How a supporting act exposed F1's biggest flaw

We had a great race in Abu Dhabi last Sunday - but it wasn't the grand prix. As at Monza, the excitement came in the morning, when Charles Leclerc topped off his championship-winning Formula 2 season with a stunning drive.

The future Ferrari driver sliced through from sixth on the second lap to pass Alexander Albon for the lead on the last, a move at once superbly judged and extremely brave.

Leclerc was suitably exhilarated afterwards, and he should savour the memory, for it will be a long time before he has another race like that: next year he is in Formula 1, where the cars are so sophisticated that they can't actually race each other.

Yas Marina yet proved capable of producing a memorable race, as Leclerc, Albon et al demonstrated. It was their cars - devoid of fancy aerodynamics - that allowed them to do it

After the grand prix, Lewis Hamilton came out with another of his self-effacing observations: "Congratulations to Valtteri [Bottas] - he did an awesome job to hold me off..." He then went on to say that "as soon as you get to 1.2 or 1.4 [seconds behind], you just lose downforce", and his conclusion, after sitting endlessly behind Bottas, was that Yas Marina was not suited to F1 cars.

Hamilton's right, of course - but then where is? After shadowing him throughout the Belgian Grand Prix, Sebastian Vettel might have said the same of Spa: given that they were never more than a couple of seconds apart, it was tense - but not more than that, for 'dirty air' decreed that only a mistake by Hamilton would have allowed Vettel to take a run at him.

We never learn, do we? The inalienable laws of nature are that, one, the sun rises every morning, and, two, downforce is ruinous to good motor racing. Why, then, you might ask, do hundreds of people spend every waking hour - and unimaginable amounts of money - in trying to find more of it? Well, because it's their job to make the cars faster, and they're brilliant at it.

For F1 fans - who in the end pay for all this - it's a somewhat different proposition, because what they want above all is great racing, and it's a very long time since they've had it.

As soon as pre-season testing began, fears were confirmed. The drivers loved the sensation, but some tempered enthusiasm, suggesting it was already more difficult to follow other cars. Inevitably racing would suffer

Although by any standards a nondescript circuit, Yas Marina yet proved capable of producing a memorable race, as Leclerc, Albon et al demonstrated, and it was their cars - devoid of fancy aerodynamics - that allowed them to do it. Sunday morning brought back something Fernando Alonso said to me earlier this year: "For sure, the actual racing would be more spectacular if you had 20 Formula 2 cars, driven by Formula 1 drivers. I think the fans would love that kind of racing - with the cars so equal, the driver would matter more, and, compared with what we have now, it would be incredibly cheap. But of course Ferrari and Mercedes and Renault would not be there."

F1 fans - or at least those to whom I have spoken - have never been enamoured of this breed of car, with its clever, heavy, muted, expensive, hybrid power unit, but in its early days something they did like was the way the cars would 'step out' when the massive torque kicked in. Everyone surely revels in the spectacle of opposite lock, and briefly that was in evidence.

It didn't last, of course, because downforce caught up, and when the F1 Strategy Group began debating the need to make the cars quicker, to get back to the performance level of the three-litre V10s of a dozen years earlier, it was to be achieved, they determined, by increasing mechanical grip through larger tyres - but, more fundamentally, by hugely increasing downforce, and doing it entirely 'over the car', with wings and even more unsightly aerodynamic bits and pieces.

At Autosport International in January I got talking to a posse of real long-haul F1 fans - the kind Liberty Media needs to take care not to alienate - and they weren't looking to the coming season with optimism: yes, the cars would be quicker, but with even more 'aero', the racing was surely going to be worse. I could only agree. "Well, if we can all see it," one of them concluded, "why can't the people who make the rules?" Answers on a postcard, please. I don't have one of my own.

As soon as pre-season testing began, we were confirmed in our fears. The drivers, suddenly going way quicker than most had ever experienced before, loved the sensation, but Hamilton was one of several to temper his enthusiasm, suggesting that already he was finding it way more difficult to follow another car through a corner: inevitably racing was going to suffer. Hamilton was right, and as well as that, of course, a lot of once testing corners have sadly become 'easy flat'. Is anyone - save perhaps the Strategy Group - surprised?

For a different reason, Kimi Raikkonen was another man disenchanted last Sunday evening, complaining that the whole race had been 'pretty much fuel saving', although he didn't explain why this had cost him 26 seconds more than team-mate Vettel. "It didn't feel like racing," Raikkonen said, "but those are the rules."

So they are, and they need changing. Hopefully, we are done with silly high-degradation tyres, and that has been good (as is the forthcoming removal of shark fins and T-bars, compensating in part for the arrival of the hideous halo), but anything that requires 'cruising' has no place in F1.

Liberty Media needs to give these matters some thought, not least given its wish to build up F1 in America, where fans are accustomed to order changes. In Ross Brawn it has the right man for the job, but in the meantime its big news of the weekend was the announcement - presumably to draw another line under Bernie Ecclestone - of a new F1 logo, which comes with the blessing of the FIA. So that's a weight off everyone's mind.