Autosport: Watching Paint Dry

In the early 1990s, there was talk of a TV 'soap' set in and around Formula 1. The late Adam Faith, a good friend of Bernie Ecclestone, was involved, and he came to Barcelona one year, together with a couple of scriptwriters.

The idea was that it would centre round the paddock - the people, the gossip, the friendships and rivalries and intrigues. There would be no actual racing involved.

In the end it never came to anything - but then it didn't need to, for life has perfectly imitated art, as demonstrated over the French GP weekend. Lots of talk, lots of anger, a laugh or two, and - so far as F1 is concerned, anyway - no racing whatever. This was one of those weekends that made you weep for our sport.

On Saturday afternoon, as the final segment of qualifying was about to begin, Michael Schumacher pulled alongside Fernando Alonso in the pitlane. With this particular chunk of qualifying now shortened from 20 to 15 minutes, there was a greater need than before to get out and get on with it.

Schumacher's actions suggested an element of gamesmanship, a bit of 'edge', if you like, and this unexpected moment of theatre was very welcome. When they got the signal to go, Fernando duly got away first, but halfway round the lap Michael passed him and for a few laps the two circulated in close company.

It meant nothing, of course - at that stage they were getting rid of fuel, and not setting quick times - but briefly it created a pleasing illusion of 'racing', and for that everyone was suitably grateful. "Probably," I said, sort of tongue in cheek to a colleague, "that'll be the high spot of our weekend." He responded with a mirthless laugh: "Probably it will..."

And it was. Once the lights went out, 24 hours later, Schumacher didn't bother with any games, but simply disappeared up the road. That's his job, of course, but for the 84,000 spectators, grilling in the 35C chaleur, it was inevitably a disappointment.

And when, in the next hour and a half, nothing else happened, probably a good few of them wondered why they had bothered. Michael screamed past 70 times, and the rest did the same, not quite as quickly. Then everyone went home.

Oh, I nearly forgot. Alonso got ahead of Felipe Massa for second place - on strategy, naturally. Any overtaking? Well, on lap 16 Jacques Villeneuve passed Rubens Barrichello for 13th place and that was about it.

To call the French Grand Prix a 'race' would be to dishonour such as Rossi, Melandri, Hayden, Pedrosa and the rest, who gave their all in the MotoGP race at the Sachsenring an hour or so earlier, and were watched avidly on motorhome TV screens - by all those who weren't somewhere else, bitching about engines.

So incidental was the race to the proceedings that in the middle of it Renault issued a press release, relating to a similar thing issued earlier by the Grand Prix Manufacturers Association. Seemed like a metaphor for the entire weekend.

By creating GP2, the powers-that-be have made a rod for their own back. Whereas F3000 never caught the imagination, GP2 is a different matter and to my mind has been the great success story of European motor racing in recent times.

For one thing, the cars look so good. They are better-proportioned than the F1 cars, and lack the barge boards and other aerodynamic accoutrements - what Bernie calls, 'Those horrible-looking bits and pieces they stick on all over the place' - that so disfigure the grand prix car of the modern era.

They are also on slicks, which always lend an air of 'proper racing car'. With their long-life 4-litre Renault V8s, they don't have the regulation scream of a god-knows-how-many-revs F1 engine, but still they sound pretty good to my ear.

Then there's the way they behave. They don't have traction control and so they actually slide a little. From the cradle a racing fan loves to see that - think of that sharp intake of breath as the rear wheel of Loris Capirossi's Ducati kicks out at the exit of a corner, and then tell me otherwise.

In terms of racing, the GP2 race - a supporting event - has become the highlight of a grand prix weekend. And that can't be right.

Every year braking distances get a little shorter, and cornering speeds a little faster - in fact, a lot faster this year, thanks primarily to the unfathomable decision, after just one season, to reintroduce tyre changes.

The start of the Grand Prix of Brazil © LAT

"It hasn't been a great year, has it?" mused Martin Brundle in a putting-the-world-to-rights session we had recently. "It's a shame tyre changes have been brought back - we've reverted to this sprint-pit-sprint thing, and that's certainly not helped the grand prix, has it?"

Brundle is seriously concerned about the state of affairs in F1. "Something's got to change. I keep getting to the end of a race with a really guilty feeling - I can't hide from it. I think the pre-race stuff my ITV colleagues do is terrific, and my little bit of that is the grid walk.

"The aim of all this is to make the viewer feel he's been there all weekend, and the last bit is building up the race - like at Silverstone, where we had Alonso, Raikkonen and Schumacher 1-2-3 on the grid. Fantastic!

"Then the race starts - and what happens? Nothing. It's a bit difficult, you know: I'm on the grid and I can hardly say, 'Well, we've got the three best drivers in the world at the front of the grid, but, er... I'm not sure anything much is going to happen...' I mean, I'd get fired immediately, wouldn't I?

"The thing is, these days we all get pumped up about a 'pitlane pass', don't we? Someone makes his stop, puts the hammer down and gets ahead of the other guy when he makes his stop. The order changes - and the other guy's sometimes not even in sight!

"We've got indoctrinated now, so that we think of someone coming out of the pits, and someone else rushing down the pit straight, as a pass. And it's not - it's a change of order, but it's not a pass! 'I was waiting for the stops'... Jesus, how many times have we heard that?

"However, looking ahead, I must say I'm extremely happy at the thought of losing the driver aids. I mean, traction control is a joke.

"I drove the Red Bull at Silverstone recently - in the wet on intermediates - and even an old tosser like me could go into Copse, stamp on the throttle, and the car just sticks! It blew my mind. I've driven F1 cars, on slicks, on a dry track, that had less grip than that. Can't be right, can it? How are we ever going to have racing when the cars are like that?"

Perhaps, as and when the engines row is sorted out, someone might care to address that.