This has been a pricey season for Ferrari, which has not only had to pay off Kimi’s contract (while he contests the World Rally Championship for Citroën), but also to stump up for Fernando, who may be earning somewhat less than Kimi did (and certainly less than Mercedes is paying Michael Schumacher), but is still at the high end of the pay scale.

I’ll admit that when Alonso’s signing was confirmed I thought it good reason for other teams to quake a little. In the two years when Fernando won the World Championship, 2005 and ’06, Schumacher was still in his pomp, yet Alonso – with Renault – beat him. Put all that talent and commitment to work at Maranello, and how could anything much go wrong? When Fernando won the opening Grand Prix, in Bahrain, it seemed to suggest a stellar season for Ferrari.

As I write, immediately before Hockenheim, that remains the team’s only victory in 2010. All season long Red Bull has had unquestionably the quickest car, but it has been by no means the most reliable – and that, whatever else, has always been one of Ferrari’s strongest suits. When Sebastian Vettel’s car faltered in Bahrain, it was Alonso and Massa who took over.

Since then, though, it has been McLaren which has benefited most from Red Bull failings – and rightly so, because its car has been consistently developed, in the traditional McLaren manner, and if the MP4-25 is not the equal of the Red Bull (particularly in qualifying), in most of the races it hasn’t been far away. Thus, Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button sit first and second in the point standings.

Ferrari, meantime, has had a pretty thin season, and although Alonso has predictably outpaced Massa, one may be sure that he never envisaged, at mid-season, being only fifth in the championship, 47 points adrift of Hamilton.

In part this is because Fernando has made mistakes, which is uncharacteristic of him. There have been tangles at the first corner, an unfathomably jumped start, a shunt at Monte Carlo, which obliged him to miss qualifying and therefore start from the back – after being quickest of all in the first two practice sessions…

Many of the mistakes, I would suggest, have occurred because for a long time Alonso has necessarily been driving right at the edge in a car not truly on the pace. After an encouraging start to the season, Ferrari failed to keep pace with the developments other teams were introducing, and only in the last three races have decent innovations come through – in Montréal Fernando was right there, and only a couple of backmarkers kept him from threatening Hamilton in the late laps. In Valencia he was on Lewis’s tail, in third place, when the controversial safety car incident removed him from the reckoning. At Silverstone a drive-through penalty – also controversial – put him out of the points.

In Italy there is much talk of a crisis at Ferrari, and even speculation – misplaced, one hopes – about the future of Stefano Domenicali. Yes, the team has been through a very bad patch, but Alonso continues to insist that he can still be World Champion this year. He loves the team, and they him, but the time has come for a series of good results, and everyone knows it. I’m betting that Fernando will come on very strong through the balance of this season…

Psychology, as we know, plays a very considerable role in motor racing, and sometimes a driver can find himself in the happy position of flying off to a race somewhere and positively (itals) expecting (end itals) to win it. Ye Gods, in the course of his Ferrari career, Michael Schumacher had entire (itals) seasons (end itals) of feeling like that.

In these circumstances, however, it’s as well to exercise a (itals) little (end itals) caution, because it’s all too easy to become complacently over-confident, make a silly mistake, and take yourself back to square one.

Very easy, then, to do the old ‘hero to zero’ thing, but rather more difficult to do it the other way round. Some drivers find themselves in a recalcitrant car, or get a run of bad luck, and you see ‘the head go down’ and know you can write them off this weekend, and probably next. Others, though, have a mental toughness that enables them to shrug off disappointment, and one such – indubitably – is Mark Webber, pole man and winner at the last two races in Barcelona and Monaco.

There was a time when Webber seemed prey to the ‘head down’ syndrome – there were those at Williams who thought that about him, but there he rarely had a truly competitive car, and his luck was indeed terrible. People began to compare Mark with the legendarily unlucky Chris Amon. No one doubted his fundamental quality as a driver, nor his outright pace, but he was into his thirties and hadn’t won a Grand Prix yet, and time was marching on…

Sometimes there were signs that Webber was putting himself under too much pressure – and making mistakes as a consequence. We saw it as recently as this year in Melbourne – surely the race he would like most to win – but in Malaysia, the following weekend, he beat Red Bull team-mate Sebastian Vettel to pole position, and assuredly that wasn’t in Vettel’s copy of the script. Had he beaten Sebastian to the first corner, Mark would almost certainly have won, but at the last second – misled by the stupid ‘outrigger’ mirrors then used by some teams – he moved left to give himself the ideal line into the turn, and Vettel, hardly believing his luck, nipped by.

