From the Pulpit

For a military conflict to cease, according to this week's New Statesman, one of three factors must be in play:

(a) superiority must be so overwhelming on one side for the other side to decide that it's fruitless to continue;

(b) both combatants achieve rough parity and know they cannot achieve a breakthrough;

(c) outsiders exert such pressure for a resolution that the warring parties are unable to resist.

The Magny-Cours paddock was filled not with whispers about Michael Schumacher and Fernando Alonso and Kimi Raikkonen et al, as by rights it should have been, but about the battle over engine regulations between the manufacturers on the one side and Bernie Ecclestone, Max Mosley and Luca Montezemolo on the other.

But worry not: I'm not going to add to those whispers here, because you've probably had about as much as you can stomach on that subject already. Besides, that particular conflict was always going to be won by Ecclestone, Mosley and di Montezemolo - simply because that's how Formula One works.

For, right or wrong - and they're often wrong - Bernie, Max and Luca are past masters at bringing about situations whereby superiority is so overwhelming on their side for the other side to decide that it's fruitless to continue.

Luca di Montezemolo and Bernie Ecclestone, with Flavio Briatore behind © LAT

So they'll win, if they haven't won already. And whatever concessions the Grand Prix Manufacturers' Association will eventually claim they've annexed will only be what Bernie, Max and Luca secretly agreed they'd concede long ago - concessions that, for strategic reasons, they're happy to allow their hapless foes to parade as triumphs.

But let's hope that the Hockenheim paddock is filled with more interesting whispers - because, although most F1 bigwigs these days want to talk increasingly often, I find, of weird and wonderful things such as EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation, I'm reliably informed), I firmly believe that doing so till kingdom come, particularly in public, is actually counter-productive.

F1 is still a great show - and, if Juan Pablo Montoya's departure to NASCAR showed us anything, it showed us that there's no single-seater series anywhere in the world that can hold a candle to Grand Prix racing.

Yes, there's NASCAR itself, and F1 people are fond of beating themselves up about how successful NASCAR is. But NASCAR is about as popular outside the United States as peanut butter and jelly sandwiches - which is to say not very popular at all. F1, by contrast, is truly global.

Whenever I want to hear good sense spoken in the F1 paddock, I seek out Cosworth's director of F1, Bernard Ferguson, a no-bullshit bloke from the north of England who knows how many beans make five.

"What's EBITDA, Bernard?" I asked him at Magny-Cours.

"Fooked if I know," he replied.

"Really?"

"Well, actually, I think it's a way of analysing a company's operating profitability before non-operating expenses and non-cash charges, but I doubt if your readers could give a fook about it, to be honest."

"You're probably right. Prattling on about EBITDA isn't going to make people switch off Big Brother Live and switch on Martin Brundle and James Allen, is it?"

"No, it fookin' ain't. That's the problem with F1 people today," Bernard added, sighing the sigh that I guess he learnt how to sigh on the terraces at Burnley Football Club long ago. "Too much EBITDA and not enough ee-by-gum."

Spectators at the 2006 United States GP © LAT

Which is about as good a summation of the sport's current presentational ills as you're ever likely to hear.

So what can be done? Well, in my August 31st autosport.com column last year, frustrated at how our great sport was being unintentionally undermined by those who could not see how important it was (and is) to talk it up rather than down, I stated that the F1 world is full of clever spin doctors, smart corporate strategists and resourceful 'lifestyle' merchants, but they're all employed by drivers, teams, sponsors and so on. Not one of them is ever asked to bend his/her mind to the task of (re)branding F1 itself.

How much better would it be, I asked, if one of them were to be tasked instead with heading-up a properly funded F1 PR department whose sole brief was to reignite the world's interest in what remains a formidably slick, wonderfully enthralling and therefore prodigiously marketable sport?

At Magny-Cours last weekend I reminded Ecclestone of what I'd written, and he answered as follows: "Absolutely. We're going to do it, for sure. Just as soon as we've sorted out this latest little bit of nonsense, we'll do just that."

So there you have it. And all I can say at this stage is, "Ee-by-gum!"

Oh... and that I'll believe it when I see it.