The return of driver aids

I knew what he meant, and had sympathy with his point of view, for in truth I felt much that way myself, and there were others, too. Through the days of the Spanish Grand Prix meeting, 'gizmos' tended to dominate paddock conversation, but for those who remembered him, who had known him, Michele Alboreto was never far from the surface of the mind.

Not always in sadness, though. As I listened to sundry folk earnestly talk up the merits of' driver aids', stressing that they didn't truly detract from the driver's contribution, I remembered a conversation with Alboreto a while ago.

Alain Prost, I had said to Michele, believed that semi-automatic gearboxes should be banned. He was voluble in his response.

"I agree with him 100 percent! OK, economically, it's better for the teams, because it saves on blown engines, but otherwise, no. To be able to change gear properly was part of being a racing driver - you could pressure someone into missing a change, and perhaps he would blow his engine. The really good drivers didn't do that, but now no one misses a change, because it's not possible."

We have now moved on even from that, of course, because, as of last weekend, fully-automatic gearboxes are kosher in Formula 1, together with traction and launch control. It won't surprise you that retired drivers are scathing about these changes, making frequent use of words like 'PlayStation' as they discuss them. In Spain, one murmured that, at this rate, in another five years, the drivers wouldn't even need to turn up: "They'll just be able to phone their races over."

Over the top, of course, but you take his point. Journalists of a certain age feel broadly the same way, as Patrick Head smilingly acknowledged.

"The problem was, it was a pretty unsatisfactory situation," he said on Saturday, "to have constant suggestions of cheating, and what we're doing is saying, 'Well, if these things can't be properly policed, then they should all be allowed.'

"I think that certain people will be seeing how it goes, and the first thing will be to make sure that the safety level hasn't changed, that nothing has made it less safe than it was before. OK, there's no such thing as 'safe F1', but we need to be sure there's been no lessening of safety.

"Equally, I think it will be interesting to see how it's perceived by the press. Some of the older members here will gnash their teeth at the thought of traction control, for example, and say it's all a shame and a scandal, but if you talk to an 18-year-old, he'll probably think it's the best thing since sliced bread, and absolutely fantastic, because he loves technology."

And what do you think, Patrick?

"Er, well, I'm one of the old brigade! Consequently, I don't necessarily represent what the market wants. I suspect that people in the FIA will study the reaction to the changes, but the difficulty will be that if it is decided it's not the right way for F1 to go, what then? How do we solve the problem of suspicions of cheating without going to something like we saw this afternoon in the Formula 3000 race? In F3000, you've got a spec car, with a spec engine, a spec ignition system and whatever - and does it make for good racing? No, I don't think it does."

It was a fair point. F3000 races, after all, even lack the artifice of refuelling stops, which permit occasional changes of order in grands prix. The one at Barcelona was soporific.

"What would improve racing," Patrick said earlier this year, "is either get rid of completely, or at least seriously reduce, the downforce. The aerodynamicists would hate that, of course, but the biggest opponents to making the wings smaller, or taking them off, have always been the team owners - imagine the advertising space they'd lose!"

So what does the future hold, then? I may think it - in Blair-speak -'inappropriate' that software should control functions in a race car previously carried out by the driver, but I'd find the return of the gizmos rather more acceptable if it were accompanied by clear evidence that something fundamental were being done to change the rules on aerodynamics, so as to permit one car closely to follow another through a corner. To decimate downforce, in other words.

Everyone accepts that, more than anything else, it is aerodynamics which have caused the quality of racing so substantially to deteriorate over the years, and the drivers repeatedly say they would like to see a significant reduction in aerodynamic grip, together with a sizeable increase in mechanical grip.

It is entirely desirable that we have a level playing field back in F1 (for now, anyway), but for me the price has been high: as I hate to see cheating thrive, so also I intensely dislike the gizmos. Being a purist makes me increasingly a member of an endangered species, but something I have never forgotten is that, before 'driver aids' were banned last time around, at the end of 1993, Max Mosley received a letter from Ayrton Senna, imploring him to get rid of them. Not even Senna's right foot could control traction as well as software - but he knew damn well it could do it better than anyone else's right foot.

Were he still with us, still racing, I doubt Ayrton would have been smiling in the Barcelona paddock last weekend. And as for Gilles...