Autosport: Traffic Jam on the Road to Damascus

The majority of Max Mosley's Silverstone press conference was given over to future engine regulations, energy storage devices and the like, but right at the end, in speaking of the proposed - and controversial - CDG wing, he stressed that the FIA wished to see more overtaking in the future. That was important, he said, and his words came strongly back to me on Sunday afternoon.

One doesn't wish to sound churlish, but for a while it has seemed that members of the governing body have had something of a change of heart when it comes to the question of overtaking. A traffic jam on the Road to Damascus, perhaps.

At some point in his life, inevitably, every politician says something he later regrets, comes out with words that return to haunt him. Mr Prescott on family values, that kind of thing. Max is extraordinarily astute, and rarely falls into this trap, but I suspect he wishes now he had never said, in answer to a question about the lack of overtaking in Formula 1, that he looked upon a grand prix as he would a chess match, where strategy and plotting were all.

Chess matches may well be enthralling for anyone directly involved, but fall short of that for those who merely watch. Indeed, sodium amytal apart, I can think of little more guaranteed to induce sleep, and when you buy tickets to a grand prix (perhaps through a building society), that is not what you seek.

On paper, the British Grand Prix had everything - save a front-running Brit - going for it. The weather was splendid, and the world's three best drivers were one-two-three on the grid. Anticipation was high. And for an hour and a half Alonso, Schumacher and Raikkonen then did us proud, in the sense that they gave their all as they went after the 10 points.

Fernando, though, appeared to have everything covered from the off. Once the safety car had gone in, at the end of lap three, Kimi briefly threatened him, only to make a mistake and come under momentary attack from Michael, but by the end of the fourth lap the pattern was set. Almost every time Alonso came by, his name was in purple at the top of the order, indicative of one new fastest lap after another. They couldn't live with him.

After qualifying, Schumacher, apparently bemused at being so far - three-tenths of a second - from the pole time, gave the impression that he probably had more fuel on board. If such were the case, then we might after all have a race on our hands - or, at least, an order change, which these days passes for the same thing.

As it was, the British Grand Prix began to die on lap 18, when the Ferrari came in, and the Renault and McLaren did not. How about Raikkonen, then? Might he have gone to the grid heavier than Alonso? No, sir. On lap 19 Kimi stopped - and Fernando swept on. Not until lap 22 did he come in, which served further to confirm what a beautiful job he had done on his pole lap.

At the second stops Schumacher did indeed get ahead of Raikkonen, but by this time Alonso was 12 seconds up the road, driving with that relentlessly metronomic precision which has become his trademark. Not since Alain Prost has there been a great driver who made so few mistakes.

Afterwards, at the press conference, someone was moved to ask the drivers if they had suffered some very recent bereavement, so glum were their expressions. It's a fact that these days, for some reason, outright jubilation is rarely apparent on such occasions - Jarno Trulli at Monaco in '04 comes to mind as a delightful exception to the rule - but even by normal standards Fernando, Michael and Kimi seemed downbeat on Sunday. Why?

Schumacher's response was on the mark - and spoke for most, if not all, who were listening to him, too. "Well, it was a lonely race for Fernando... there was a bit of action between me and Kimi, but... it wasn't that exciting, was it?"

No, Michael, sad to say, it wasn't. "It's been like this for a long time," he went on. "There's no way to stick close to another driver at a high-speed track like this. Aerodynamics are so important... as soon as you get close, you start sliding around."

For all his fabled extrovert behaviour when off duty, Raikkonen at a race track invariably looks and sounds like a man in recent receipt of bad news, but he picked up on Schumacher's remarks: "Everyone would like to see more overtaking, but ever since I've been in F1 it's been like this..."

Jean Alesi (Ferrari) races with Michael Schumacher (Benetton-Renault) and David Coulthard (Williams Renault) in the 1995 British Grand Prix at Silverstone © LAT

Longer than that, Kimi. At the end of the 1995 race at Silverstone, Jean Alesi was asked why he had not made greater efforts to catch Johnny Herbert and David Coulthard in the late laps. "I gave up," said Jean, with disarming honesty. "I lost my motivation. Even if I had caught them, I knew it would be impossible to pass, because you can't run close up to another car - if you do, you lose downforce. That was why, in the first part of the race, Schumacher couldn't threaten me..."

It was true. Away from the grid, Damon Hill had taken the lead, while Alesi's Ferrari somehow launched through from the third row to slot in behind the Williams into Copse. Heaven-sent for Damon, of course: by the time of the first stops he was 20 seconds up on Alesi - who still had Schumacher's Benetton behind him.

"There was no point in trying to pass Jean," Michael shrugged afterwards. "All I could do was wait for the stops..."

When Michael Schumacher says something like that, you know there is something very wrong with the technical regulations.

Ten years on from that, at last year's British Grand Prix, Michael was the beneficiary of aerodynamic pestilence. On that occasion Raikkonen's McLaren-Mercedes was the fastest thing in the place, but blew up in practice, and had to start 10 places back on the grid. By the end of lap one Kimi was up to eighth, behind Schumacher's very slow Ferrari - and there he stayed for 24 laps, 'until the stops'.

"I was quite a bit quicker than Michael," he said afterwards, "but, with the cars the way they are, it's impossible to follow someone through the quick corners - and, basically, Silverstone is all quick corners..."

So it is, with a lap speed of well over 140mph, even in 2006, with 200 horsepower lost. But on Sunday it felt like one of Max's chess matches - and you only had to watch the morning's GP2 race to be reminded again that it didn't have to be that way, that technological overkill is indeed the enemy of spectacle, of racing.

The CDG wing, or something of the kind, may or may not be the way to go, but one trusts that somehow, for 2008, the problem will at last be addressed. F1 can survive without certain of the manufacturers; without people wanting to watch, it cannot.