Why F1's 2018 silly season will be one to savour

This has not been a vintage 'silly season' in Formula 1 - too many of the top drivers are already contracted for 2018 - but such changes as there are now appear almost complete, the most significant being Carlos Sainz Jr's 'on loan' move from Toro Rosso to Renault.

It would have been nice if someone at Renault had had the courtesy to inform Jolyon Palmer personally, rather than let him discover his fate on the Autosport website, but niceties, as we know, seem to be falling into disuse.

Already under debate is what happens in a year's time, when it appears that virtually everyone with a competition licence will be out of contract, and therefore open to offers. The major exceptions to this are the two current world championship protagonists, for Sebastian Vettel recently renewed with Ferrari for three years, and the expectation is that Lewis Hamilton will do the same with Mercedes. On the assumption that Hamilton will wish to continue beyond the end of next season, with the Maranello door closed what else would he do?

Obviously the most sought after drives will be 'the other car' at Mercedes and Ferrari, for both Valtteri Bottas and Kimi Raikkonen have only one-year renewals for 2018, and while they may be the preferred team-mates of Hamilton and Vettel, that could count for little if such as Daniel Ricciardo and Max Verstappen are on the market: already people are speaking in terms of 'Ricciardo to Ferrari, Verstappen to Mercedes'.

Bring it on, say I, but when situations like this arise, invariably I remember something Gerhard Berger once said to me: "Don't believe all this rubbish people come out with about preferring a team-mate who will push them - the perfect team-mate is anyone a second slower! Why do you think, after fighting with Alain Prost, Ayrton Senna was so happy with me at McLaren?"

The world still tends to under-rate Prost, the only driver Senna ever worried about, and I am not alone in being mystified by this. Jackie Stewart, for example, has always considered him the better of the two, and in a chat a few weeks ago Bernie Ecclestone was of the same opinion.

"I'll always think of Jochen [Rindt] as the most naturally talented driver I ever saw, but beyond that I'll go with Alain. The thing about him was that, like Jochen, he just got in the car and drove it: it wasn't people telling him what to do and what not to do, he just got on and raced - and he had a lot of competition, much more than today. He won four championships, but it could easily have been more than that - and he also retired as world champion, which is the way to do it.

Vettel is a man who needs to be kept happy, needs - like his hero Schumacher - to have a team tailored to his requirements

"There's something else you've got to remember, too - and something I really admired about Alain. Unlike Senna and Michael Schumacher, he never tried to lay down the law about who his team-mate should be: when Ayrton wanted to come to McLaren, he could have said to Ron [Dennis], 'No, I'm not having him' - but he didn't.

"Michael had more wins and titles than anyone, but something that lessened his record, in a lot of people's minds, was his refusal to have a really quick guy in the other car. Because the cars were so good, the only person who could have beaten him was someone else in a Ferrari, and when that guy wasn't allowed to beat him - and, worse than that, was riding shotgun in case somebody could get near him - people didn't have the respect for Michael that perhaps they should have done.

"I doubt that anyone, in equal cars, would have beaten him, anyway, and I used to tell him that, but... we'll never know, will we?"

Coming back to today, neither, of course, do we know the detail in the contracts of Hamilton and Vettel, although Italian colleagues - who insist that Vettel effectively runs Ferrari these days - assure me that there is a 'no Alonso' clause in his contract, and some even suggest that Raikkonen's continued presence was a condition of his re-signing. Bearing in mind what happened in 2014, when they were team-mates at Red Bull, would Vettel welcome the thought of once more going up against Ricciardo? Perhaps not.

For now, though, Raikkonen goes into what will be, in two spells, his eighth season with Ferrari, and only Schumacher has had more. As we know, Raikkonen is one for whom the car has to be 'right', and although he remains capable of occasionally blinding pace, the flashes of real genius we saw in his McLaren days are something of a distant memory. More than once it has surprised me to see his Ferrari contract renewed, but who else - of his standing - would so uncomplainingly put up with being 'the other driver'?

After Monaco, where he started on pole, and led until the stops, Raikkonen allowed his displeasure to show, but in Hungary he selflessly protected a hobbled Vettel, and in Singapore the other weekend declined to show anger - which, God knows, he must have felt - after the startline debacle caused by his team-mate.

Vettel is a man who needs to be kept happy, needs - like his hero Schumacher - to have a team tailored to his requirements, and that would inevitably be disrupted by the arrival of a Ricciardo or Verstappen. Raikkonen, closing on his 38th birthday, has not won a race since returning to Ferrari in 2014, but as long as there abides at least the possibility of it he remains - for now - a logical choice for the second car.

That said, a year from now we may assume that Sergio Marchionne will be encouraging the team to look to the future, to focus solely on what is best for Ferrari down the road. The quality of the racing apart, as ever Formula 1 lives in interesting times.