Everyone predicts an extraordinary future for Vettel, and with good reason. Despite a run of poor reliability in 2009, he finished second in the World Championship, and the races he won he dominated. This year he should have won in Bahrain, should have won in Australia, and so on – should have got to the start of the European season with a considerable lead in the World Championship. Sebastian’s talent is from the top drawer, no doubt at all, but he is by no means unbeatable, as his team-mate showed last year at, of all races, the German Grand Prix.

There, at the Nürburgring, Webber had Vettel handled all weekend – and it has been the same this May, where Mark was dominant in the Spanish and Monaco Grands Prix: two wins in seven days. Most impressive of all was the way he handled the pressure of several restarts in Monaco: each time he simply left everyone behind again. There wasn’t the trace of a mistake – he looked as though he could have gone on for days, and it was as conclusive a win as ever I have seen at Monaco.

Webber’s Red Bull contract is up at the end of this season, and for quite a while there have been rumours that it would not be renewed, that a returning Kimi Räikkönen would partner Vettel in 2011. Personally, I think Red Bull would be mad to follow that course, but in any event it pleased me that Mark declared, post-Monaco, that while he was very happy at Red Bull, and might well be inclined to stay, it wasn’t by any means certain – that one or two others (notably Ferrari) might come calling. “Good to see good things happen to a good guy, isn’t it?” someone said as Webber came into the Monaco press room for the post-race conference. It is indeed.

For most, if not all, of the designers in F1, Domenicali’s words will be heresy, for their constant quest is to achieve as close to perfection as possible, and quite right too – that’s what they’re paid for. But a man like Patrick Head, as much a racer as anyone I have known in this business, has always been able to see the bigger picture, to appreciate that Grand Prix racing is – or should be – much more than merely a technical exercise. It is also a sport, and one that requires fans to enable it to survive.

Those fans need to be entertained. As Head once said, “Imagine how spectacular Monaco would be if we ran there with ‘Hockenheim’ wing settings…” Very well, Patrick was speaking some years ago, when Hockenheim was still a flat-out blind, but his point was well made. It’s interesting to remember that in those days, when the cars were as ‘trimmed out’ as possible, in the interests of straightline speed, they twitched and moved around in the stadium section most entertainingly.

Over the years I’ve written endlessly of the need for a complete reappraisal of Grand Prix racing, and where we – the fans – would like it to go. Personally I believe we have taken a good step forward this year, with the ban on refuelling, which has revived the need for a driver to look after his tyres, and will reward artists in the Clark-Stewart-Prost mould. A driver, as Robert Kubica has said, now needs to ‘manage a race’, rather than go through a series of qualifying sessions – which are great on Saturday afternoons, when they decide the grid, but quickly became too much of a muchness on Sundays. There is now, as Jenson Button has superbly demonstrated, more than one way to win a Grand Prix.

So all that’s good, but it is not enough. Since its soporific start in Bahrain, the F1 season has picked up dramatically – but it would not, it must be said, have done so to this degree had not rain played so big a role. In both Melbourne and Shanghai, the races were mainly wet, and in Sepang – admittedly with the help of complacency by McLaren and Ferrari – mixed conditions in qualifying led to a highly unusual grid, with four major players towards the back.

Lewis Hamilton may lack his team-mate’s delicacy when it comes to going quickly and babying your tyres, but his aggression, his freestyle approach to overtaking, has been one of the highlights of the year. In Sepang, where he started 20th, Lewis sliced through the field in amazing style – until he caught Adrian Sutil. The Force India wasn’t as fast as the McLaren, but it was very quick in a straight line, and driven extremely well. At that point Hamilton’s only hope of getting by was to pressurise Sutil into a mistake, but it never came.

The race was dry in Malaysia, of course, and I thought the Hamilton-Sutil duel served very well to highlight F1’s abiding problem: when grip levels are normal, overtaking is simply too difficult, and, while the layout of many circuits doesn’t help, the main culprit is aerodynamics.

As Domenicali says, the F1 car is too efficient. You only have to see how good the racing becomes when it is less efficient, when the track is damp and grip levels are reduced, to appreciate that. Next year the controversial ‘double diffuser’ is to be banned (as it was originally intended to be from 2009 on), and that is good, but much more needs to be done.

As the powers that be contemplate the future, let them concentrate not on tricks and artifices – a minimum number of pitstops and the like – but on tailoring the next generation of Grand Prix car so that it can race more effectively. The technical gurus may not like it, but in the end – as it should be – it’s the fans who matter most. They’re the ones who pay for it, after all.

Many immediately suggested it had been a mistake to get rid of refuelling and demanded immediate changes, some of which had merit, some not. Bernie Ecclestone counselled against knee-jerk reactions, and anyone with half a brain agreed with him.

Race two, in Melbourne, was as diverting as Bahrain had been bland, and much of this – rightly – was put down to uncertain weather conditions, which have spawned exciting races since the beginning of time. It isn’t much of an intellectual stretch to understand that when you get a wet race track – even a damp one – you have less grip, and when you have less grip you get more driving errors and therefore changes in the order.

