Has F1 finally solved a key problem?

In China they may not be happy about what they have to pay for a grand prix - who is? - but whereas the Malaysians, in the face of continuing lack of local interest, have announced that this year's race will be the last, the Shanghai authorities must surely have been gratified by what was claimed to be a sell-out crowd last Sunday.

Those at the circuit last Friday, however, will not have been too thrilled, for they saw only a handful of laps by a handful of cars. Rules are rules, and visibility was so bad that it would have been impossible, in the event of an emergency, for the circuit's helicopter to land at the nearest major hospital.

If Friday were a waste of time for the fans, so also it was a day lost to the teams, and the way they coped made you wonder - again - why, with so many races on the calendar these days, we don't have two-day GPs, with a couple of hours of practice on Saturday morning, then straight into qualifying.

When the parc ferme rule was introduced, initially the teams were outraged and said it was unworkable, but they adapted as they always do, and these days nobody ever talks about it.

On the track they're adapting, too. When the new rules for 2017 were announced, most - apart from members of the F1 Strategy Group, anyway - were dismayed by the huge permitted increase in downforce, for it was bound to make overtaking even more difficult than before.

In absolute terms that is indeed the case, but one gratifying, if perhaps unexpected, consequence of the rule changes is that the dreaded Drag Reduction System appears to be less effective than before.

In the late stages of the Chinese GP, for example, the Red Bulls of Max Verstappen and Daniel Ricciardo were nose to tail, but on the endless main straight Ricciardo could do nothing about it.

As one who has always loathed the concept of DRS, I was delighted to hear Ross Brawn declare his aim to eventually get rid of it. If no-one wants to see a Formula 1 in which overtaking is nigh impossible, neither do I, for one, care to see it so commonplace that it ceases to register.

To me, a DRS pass is a penalty rather than a goal, and if there is a sport on Earth that leaves me cold it is basketball, where there seems to be a score every seven seconds.

Back in the refuelling days in F1, more than one driver admitted to me that subconsciously it made him lazy, in the sense that, rather than put a risky move on the car in front, the temptation was to 'wait for the stops'. Similarly, if you know DRS will waft you past down the next straight, why get adventurous under braking for a tight corner?

As I say, though, happily it is proving less potent with the latest cars.

Ten laps in at Shanghai, Lewis Hamilton led, and the combination of a stupefying first lap - in which he passed nine cars - and a safety-car period after Antonio Giovinazzi's accident, had Verstappen up in second place, followed by team-mate Ricciardo, then Kimi Raikkonen and Sebastian Vettel. If the second Red Bull was holding up the Ferraris, so it was equally plain that Kimi was doing the same to Sebastian.

Quite why Ferrari didn't instruct Raikkonen to give way to his team-mate - as Mercedes did to Nico Rosberg at Monaco last year - is a question Vettel just may have raised after the race, but no such order was forthcoming, and in its absence he was obliged to go into business for himself, overtaking Raikkonen with a superbly deft move, after which he lost little time in similarly dealing with Ricciardo.

This, to me, was proper grand prix racing, and of course - as in Melbourne - the afternoon was greatly enhanced by the fact that, after years of misguided attempts to spice up the show with joke tyres, the drivers now find themselves with Pirellis that can be raced.

As one who has always found endless tyre stops a boring distraction, and a single 'line' through acres of marbles an unsightly joke, I am fundamentally heartened by the latest iteration of Formula 1.

Now what Brawn needs to do is either reduce downforce or - if it's decided we must have it - have it come from under the car, as in the ground-effect days, rather than from ugly appendages on top of it. This would make closely following other cars through a corner easier, and also greatly improve their aesthetics.

Already there seems to be common agreement that the next engine to be introduced into Formula 1, albeit not for some years, must - while retaining hybrid elements - be both simpler and significantly cheaper.

While I have always agreed with Patrick Head's contention that F1 is an entity unto itself, with no need to justify itself as 'improving the breed', so I could see the logic in Jean Todt's argument that GP racing had to go to hybrid engines if it were to attract the major manufacturers.

Problem is, four years into this era it doesn't seem to have attracted very many of them, does it?

The engines, heavy and horribly complex, as well as numbingly expensive, may be technological masterpieces, but if they achieve a startling power:consumption ratio, unfathomably neither the manufacturers - through advertising - nor the championship itself has thought to tell anyone about it. In the meantime Toyota, which abandoned Formula 1 years ago, continues to build steel blocks for its NASCAR contingent.

Last weekend, in Shanghai qualifying, Mercedes and Ferrari finally squeezed under Michael Schumacher's lap record, set in the V10 era back in 2004, but in the race were not within three seconds of it.

Down the road Formula 1 needs to turn back the clock to simpler, cheaper - faster - times.