Would a safety car every race help F1?

Although the closing laps at Shanghai were riveting, let's not get carried away. Had Pierre Gasly not put a clumsy move on Toro Rosso team-mate Brendon Hartley, there would have been no safety car, and no opportunity for Red Bull to steal a march by bringing in both its cars for soft tyres.

To that point the Chinese Grand Prix had been pretty much standard Formula 1 fare: a long string of cars, each separated by a couple of seconds, and not much in the way of racing. Yes, there was a lead change, Valtteri Bottas getting ahead of Sebastian Vettel, but it came about in the pits, not on the track. Tyre stops: this is where the order changes come from these days. It was with astonishment that I learned that in a recent fan survey there was apparently considerable support for a return to refuelling.

Quite apart from the expense of transporting all that cumbersome equipment across the globe, perhaps some have forgotten the drivers' standard catchphrase in the refuelling era: "I was waiting for the stops..." Back then, when all the cars were running light all the time, overtaking was rarer even than now. Refuelling contributed precisely nothing to F1.

Nor, for that matter, do all the unsightly bits of 'aero' that festoon the cars these days. As David Coulthard said to me, "In IndyCar they've reduced downforce, but here we've greatly increased it - what the hell were we thinking? Of course it made the cars quicker - but are we surprised there's no overtaking?"

What happened a couple of years ago was that a bunch of Einsteins decided that the cars needed to be substantially speeded up (at least to a point that lap times matched the V10 era of a decade earlier), and in their wisdom they concluded that the answer was bigger tyres and sledgehammer downforce. If any seasoned F1 fan could see this would inevitably damage the racing, why could not the ill-named F1 Strategy Group?

Melbourne may have been a godsend for insomnia sufferers, but two things stick in my mind from that weekend. One, some absurdly suggested that the track - not the cars - needed to be changed to facilitate overtaking; two, Lewis Hamilton, chasing Vettel in the late stages, said that ultimately he backed off because in his mind was that he had only three engines for the season.

This is a particular lunacy of contemporary F1: so crazily expensive are these hybrid power units, with all their ancillary bits, that the FIA restricts each driver to three, down from four last year. Ask any of the manufacturers, and they will tell you it has cost a huge amount to enable this to happen, to increase engine longevity from five races to seven. And so it goes...

This month Liberty revealed its 'broad brush' proposals for the next F1, in 2021, while the FIA has announced its suggested engine specification. Fans will have been dismayed, if not surprised, to note that, while simplified, the hybrid concept is apparently set in stone. If we are never again to hear a screaming grand prix engine, let us hope one day at least to see sensible aerodynamics. For now, maybe we need a safety car every weekend.

Ricciardo runs riot

After a soporific race in Melbourne, then a humdrum affair at Sakhir, Shanghai happily - one might say mercifully - produced some action, and it delighted me that Daniel Ricciardo's supreme opportunism was rewarded with victory. Some years ago, Fernando Alonso told me he thought Ricciardo the best overtaker in the business, and in a recent chat Coulthard echoed that: "Absolutely he is. Danny's an incredible racer, and his judgement is amazing: from what looks way too far back he'll have a go - and still make the corner.

"If Max Verstappen had a slight edge, it would be a huge mistake to underestimate Ricciardo" David Coulthard

"In my opinion," DC went on, "Red Bull has the strongest driver pairing in Formula 1, and although last year it looked as if Max Verstappen had a slight edge, in terms of pure pace, it would be a huge mistake to underestimate Daniel. He, too, has great speed, and - relative to your team-mate - the tide can suddenly turn, you know."

Verstappen's youthful impetuosity, curiously, seems to have been particularly apparent this year, his fourth in F1. As the Chinese Grand Prix wound down, he was ahead of Ricciardo, but lost the place to him after an impatient move on Hamilton, and then screwed up his race completely with another such on Vettel. Ricciardo, by contrast, nailed both of them with clinical brilliance, then did it again to pass Bottas for the lead.

No one is suggesting that Verstappen has lost the plot, but certainly he might study his team-mate to advantage: not once did Ricciardo so much as lock a wheel in all his moves, and he brought back to mind Martin Brundle's memory of an IROC race with Dale Earnhardt: "Don't know how he did it - he passed me on a piece of Tarmac that wasn't there."

Bottas, in particular, must have felt that way at Shanghai. You watch Ricciardo pull off a pass, wonder why they don't all do it like that, and can only conclude that - for the most part, anyway - they can't. Going for it on a hope-for-the-best basis is one thing, passing incisively, yet cleanly quite another. On that level, it is an art form in itself, and of particular worth in an era when 'aero' so militates against overtaking. Toto Wolff described Ricciardo's move on Bottas as a bit "brutal", but to me it was everything grand prix racing should be: uncompromising but fair.

