but at best, they're a mid pack contender.

Wiki has a lot of good info on F1.