Jonathan Noble: Online

I had spent most of the weekend in Spa-Francorchamps wondering just why the Formula One season had not come alive. The paddock, just like it had been for the past five or six races, had very little buzz.

Such quietness is typical during the mid-season grind from Magny-Cours through to Hockenheim. When it continued in Hungary I just put it down to everyone in F1 being demob happy about the looming summer break. But things did not pick up in Valencia - and then Spa was exactly the same thing.

Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton © LAT

The paddock's calmness has not mirrored what was going on on-track - where we have had a fantastic title battle, the likes of which have not been seen since the mid-1980s. So why, when things are so good and so close on it, was it so quiet off it?

My conclusion was that the drivers these days are too cautious in venting their true feelings - in public at least.

All the great title contests since the mid 1980s - Alonso v Schumacher; Hill v Schumacher; Mansell v Senna; Senna v Prost; Piquet v Mansell; Prost v Piquet - had the common theme of a bit of a needle between the title contenders. That's what drove fans to turn on every Sunday and watch the races.

Sport is about competition, but it thrives even more when there is real tension in the rivalries. One of my greatest sporting memories was going to see a Boca Juniors v River Plate football match in Buenos Aires over the weekend of the 1998 Argentine Grand Prix.

Now that was conflict in the extreme - armed guards separating the fans, fights breaking out in the media centre, the players giving no quarter on the pitch and chants like you would not believe.

It was an experience - not necessarily pleasant at time - but an experience no less. Now, imagine how dull that would have been if the fans had simply walked in arm-in-arm, stayed quiet apart from polite applause during the match, the players had congratulated each other for each tackle and then everyone shook hands afterwards before heading off home in silence.

In a way it is the latter scenario that has been happening a bit too much in F1.

All of the title contenders speak simply of their 'respect' for each other - saying they are a great rival, praising how well they drive, blah, blah, blah. It's partly sponsor/marketing-led in a bid not to create tension - but it is not what drives interest in the sport.

We want to see the gloves off. We want to understand and appreciate just what these guys really think and why on-track they will not give an inch if they can help it. We do see it on-track; but unless we get to live and breathe it off track we don't get a true understanding of what is going on.

So on Sunday night, as I sat outside Race Control waiting for news of the stewards' decision about Lewis Hamilton's penalty, I realised we had finally got what the sport has needed - even if it was in far from ideal circumstances.

It's gloves off now between Ferrari and McLaren; Hamilton has a point to prove on Ferrari's home turf and the way that Kimi Raikkonen and Felipe Massa duelled in the opening stages of the race in Belgium points to a far from cosy relationship there.

I'm a great believer that all publicity is good publicity - even if at times it makes uncomfortable reading for the sport's chiefs and those of us on the inside. But it's worth it, even if we have to fight and tooth-and-nail to prove to the doubters that F1 is not fixed and it is a great sporting contest.

Lewis Hamilton leaves the McLaren motorhome after losing his race win © LAT

Everyone I know is talking about F1 again - and the debates are raging hard.

More than 30,000 fans have put their name to a petition calling for the FIA to reverse the decision to penalise Hamilton. But don't believe for a second that the entire world is outraged that the championship leader was punished for gaining, what the stewards felt, was an unfair advantage for cutting the chicane.

The Spanish papers on Monday, most certainly not huge supporters of Hamilton after McLaren's troubles with Fernando Alonso last year, barely gave the matter a second thought. And in Italy's leading sports newspaper, Gazzetta dello Sport, they ran a poll asking readers to vote on whether they thought Hamilton deserved the penalty.

The result, at the time of writing, was around 75% believed that he did.

Nothing is ever as bad (or as good) as it seems on the day, and while some may feel that the Spa controversy is going to drive hordes away from the sport, it will equally entice many more out of intrigue - especially as we head to Ferrari's home turf in Italy once again.

Of course I could not sign off without giving my opinion on the incident - which I am sure will be shared by some and slammed by others.

I see too many mixing up the actual incident with the severity of the punishment Hamilton was given for it, and seeing them as exactly the same matter. I think it's important in this situation to strip the two apart.

The incident itself? Despite McLaren's protestations, I agree entirely with what Jarno Trulli has said this week.

Hamilton's car was in a position it would not have been if he had not run off the track and across the chicane. Irrespective of McLaren's claims that Hamilton was going 6.7 km/h slower than Raikkonen across the start-finish straight and conceded the lead, his car was in a position it would not have been had he stayed to the track.

Hamilton was further up the road than if he had followed Raikkonen through the chicane, and his position on the circuit forced Raikkonen, through F1's no two changes of direction rules, to steer left and leave the inside of La Source open. Raikkonen certainly could have done more to close the door but he may well have thought that Hamilton would not be allowed to take him there.

Had that been the last corner of the race, I think there certainly would have been a case for a post-race change of positions between the two drivers. And McLaren were certainly in enough doubt about the legality of the situation by asking FIA race director Charlie Whiting twice for confirmation that it was okay.

Kimi Raikkonen returns to the pits after crashing out of the Belgian Grand Prix © XPB

Had Hamilton been told to move aside for Raikkonen later that lap, I think there would only have been a few complaints from outside the sport. And perhaps publicly revealing the technical details about the incident, which the FIA stewards had at their disposal on Sunday night, would have even silenced those murmurs.

So it points to the fact that the controversy is not the rights and wrongs of what Hamilton did, but is based around the penalty chosen.

F1's sporting regulations limit stewards to only a drive-through penalty, a 10-second stop-go and a 10-place grid penalty in the event of a driving infringement, so in some senses their hands were tied by what they could hand down.

But in my reckoning there were extenuating circumstances here.

Raikkonen retook the lead later that lap - when Hamilton ran off-track to avoid the recovering Nico Rosberg. So any advantage the McLaren driver gained from his move was wiped out.

Furthermore, Raikkonen spun the lead away once he had got it back properly, and then crashed out by himself later in the lap. So that was the end of any talk about the chicane-cutting incident bringing Hamilton any advantage.

Why couldn't the stewards have factored in the strange circumstances here to explain that Hamilton did wrong, but there was no way he should be punished with a penalty that hands the win to someone who did not figure much on Sunday? The punishment must always fit the crime in sport; and in this case I believe it didn't.

A reprimand or fine would have been far more suitable - but then again I don't have all the technical information about the incident at my disposal.

I don't know where this case is going to go. But heading to Monza things could not be more exciting for the sport.

And I can bet that a high percentage of the people who vowed in the hours after the Spa decision never to watch F1 ever again will not be sitting in their gardens on Sunday.

They will be there, glued like the rest of us to their television sets or clicking the refresh button on autosport.com, knowing deep down that F1 has got interesting again.