Not rocket science, is it? Which makes it the more unbelievable that, between them, the FIA and the Formula 1 teams – all of which have recently wakened up to the fact that racing fans like racing – cannot between them come up with a set of regulations to promote it. Last year, those teams which designed ‘trick’ double-diffusers into the concept of their cars deliberately ignored the aims of the FIA Overtaking Working Group – and the governing body then shamefully declared them permissible.

All concerned knew of the adverse effect this would have on the sport’s appeal, and all – for reasons of self-interest – chose to ignore it. A plague on their houses, as far as I’m concerned – but the FIA Court of Appeal stands especially culpable, for while it is in the DNA of F1 designers to look for loopholes in the rules, it is the interests of the sport which should always be paramount to the people who run it.

Patrick Head once pointed out that the Monaco Grand Prix would be highly diverting if all the cars ran with ‘Hockenheim wing settings’, and on another occasion even more radically suggested that wings be banned altogether – although that, he smilingly admitted, would never be accepted by the team owners given the amount of ‘sponsorship area’ on the car that would be lost.

For the fans, the people to whom manufacturers and sponsors are trying to sell things – and therefore, in the end, the people who pay for this sport – what constitutes the ideal racing car? No one ever defined that better than Tony Brooks, the great Vanwall and Ferrari driver of half a century ago: “A Grand Prix car,” he said, “should always have slightly more power than the chassis can comfortably handle…”

Simple, isn’t it? And the abiding problem of contemporary F1 is that the ratio between power and grip is out of kilter. The ban on traction control was a good move, but still the fact remains that F1 cars race today with 300 horsepower fewer than we have seen in the past – and don’t tell me that the grip levels in the 1980s (during the turbo era) were anything like those of today.

Some years ago Max Mosley decided that horsepower was getting out of control, and declared that the 3-litre V10 engine should be replaced by a 2.4-litre V8. He then imposed the ‘frozen engine spec’ rule, and that was probably essential, given the amounts of money being spent on the endless quest for another 10bhp.

Unfortunately, attempts to change the aerodynamic rules – so as to cut back on grip – have proved far less effective, and thus we have a situation where a dry day means a procession, where only adverse weather conditions can guarantee a memorable afternoon. Can’t be right.

After Bahrain, there was hand-wringing by some of the team principals, who had apparently become suddenly aware that a Grand Prix can be boring, and were demanding all manner of instant changes to spice up ‘The Show’. One instant change might be to be receptive in future to technical changes proposed by the Overtaking Working Group, rather than ignore them for the sake of self-interest.

And to think there was a time when we used to joke about spinklers…

It’s interesting that, when forecasting the likely World Champion, most seem to be choosing between Schumacher, Hamilton, Alonso and Vettel – to be focusing, in other words, on one driver in each of the four top teams.

There’s no denying that, in the normal course of events, within a team one driver tends to assert his superiority over the group, to become the de facto number one, even if this is not officially acknowledged. And it’s a fact, too, that Michael, Lewis, Fernando and Sebastian have all shown themselves to be very keen on this thing of having the team revolve primarily around them. But I wonder if it’s going to be as clear-cut as some imagine.

Consider the ‘other’ driver in each team: Rosberg (Mercedes), Button (McLaren), Massa (Ferrari) and Webber (Red Bull). Of these only Nico has yet to win a Grand Prix, but then he has never – until now – had the car to enable him to do so. Shout me down if you will, but I have a suspicion that he will show a great deal better against Schuey than most appear to believe. Although Ross Brawn presided over a Ferrari team that for years clearly favoured Michael, he has publicly said that such will not be the situation at Mercedes.

Over at McLaren, Martin Whitmarsh has said the same about Hamilton and Button – and, again, I expect the performance gap between them to be far less than some suggest.

On to Ferrari. While I believe Alonso to be the best driver in the world, don’t forget that Massa – fully recovered – largely dominated Kimi Räikkönen, and came within a Toyota dry tyre of winning the 2008 World Championship. Felipe is cowed by no one these days, and quite right, too.

Finally, there is Red Bull: Bernie Ecclestone has predicted that Vettel will win the championship this year, and that’s not the silliest thing he has ever said, for Sebastian is prodigiously talented, with ambition to match.

I do, however, think it would be a great mistake to underestimate Webber. Because he’s in his thirties, and has been around a while, Mark is sometimes overlooked, but remember that last year he won twice – and that included a sound defeat of Vettel in Germany. Webber is Trulli-quick over one lap, and in a race no one fights harder. Twelve months ago he began the season with virtually no testing behind him, legacy of the badly broken leg sustained the previous autumn, but he never moaned about the discomfort, put up with his team-mate’s occasional tantrums, and simply put his head down and got on with it. I’m sure he will do the same in 2010.

