Nigel Roebuck: Fifth Column

Strange times we live in. A week ago I was in Turkey for a sadly dull grand prix, and on Sunday evening I watched an IRL race at Detroit's Belle Isle, which, in terms of overtaking, made Monaco seem like Michigan, and through which it was difficult to stay awake - even for the drivers, if Helio Castroneves was anything to go by.

On the other side of the world, meantime, Marcus Gronholm won Rally New Zealand by one third of one second. Some mistake, surely... Not so strange, though, was Goodwood, whose Revival Meeting is one of the highlights of my year.

If the skies were dominated by cloud, at least the weekend was free of the rain which threatened to drown the Festival of Speed. As ever the event was a sell-out, the organisation something the promoters of virtually every grand prix could study to advantage. One wonders if, 40 years hence, there will be 'nostalgia' events recalling the start of the 21st century.

There was an elegance of line - long banished by the windtunnel - about so many racing cars at one time, was there not? Ron Dennis has said he thinks the 1967 Eagle-Weslake V12, as driven to victory at Spa by Dan Gurney, the most beautiful F1 car ever built, and many would agree with him.

While my vote will always go to the 'long nose' Maserati 250F - the F1 car, as driven by my hero Jean Behra, that I fell in love with as a kid - I remember Juan Pablo Montoya's reaction, at the Festival of Speed one year, when his eyes lit upon a 1990 McLaren-Honda MP4/5B, as driven by his hero in youth, Ayrton Senna.

JPM just gazed at the red and white car, oblivious of all about him. When he came out of the trance, I offered a penny for his thoughts. "It's just so beautiful, isn't it?" he murmured. "So clean. No bargeboards, or any of that stuff. Must have been like a bullet in a straight line..."

It was. At Monza that year Senna took the pole, with team-mate Gerhard Berger third on the grid, and the Ferraris of Alain Prost and Nigel Mansell second and fourth. In the race the quartet finished in the same order, and on recent evidence we may reasonably anticipate something similar this Sunday, when Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton, and Felipe Massa and Kimi Raikkonen go at it once more. It's not impossible, with BMW hovering, that the front two rows of the grid will contain other than McLarens and Ferraris, but you wouldn't bet that way.

We are 12 races into the 2007 world championship, and at half of those Ferrari and McLaren have had the front two rows to themselves, with Massa the leading pole taker, on five, followed by Hamilton, with four. On four occasions Nick Heidfeld has presumed to disturb the pattern, while Giancarlo Fisichella, Robert Kubica and Nico Rosberg have all made the top four once.

Glance at the championship standings, and it tells you all you need to know about how much the grand prix driver of today is at the mercy of his car. The two McLaren drivers are followed by the two from Ferrari, then BMW, then Renault, then Williams, then Red Bull, then Toyota. Perhaps, as Rosberg suggests, the banning of traction control in 2008 will shake things up a little.

At the press conference in Istanbul, Raikkonen, who had spent a 'boring' afternoon behind Massa, observed that, "Unfortunately, in Formula 1 these days the races are pretty much decided in qualifying", and it's difficult to take issue with him. Eight of the season's grands prix have indeed been won by the pole man, and only one - by Kimi at Magny-Cours - has gone to a driver who did not start from the front row.

No surprise, then, that qualifying has assumed an importance even greater than before - and no surprise, either, that all this nonsense about 'fuel burning laps' and so on has become so crucial. Talking to F1 fans at Goodwood, I was again reminded that most people are wholly turned off by endless additions to the rule book, to the over-complication of what used to be a relatively straightforward activity.

"I can't quite imagine," someone said, "what Jochen Rindt would have made of 'fuel burning' laps, can you? Now, tyre burning laps, that would have been a different matter..."

I wish it were possible for racing fans occasionally to have the opportunity of communicating their feelings about the sport - good and bad - to the powers-that-be, not least certain of the team principals and engineers, and in particular the aerodynamicists. "The problem," a Goodwood fan said, "is that what they want - more grip - is exactly what we don't want!"

He was sure, he went on, that team people found a grand prix weekend, including the race itself, completely absorbing, for their attention was wholly focused on their own cars and drivers, on changing strategies through a race, and so on. I'll admit that when I was involved with Graham Hill's team, in the mid-'70s, I was exactly that way. A spectator, though, simply wishes to enjoy an entertaining race, preferably with a few order changes which do not occur during pitstops. "Sometimes," he said, "it's almost as if the race is incidental, as if the stops are the focal point..."

Such is often the way of it at Monza, it must be said. Ten years ago, for example, we had an Italian Grand Prix almost completely devoid of overtaking, in which Alesi's Benetton led Coulthard's McLaren until both made their one and only stop, on lap 32. Jean's refuelling took 8.7 seconds, and DC's 7.8, which meant that the McLaren got out ahead of the Benetton, and there it stayed, a second ahead at the flag.

Still, as I have many times said, Monza remains my favourite grand prix weekend of the year. For some years now, the crowds at the old Parco have been on the wane, but perhaps this season's extraordinary two-hander between McLaren and Ferrari will put that to rights.

Monza spectators tend to be extremely 'political', with an unusually keen awareness of what is going on in the sport, and sometimes this makes for a pretty volatile atmosphere. The 'Stepneygate' affair is due to be settled in Paris next week (conveniently the day before first practice at Spa), and it's inevitable that banners in the grandstand - always a feature of Monza - will reflect some hostility towards McLaren. In light of the goings-on of the last couple of months, a victory by Hamilton or Alonso on Sunday would be especially savoured by the team.

Whatever else, what I hope we don't see this weekend is any nonsense of the kind that disfigured the Monza weekend 12 months ago, when Alonso was adjudged guilty of delaying Massa by a nanosecond in qualifying, which supposedly robbed Felipe of pole position. In reaching this absurd conclusion, the stewards inflicted one of their 'ad hoc' punishments (as also meted out to Fernando the other weekend, in Hungary), deleting his three fastest qualifying laps, which dropped him from fifth to 10th on the grid.

At the time Alonso was embroiled in a fight for the world championship with Michael Schumacher, whose Ferrari went on to win the Italian Grand Prix, and move to within a couple of points of his rival.

If Raikkonen is right in his assertion that, "In F1 these days the races are pretty much decided in qualifying", keep a close eye on Saturday afternoon. Only twice, in the last 10 years, has the winner of the Italian Grand Prix started from other than the front row.