Mark Hughes: F1's Inside Line

Lewis Hamilton's performance diverted attention away from an inconvenient truth in Australia - namely that nothing much was happening on the track. Some cynics might say, 'What's new?', but actually if you compare it to last year, it is new. One year ago the Australian Grand Prix produced several very tense battles through the field, with seesawing variations in performance and lots of incidents.

Up front, Fernando Alonso was pretty dominant, but first he'd had to find a way around a very defensive Jenson Button, something that had taken several crowd-on-their-feet attempts, and for a time in the early stages it looked like Fernando had a real fight on his hands from Kimi Raikkonen, the McLaren cutting dramatically into the Renault's lead until its front wing endplate support fractured.

Every time it looked like stalemate had set in, there would be another incident and the safety car would be triggered, bunching up the field once more. But even more critically, the cooled tyres then created a huge variation in how well the cars performed - and position changes were rife as drivers in cars that warmed their tyres quickly were able to be opportunistic in how they dealt with those struggling to get warm-up performance.

The Honda - the fastest car of all in qualifying - was hopeless in getting heat into its rubber, and so fell progressively further down the order each time there was a post-safety car scramble. You needed to understand this to appreciate just what a fantastic job Button was doing that day - even though he was falling backwards through the field. His tenacity was fabulous to watch. He was yielding not one millimetre of space, whether it be to Alonso, Raikkonen or Montoya, even though it was inevitable they were going to get past.

He even banged wheels with Kimi and JPM at different stages as he defended his track space in a car that was effectively crippled. There was the chance that he just might be able to hold them off long enough for his tyres to get back up to temperature, and then he might be able to stabilise things. Although it didn't work out that way, it was fascinating and wonderfully tense watching him try.

It was, in fact, Button's tenacity on that day that ultimately blunted Raikkonen's challenge to Alonso's victory. So defensive was Jenson as the McLaren pounced after yet another safety car, that Kimi locked up a front wheel for a long time. Although he got past, the severe flat spot he'd now got created such vibrations the endplate support later broke - just as he was closing in on Alonso's lead.

The key to every bit of intrigue and suspense in the '06 race was to do with variation in performance, how a definitive status quo of lap time for each car never really was established: the league table of speed of the cars seemed to be changing by the lap. Why? Because the tyres were so incredibly temperature-sensitive. You could spend 10 laps or more hopelessly off the pace, trying to get the tyres up to the beginning of their critical working range - and then suddenly you'd get there and find as much as two seconds per lap.

This indeed was the pattern of Michael Schumacher's race that day. Other cars could generate the correct tyre temperature pretty much immediately, even if they weren't ultimately fast cars. The Toyotas were like this on the day, something that enabled Ralf Schumacher to grab a great opportunistic podium place.

Some of the incidents that triggered the safety cars were also to do with the narrow working range of the tyres. Why were the tyres like this? Because there was a tyre war. With Bridgestone and Michelin chasing ultimate performance in their war against each other, they were having to produce rubber that was very edgy in its performance profile.

Almost like a very powerful but very 'cammy' engine, they had great performance, but over a very narrow band. If outside factors like track temperature were just a little bit different from forecast, suddenly the tyres were extremely sensitive to how the car used them. That's before we even begin to consider the wild variations we'd get when it rained.

But now Formula 1 has surrendered all that. The tyre war was deemed too expensive and too complex - and besides, said the critics, who cared about tyres? There was even a very smart comment in one of the broadsheets to the effect of: 'Michelin v Bridgestone: it's hardly Ali v Frazier, is it?' It was a great quote, but it missed the point entirely. It wasn't the tyre war per se that was interesting, it was the variation in performance it brought to the whole field.

We are now seeing the repercussions of that simplistic line of reasoning; namely, tyres with a nice wide operating band that are the same for everyone. The league table of performance between the cars is set at the beginning of the weekend and stays that way. So the race begins and each car pulls ever-further away from the ones behind it, then the flag falls.

The point is that people didn't need to care about tyres or understand the subtleties to appreciate the more interesting racing that inevitably results from a tyre war and the random variables it brings. I'd love to be proved wrong about this, but I've a nasty feeling we're going to see plenty of races just like Melbourne '07 this year.