Wednesday afternoon, rolling into Monaco and the frenzy has already started. Beyond the famed Rascasse hairpin and down by the harbour's edge the zoo is already open for business, autograph-hungry fans pressing themselves into steel fences, knuckles white on the links, eyes feverishly scanning the animals behind the wire, separating the great and glamorous from the wannabes.

Behind them, nestled against the quay side, are the quarters of both attractions and zoo-keepers, glistening in the Mediterranean sun, shining with the wealth of nations.

Thursday morning and into the fray walks Eddie Irvine. Sunglasses tattooed to his face, faintly mocking, faintly self-satisfied grin locked in place, he makes his way from Jaguar's faintly ridiculous, certainly monstrous motorhome to the pit.

Once again the faces are pressed to the wire, hands stretching through the cables to thrust programmes and pictures and hastily torn bits of paper his way.

This, you think, is definitely Eddie Irvine country. Dripping with glamour, thick with the scent of heady, abandoned consumption, and awash with beautiful girls.

Irvine, though, has always been something of an enigma. Brash and brusque he may be, often to the point of downright rudeness, flash and flighty he is, to the point of seeming to audition for the part of Loaded culture posterboy, but surprisingly the former Ferrari star has little time for the tinselled charms of the Principality.

Sure, his yacht, the Anaconda, is moored in the bay, home for the weekend. But come Monday morning he'll weigh anchor and ship off to somewhere more suitable - down the coast to St Tropez maybe, or possibly back to his flat in Milan. Anywhere but Monaco.

"It's a great to be on a boat in the harbour but otherwise it's really not my kind of place," he says simply, nodding vaguely towards the harbour, filled with boats that match his own and beyond.

It's a weird but correct metaphor for Irvine's place in the Formula One firmament. On the one hand he is rent-a-quote Eddie, forever willing and always able to deliver an opinion, often in the most scathing tones, on any driver, team, circuit, race.

He's Eddie the modeliser, gossip columning his way through a sequence of expendable women.

But on the flipside, he's the Eddie Irvine some will, a tad unbelievably, describe as painfully shy, shooting his mouth off because he cannot comfortably deal with questions and because he feels he has to say what people want to hear.

He's the Eddie Irvine who is reputedly superb to work with, a dedicated, focused racer who gets on well with his engineers and mechanics and has a large and thoughtful input into how his car works.

The Eddie Irvine who says: "I come to the race circuit to work. It may not be fun, but I just try to work like everyone else does. Away from the circuit I do my own thing and I have a lot of fun, but at the track, I am here to get the best result for the team."

It is impossible to figure out who's who. Who you're getting. Irvine the Terrible or Nice Guy Eddie. This week in Monaco, it's again been a mix of both.

On Thursday morning he hustled his Jaguar R1 through the streetscape like a man on a mission. Sweeping through the swimming pool complex he fought hard and wrestled the car to seventh fastest.

In the afternoon he went better again, posting fourth fastest time, two tenths behind David Coulthard. A remarkable performance in a car that has so far been, somewhat erroneously, described as the BAR of 2000.

And on Thursday evening he was still in that zone, happiest when talking about the car, sullen and almost monosyllabic when talking about anything else.

Ask him about how Jaguar seem to have undone all the good work of Stewart last season and he's off, talking the team up and last year's maiden - and final - Stewart win at the Nurburgring down.

"Stewart won purely because there was no one left in the race. It was an oddball race, a fluke. You can't judge anything on that," he says impatiently, stumbling over his choice of words as they bubble out of his mouth.

Then the explanations come, exploding animatedly out, the first time in the conversation he has spoken more than two sentences at a time. "Yes, there have been a few setbacks since then but the biggest issue has simply been that I haven't been able to make starts.

"I would have scored points in Australia, Brazil, Imola, all those races if I had been able to start. I just couldn't get off the grid.

"I was overtaken by four, five, six cars. I might as well as have qualified 13th or 14th and if you qualify there you aren't going to score points."

"There's no mystery. We haven't qualified out of the top nine since the start of the season, and I don't think there's anyone else apart from the big four who have done that.

"So our pace is not bad, but our whole act is not together and that's why we don't have points."

And the solution to his problems? There isn't one. Yet. "There hasn't been a solution found. If I qualify fourth on Saturday, I'll probably be sixth by the first corner.

"It's very annoying but then again it's not like we're sitting here doing nothing about it. We're trying to figure out what's going on. We probably have a better handle on it and we think we know what's happening but it's not an easy thing to sort out."

He hunches in when talking about the racing. Willing you to understand. But turn to something outside the track, away from racing, and the veils draw up.

A simple question about the truth or otherwise of the image he has built around himself, the big boys-big toys, new lad, playboy racer image that has become his trademark, and the shutters are drawn and he bites back.

"I'm very happy with my life," he says coldly. "What the papers write is really not my problem."

Ask him about rumours that Jaguar technical director Gary Anderson's job is under threat and he gets similarly edgy. "I have no idea about Gary. I honestly know nothing about that. Ninety-five per cent of what you read in the papers is made up by the journalist because he has a page to fill."

So you steer clear of anything that might contract the already curtailed time slot you've been given with him and turn him back to the car, to the track, to the future of Jaguar, to whom he is contracted until the end of 2002.

"I think they (Jaguar) have a very good chance to be the top team in Formula One," he says. "I believe they have a chance to be McLaren in seven or eight years."

But he will be long gone by then. Surely motivating himself to work hard for a team with a seven year development ahead of it . . . "I'm 34 now, that's only 41. Mansell won a championship when he was 41, so it doesn't mean anything," he interjects. "I don't know if I'm going to hang around that long, I'm not really thinking about it."

And it's all you get, short and, as always, confusing cameos from both Eddie Irvines. A Jaguar handler comes over and rescues him by telling the driver that, as the track is closing and reverting to its normal life as a thoroughfare, he should leave now and avoid the crowds.

Irvine stands back, making for the comforting space around his manager Enrico Zanarini. You gather up the detritus of tape machines and notebooks and realise that despite the last half hour, you are a little better informed about his work but none the wiser as to what makes Irvine tick.

And then you realise that this is what makes him tick, not giving anything away, never letting the guard slip, always being the Eddie Irvine he's supposed to be.

The sour, smart, occasionally witty playboy racer, yacht in harbour, race car ready. Image is, after all, everything.