Time and again Ricciardo shows what can be done, and although he laughingly talks about 'sending it down the inside', as if doing it on a wing and a prayer, his moves are precisely calculated: were they not, very frequently they would not come off.

For all his laidback off-track persona, Ricciardo is a very committed racing driver, and if I were Wolff or Sergio Marchionne I'd be hell-bent on keeping Red Bull from renewing his deal for 2019 and beyond. If, as Coulthard suggested to me, Ricciardo has already signed some form of pre-contract with another team - say Ferrari - at the moment he would seem to be in the pound seats.

As Ricciardo's contract is up at the end of this year, so also is Hamilton's, and of course the assumption is that the Briton - who murmurs that his next Formula 1 deal will be his last - will remain with the team that has taken him to 40 wins in four seasons.

To some degree, though, perhaps the times are at last a-changin'. We may be only three races into the 2018 season, but Mercedes has yet to put a victory on the board, and Hamilton himself has not won a race since Austin last October. As Wolff said after the Chinese Grand Prix: "This is the new reality."

No, I'm not suggesting that either team or driver is on the skids, but when your car has been quantifiably the best for so long you can get a bit spoiled, which is why anything going awry - as with Hamilton's blown engine in Malaysia in 2016 - is considered a catastrophe, leading to hand-wringing anguish, talk of the need to 'regroup', and all that tiresome nonsense. Time was, as Alain Prost has pointed out, that a driver assumed he would retire at least three or four times a season, and iron-clad reliability is a luxury taken for granted only by this generation of drivers: since that day at Sepang 18 months ago Hamilton has finished every race.

Undeniably, though, Mercedes folk are currently facing opposition on a level to which in this hybrid era they have been unaccustomed. Bottas messed up in qualifying in Australia, thereby condemning himself to a miserable race, and although he then drove well in Bahrain, there was criticism of him for backing out of a move on Vettel in the late laps.

Bottas, in his unruffled way, reckoned he hadn't been quite close enough, that 18 points were better than none, and assuredly at Shanghai he was all business in thwarting Ferrari's plan to have Kimi Raikkonen hold him up while Vettel closed. Immune to pressure, as usual, he drove superbly, and - without the intervention of the safety car - would have won.

Hamilton, meantime, was having one of those weekends when his drive was phoned in. These have been an occasional hallmark of his F1 career, most notably in the McLaren years, and although one assumes that Hamilton himself understands why they occur, to the world outside they remain a mystery: his freakish talent, after all, is a given, and so is the competitiveness of his car. Once in a while, though, the combination simply doesn't gel, and on those occasions it is left to his team-mate - be it Jenson Button, Nico Rosberg or Bottas - to fly the team's flag. "I was in no man's land today - I had no pace," he said in China. "I need to get myself back in normal performance mode."

Amazing now to think that Jackie Stewart and Ken Tyrrell used to seal their agreements with a handshake: for endless months Hamilton and Wolff have been saying that contract negotiations are ongoing, with a resolution imminently expected. I have heard tell Hamilton is looking for $60million a year, which if true could explain at least in part why things are dragging on. While it is surely inconceivable that in the end a deal won't be done, Ricciardo picked a good moment to remind Mercedes that, yes, alternatives exist.

In all respects, Red Bull is a slick team

What gave the Red Bull victory extra piquancy was that it came within a couple of minutes of being out of the question. When Ricciardo suffered a turbo failure in final practice, only two hours were available to change his engine - and the replacement from Renault did not arrive in finished state, requiring work before it could go in. There was just time for a single quick lap in Q1; without it, he would have started from the back.

In all respects, this is a slick team. On Saturday the Red Bull mechanics worked miracles to get him into qualifying, and on Sunday quick thinking on the pitwall brought both cars in at the start of a safety car period. If Bottas and Vettel were unlucky with the timing, passing the pits before the safety car was deployed, Mercedes had time enough to bring in Hamilton, but decided against it.

Earlier in the race, by contrast, it had got things absolutely right, pitting Bottas ahead of the leading Vettel: scalding in and out laps by the Finn, together with a relatively slow stop by Ferrari, allowed him to snatch the lead.

To that point Vettel had looked to have the Chinese Grand Prix on a plate. At the moment Ferrari appears to have the edge on horsepower, and - as in Bahrain - he and Raikkonen had the front row to themselves. Come the start, though, one wondered yet again why Vettel has this way of making things unnecessarily complicated for himself. Given that he had Raikkonen alongside him on the grid, surely what he needed was to have him as tail gunner in the early laps, delaying Bottas et al while he made good his escape. Away from the start, though, Vettel can't help himself: routinely he chops across whomever is near at hand - even when it is his own team-mate - and he did so this time, obliging Raikkonen to back off, which allowed Bottas to sweep past.

