Grapevine: Straw Poll: Friday at Shanghai

The story was built around what Red Bull Racing's Mark Webber had to say about Lewis Hamilton driving at the start of last week's Japanese Grand Prix, specifically the dangers of moving around under braking.

The "kill" line came from Webber's reference to the 2000 Italian Grand Prix, in which a marshal, Paolo Ghislimberti, lost his life, that Webber cited as an example of the most extreme consequence of first laps going wrong.

Unsurprisingly, Webber himself was keen to clarify what he had said. With Hamilton's driving a topic of discussion in this afternoon's drivers' briefing, the keen tabloid journalist's eye for a dramatic headline could not resist this one.

Of course, it was a, shall we say, very heavily spun story so it was no surprise that the Australian was keen to distance himself from the interpretation of what he had said. Needless to say, there was plenty of debate about this particular story among certain quarters of the media centre.

But that was a mere trifle in the context of the big story of the day. At the end of free practice two, a press release indicating that the FIA was inviting tenders for the single engine to be used in Formula One from 2010-2012 was circulated.

With the Formula One Teams' Association (FOTA) scheduled to meet with FIA president Max Mosley on Tuesday to discuss a wide variety of rules changes and finalise a course of action, it totally blindsided the teams despite the idea having been floated last week. The world "unilateralism" was heard more than once in the paddock as the night charged (and darkness does come mighty fast in Shanghai) in.

Conventional wisdom had it that the single engine idea - which led to all sorts of veiled threats about manufacturer pull-outs - was a bargaining position. And it may well still be, but actually going to the extreme of inviting tenders is, shall we say, a very strong move indeed. Even if a clarification from the FIA underlined that the manufacturers would still be able to build their own engines and transmissions to someone else's design.

It was a moot point whether this was a good story to liven up a quiet day or not. One the one hand, it had been another uninspiring Friday on the track (another thing which FOTA is looking to address) and this at least created some spark of excitement and intrigue. On the other, with a three-way title fight still to be decided, perhaps it was an unwelcome distraction from the business of racing.

As ever with F1, it was politics that had come to the surface and you can only hope that, come tomorrow, the world's attention is focused on what could be a classic championship denouement over the next couple of weeks.

Despite the invitation to tender, it was still a relatively low-key day, so there wasn't a huge amount to do on the two-hour minibus ride back to the smog-ridden Shanghai city centre but talk about unicycling and hope to spot another dog riding a moped.