The key flaw in F1's mega title fight

The fight for this year's Formula 1 world championship has all the ingredients to be a true classic.

The closeness of the battle between Ferrari, Mercedes and Red Bull makes it hard to pick the winner before each weekend, and the fluctuations of form mean no driver has managed to seize the initiative in the title chase. There is little reason to think this isn't going all the way to Abu Dhabi.

But just as the highs of a late-night party rarely happen without the lows of a hangover the following morning, F1 is finding itself facing a bit of pain from the good times. In the case of the 2018 season, it's the lack of overtaking that's causing the headache.

With social media joking last Sunday night that Winnie Harlow did everyone a favour by bringing a far from thrilling Canadian Grand Prix to an early finish, there has been a renewed focus on the quality of the racing.

Kimi Raikkonen summed it up: "Not a lot happened. It was difficult to even get close enough to try to have any chance to pass. I think everybody expected different but it was a pretty similar story to the last race. Pretty boring."

Indeed, Canada was a bit of a let-down considering how much potential there was in the battle at the front, and how close and exciting qualifying had been. To have served up fewer passes (either in the pits or on track) than Monaco was pretty diabolical.

There were various fingers being pointed afterwards over the cause of the poor show. Was it more proof that the latest aero levels make it impossible for cars to follow each other? Was it the lack of degradation from the tyres that left it too predictable? Was it the result of drivers simply having to manage fuel and ensure they could do a one-stop?

These factors certainly had a role to play in what unfolded in Montreal, but there was a fascinating comment from F1 race director Charlie Whiting that perhaps offers a revealing slant.

"To overtake, the one behind has got to be faster than the one in front. If the car in front is inherently faster, then not even DRS is going to help" Charlie Whiting

Rather than suggesting a complicated technical answer to what's going on, he reckoned it was simply the consequence of the performance between the top cars being so close that there is not enough of a speed delta between them to deliver overtaking.

Pushed on his evaluation of adding the third DRS zone in Montreal, Whiting said: "The extra DRS zone was never going to make overtaking easy. All it did was give drivers the chance of getting a little bit closer before the detection point between Turn 9 and 10.

"Whether or not that worked, I don't know. We saw Lewis [Hamilton] trying to attack Daniel [Ricciardo] for lap after lap. He got DRS but he just wasn't quite close enough when he got to the first corner after two DRS attempts. He was close, but not close enough to pass.

"But from what I was looking at, the cars even just two or three seconds apart, the aerodynamics of the car are not the issue there. It's just that one car is slightly faster than the other.

"And the only way you're going to get a car to overtake, the one behind has got to be faster than the one in front. If the car in front is inherently faster, then not even DRS is going to help. That's the trouble as I see it."

There's a lot to be said for how close things were at the front of the grid in Montreal. Between Sebastian Vettel on pole position and Ricciardo down in sixth place was just 0.352 seconds - a tiny margin of performance around 2.71 miles of track.

Having six cars in that spread threw up a thriller in qualifying, with it hard to pick which of the six men in the three best cars would come out on top.

But when you have the very best drivers in almost totally reliable cars separated by such a small margin, that's not the situation you need to naturally create a bundle of passing.

Overtaking comes from the car behind being much quicker than the car in front, not from it being fewer than 0.1s better.

A close spread of competitive form does not automatically lead to dull racing - we've had thrillers in the past when the field has been just as close in pace terms as it is now.

But the problem that F1 in 2018 is facing is that the main factors that could help contribute to a better show are not there either.

The current generation of cars cannot follow each other closely enough - they lose downforce, or overheat their tyres or overheat their engines (because teams minimise cooling for aero performance in clean air in qualifying).

That's why we get a spread of cars so quickly. And without cars able to run nose-to-tail, there is little opportunity for the one behind to hassle the competitor in front and try to force them into a mistake.

Beyond the basic problem with the cars, perhaps the biggest influence on the races is the tyres. One of the easiest ways to produce varied performance between fairly equal cars during the race is through degrading tyres.

Cars being on different strategies, or the driver/chassis that is best able to look after the rubber having more speed at the end of a stint, can be enough to hit the lap time delta needed to overtake.

A race leader in the fastest car whose tyres are at the end of their life, pitted against a rival in a slower car but on fresher rubber, can find themselves several seconds a lap off the pace. It's that variation of speed that throws up the possibility for overtaking and a shuffling of positions.

Beyond the prospect of speed differentials creating more opportunity for passing, it also results in a lot more strategic variation. A borderline two-stop race with compounds that perform very differently - where degradation means there is an aggressive undercut - will produce a much better race than a manageable one-stop where drivers are more obsessed with a target lap time for tyre conservation than a rival breathing down their neck.

If early estimates that Canada had the lowest UK television audience for years prove to be correct, then F1 needs to wake up and take notice

The problem with Canada was that the degradation was not high enough to force teams into a two-stop race - either through lap times falling away or the undercut advantage being huge.

When Red Bull made its early stop to ditch the hypersofts, if it had had a pace advantage on its fresh rubber against the leaders on their older tyres, then it would have brought the race alive.

But as soon as it became clear that Max Verstappen and Ricciardo were only at best able to match the pace of the cars ahead in that phase of the race, then it really was game over for the spectacle.

The real difficulty with all the factors that are causing lacklustre Sundays is that no one is particularly at fault and there is no obvious wrongdoing.

The teams cannot be blamed for coming up with brilliant cars; the drivers aren't wrong to drive those cars in the way needed to get the chequered flag in the quickest possible time; and Pirelli is having to walk a fine line between high degradation that drivers hate and fans love, or low degradation that drivers/teams love and fans hate.

Addressing F1's problems and plotting a path that can help bring us better racing, without compromising the closeness of the title battle, is not going to be the work of a moment.

But it's clear something needs to be done because there have been too many races now that haven't lived up to the hype.

It's only been the intervention of safety cars (both virtual and real) that served to spice up some of the early season races.

The virtual safety car in Australia helped Vettel leapfrog Hamilton, while it was the intervention of the safety car in China and Azerbaijan that mixed up those races and turned things on their head.

While F1's hardcore fans may well be happy to endure the more processional Sundays because of the thrill that comes from an unpredictable championship fight and the uncertainty of which team will be ahead on a certain weekend, the success of the series rests on it luring in the casual follower - and they want to see incidents, good racing, overtaking and a decent dose of controversial action.

If early estimates that Canada had the lowest UK television audience for years prove to be correct, then F1 needs to wake up and take notice.

For no matter how close the title battle, and how titanic the fight between the top teams and drivers for supremacy, if the action on Sunday is a consistent letdown, that simply isn't good enough for an awful lot of people.