Raikkonen may be a man of legendarily few words, may also - for one of his ability - be remarkably accepting of his status in what is patently Vettel's team, but still he has a way of conveying displeasure, and he did so in China, just as in Monaco and Singapore last season. At last driving a Ferrari with a front end in which he has confidence - always an absolute Raikkonen necessity - and looking leaner than for many a year, he is back to something near his best, and I hope he wins - or rather is allowed to win - a race soon.

After being nudged into a spin by Verstappen, Vettel's car suffered damage, and that, together with tyres running up the white flag, meant a wretched end to his race, putting him at the mercy of Alonso's McLaren-Renault. Yet again Alonso finds himself in a car off the pace, but his ferocious competitiveness abides, and if anything were sure to amplify it further it was the sight of a Ferrari - with Vettel in it - up ahead in the closing laps. With one to go, he squeezed by in a slow right-left, and an outraged Vettel was instantly on the radio: "He can't just run me off the road like that - it was intentional!"

Well, yes, in the sense that he claimed the line at the exit of the corner, just as Hamilton had done with Verstappen, it was. Perhaps Vettel had forgotten Monza in 2012, when he pushed Alonso's Ferrari off the road - all four wheels - at the exit of flat-out Curva Grande; I'll guarantee Alonso hadn't.

Midfielders making an impact

Very pleasing to me in these opening races have been the strong showings of Kevin Magnussen and Nico Hulkenberg. Many believed Magnussen was making a mistake when he left Renault for Haas at the end of 2016, and thought Hulkenberg equally ill-advised to replace him after years with Force India. Subsequent events suggest, though, that for both it was the right move: Renault and Haas have made significant progress since last season, and both drivers figure in the top half of the point standings.

Amazingly, with 138 starts behind him, Hulkenberg has still to stand on a grand prix podium, but this Magnussen did on his F1 debut, with McLaren-Mercedes, at Melbourne back in 2014.

That said, it was something of a false dawn, and perhaps came too soon. "Obviously I was happy about it," he said, "but the problem was that everything afterwards was measured against it - which made it tough, in many ways. Of course, it was good to finish second in my first grand prix, but I'd rather have done it in the last race of the year."

Although Alonso was returning to McLaren for 2015, Magnussen was quietly informed by the management that he, rather than Button, would be retained as the double world champion's team-mate, but a late change of policy put him out in the 'third driver' cold, a role he not surprisingly detested - particularly when, after sitting around for a year, he was shown the door by Ron Dennis, who now had a newer hot property in Stoffel Vandoorne.

For a while Magnussen's search for a drive looked hopeless, but when regime change in Venezuela put an end to Pastor Maldonado's bountiful personal sponsorship, Renault, having lately bought back its team from Genii, offered him a one-year contract. He was not, of course, about to turn it down, but Renault's return to F1 as a team had come late in the day, and through 2016 the car was nowhere.

On the table was a new single-year deal, but Haas, seeking a replacement for Esteban Gutierrez, offered an alternative, which Magnussen eagerly accepted. From the start, it was a 'home' in F1 such as he had not known before, a small team, not overrun with bosses, and an environment in which Magnussen thrived: he took to them immediately, and they to him. If last year's car wasn't up to much, the latest one is a different matter, and Magnussen gave notice of intent in the opening seconds of the first race, passing Verstappen and running a confident fourth - until the stops, where both he and team-mate Romain Grosjean were eliminated by botched wheel changes. No matter: he then scored points in Bahrain and China.

Apart from rating him highly, I like Magnussen personally, not least because in the PR-suffocated world of contemporary F1 he is a throwback to a time I savoured more than now. Politically correct he is not, which makes him something of an outlaw in 2018 - it goes without saying, for example, that, like Hulkenberg and not a few others, he hates the halo, and was implacably opposed to its introduction.

Magnussen artlessly says what he thinks - we could do with more like him

There's more. "I've never," he told me, "been to an 'old' track I didn't like. They're much more fun than modern tracks - up and down, for one thing, and something that definitely makes it better is when there's no runoff. Everyone has a brain, so you know if you go off at places like that it's going to hurt - OK, of course we don't want to get hurt, but no matter how you look at it, it's a choice: the safer we make it, the less exciting it is - it's as clear as that. I wish we could go back to Imola and Brands Hatch and Watkins Glen."

Hardly mainstream in today's world, and guaranteed not to sit well with the Grand Prix Drivers' Association: it should be no surprise that a hero of Magnussen's is Stirling Moss, whose views are famously similar.

"I think that a lot of people - I'm not saying all - who become F1 drivers these days are completely different personalities from those in the past," said Magnussen.

"I have the impression some of them just want to be superstars, and rich and famous, rather than really loving F1 - it would be interesting to see how many would leave the sport if they weren't getting paid what they are. When I was six years old I didn't think about making a lot of money from doing this - I just loved it, and that's never changed."

Very much his own man, Magnussen, one who artlessly says what he thinks. We could do with more like him.