Why F1 must listen to Hamilton... and Villeneuve

We won't, of course, start to get a true picture of where we stand in this latest incarnation of Formula 1 until Saturday, March 25, when qualifying gets under way in Melbourne - and even then, given the particularities of Albert Park, the shape of the season to come may not be definitive.

Although it is never wise to set great store by the first test session of a season - not least because we don't know who was running how much fuel when - the opening week at Barcelona did seem to present certain fundamental truths, few of them unexpected.

Unsightly bargeboards and the like are back in force, and with great swathes of increased downforce, the cars are indeed significantly quicker than those of the recent past, with Mercedes yet again at the top of the pile. This, Lewis Hamilton said, was the fastest car he had ever driven.

So far so good - but Lewis then added that fans should not expect much in the way of great racing this season: already it was proving noticeably more difficult to follow another car through a quick corner.

As Dan Gurney has said: "It's simple: more downforce means less racing - I mean, we've known that for more than 30 years, right?" How, then, did this escape the attention of those who came up with the latest rules?

Ross Brawn says he'd like to do away with DRS, suggesting that its introduction "artificially solved a problem that we didn't want to tackle head-on - it doesn't have the quality or merit of a full-on overtaking manoeuvre..." Ross is right - many of us have always thought DRS an abomination - but if we are to have any overtaking, this may not be the moment to get rid of it.

As of now we have no idea how the post-Bernie Ecclestone era of Formula 1 will turn out, how the influence - good and bad - of Liberty Media will manifest itself, but if we yet know little of Chase Carey and Sean Bratches, the appointment of Brawn is indeed cause for optimism.

As evidenced by his thoughts on DRS, Ross is something of a racing purist, and as the future evolution of F1 is discussed he will have firm ideas of a kind, I suspect, likely to sit well with aficionados too long ignored.

Patrick Head always said that, in his opinion, Formula 1 was an activity of itself, with no need to justify its existence as a test-bed for future road car technology, but others - notably Jean Todt - took a more politically correct view, which is why we now have 'hybrid' engines.

Apart from anything else, Todt insisted, if F1 were not to go down that path it would be impossible for engine manufacturers to justify their continued involvement. One might point out that the move to hybrids has hardly had them queuing in the aisles.

Perhaps to some degree influenced by the dogs he has had to drive, Fernando Alonso has loathed the cars of the hybrid era, describing them as heavy and slow, with a constant need to 'save' this and that, be it fuel, battery or high-degradation tyres, rather than driving flat-out as a racing driver should. Fernando is, of course, one of only a handful with experience of the three-litre V10s of a dozen years ago. "Real racing cars", he calls them.

As we know, Sky TV frequently shows synchronised on-car footage of two drivers - invariably Hamilton and Nico Rosberg - fighting for pole position, but after Monza in 2015 a video emerged online comparing, in just that way, Hamilton that weekend with Juan Pablo Montoya back in 2004. The result was eye-opening.

Most immediately what struck you was the soundtrack. After becoming used to the hybrids, the furious noise from JPM's BMW V10 was startling, but so also was the way the Williams rocketed out of corners. As Montoya went over the line at the end of the lap - nearly four seconds up, despite running on the grooved tyres of the time - Hamilton was coming out of Parabolica.

You can see why Alonso misses the era of the V10s. They had about 900 horsepower, perhaps less than the best engines of today - but crucially the cars were lighter by more than 100kg. Where would Lewis's 2015 pole lap have qualified him for the 2004 Italian Grand Prix? Nineteenth, ahead only of the Minardis.

I remember interviewing Ecclestone at Spa in 2005, as the V10 era was drawing to a close. Unlike Max Mosley, then president of the FIA, he was not in favour of the switch to smaller-capacity V8s, and neither did he care for the appearance of the cars, increasingly festooned by bargeboards and the like. Given a free hand, what changes would he make?

"For a start," Bernie said, "I'd stop them sticking all these horrible-looking bits and pieces on the cars - they'd look better, and it would be easier to tuck in behind another car through a corner. I'd like the weight limit to come down, getting rid of the need for all this ballast; I'd also like to see less efficient brakes.

"Formula 1's got a bit cranky, hasn't it? You take one of the gearboxes to bits, and it's like a Swiss watch, but the guy sitting in the grandstand hasn't got the slightest idea about that - and if he did, he wouldn't care, any more than he does about thousands of hours in bloody windtunnels. All he cares about is whether the racing's any good.

"It doesn't make me very popular when I say this, but if you were serious about trying to make the racing better, the first thing you'd do is get all the aerodynamicists together, and say, 'We want you to find us a way of not needing you anymore...'"

Perhaps a touch extreme, as Ecclestone invariably was, but you knew what he was getting at, just as you did 35 years ago when Gilles Villeneuve said: "People don't come to races to see brilliant aerodynamicists."

I hope Hamilton's fears are exaggerated, but I somewhat doubt it. Get working, Ross...