Four top teams, then – but there are more than four drivers in the mix, and that’s what makes the forthcoming season so mouth-watering. And I’d add a final thought: if Renault comes up with competitive package, expect Robert Kubica – as talented as there is – to be in the thick of it.

If pushed, my money would be on Alonso for the title – but I’m not sure I’d bet very much…

As he left for Ferrari, so Robert Kubica – on the market following BMW’s withdrawal – took his place, but through the late months of last year rumours abounded that Renault, too, might follow the lead of Honda, Toyota and BMW, and disappear from F1. Theoretically, therefore, Kubica might have been on the street once more – and, frankly, I was surprised that during that period any team signed any driver before being certain of Robert’s situation.

For my money, he is one of the top four drivers in F1, and some go further than that. His close pal Alonso has said he considers him the best, while even Lewis Hamilton has – privately – admitted that Kubica is the driver he most fears.

When Renault announced that, while the team would be continuing under the same name, a considerable chunk of it had been sold, Kubica declared that he now considered himself free to walk, should he choose to do so. After being reassured that it would remain a serious F1 operation, he said he would remain – but his original contract was for one season only, and there has been speculation that he could well join Alonso at Ferrari in 2011.

It could be that Kubica will have a frustrating time of it – again – this year, but still it astonishes me that when pundits consider the prospects for the coming season, frequently they omit to mention him. In all probability, this is because they do not expect very much from Renault, but if the car is even half-decent expect to see Robert in there, pitching. He might not look the part as much as some, but potentially this is a great Grand Prix driver.

It was, by general consent, an appalling happening, and draconian punishments were forecast and – in some cases, anyway – duly handed down. Flavio Briatore was banned from motor racing for life, and Pat Symonds for five years; Renault, the company, got away with a suspended ban (i.e. nothing) and Piquet himself – said by many to have been the instigator of the idea – got not even that, having been granted immunity for turning in his ex-colleagues when the moment suited him (i.e. when he had been fired, and had a powerful thirst for revenge to slake).

“The worst example of cheating I’ve ever known,” commented Stirling Moss at the time, and few would take issue with him. What Piquet et al did that day was to cause an accident with the intention of gaining from it, right?

Right. And all sorts of things – some of them a touch hysterical, in my opinion – were said about the danger, the risk involved, both to Piquet and to other drivers, marshals and so on. I’m not attempting to play down the gravity of the offence, but the incident occurred at the exit of a slow corner, and the Renault finished up flush with the inside wall, well off the line. It was not nothing, by any means, but nor – to my eyes, anyway – was it quite the potential catastrophe described by some.

Now let’s go back a couple of years before the Singapore incident, to Monaco in 2006, to the dying seconds of the final qualifying session. Michael Schumacher had the all-important pole position, but feared that Alonso, out on the circuit and going for it, was going to beat him. Therefore, in the most cack-handed manner imaginable, Schumacher contrived to ‘have an accident’ at Rascasse, thereby blocking the track, so as to thwart Alonso.

Why cack-handed? Well, for a start because it wasn’t even vaguely believable. Michael came into the corner off the pace, and off his normal line. He then put the brakes on hard, locked up – and stopped, a couple of feet from the barrier. As Keke Rosberg said at the time, “Jesus, he could at least have knocked the nose off…” The Ferrari was completely undamaged.

Outrage in the paddock was extreme, and the stewards announced that they would investigate. Who knows why, but it was late that evening before they concluded that Schumacher should be… not banned for life or for five years or even for one race. No, he would start from the back of the grid. Wow! Was that hard-hitting or what? On race day he duly came through to fifth place, and four points.

Now, was what Michael did greatly different from what happened in Singapore? Was not the intention the same in both cases – namely, deliberately to ‘have an accident’ in the hope of benefiting from it? All right, Schumacher didn’t actually hit anything, but his car was in the middle of the road, engine dead, and a carambolage could have occurred behind it.

Perhaps his sin wasn’t as great as Piquet’s, but still he cheated with thoughts of gain in mind (and not for the first time, either). Of course the argument was that Michael’s action wasn’t planned, wasn’t preconceived. Probably so, but it didn’t keep him from spotting an opportunity, and deciding instantly to act upon it. And the discrepancy in the punishments handed out for the two ‘crimes’ seems to me more than a touch absurd.

None argued Schumacher’s case more trenchantly than Jean Todt, but he was then of course a Ferrari man, doing right by his team and thinking of nothing else. Now he is the president of the FIA, and the hope must be that now the interests of ‘the sport’ are uppermost in his mind. On the face of it, sundry announcements made in the wake of December’s World Motor Sport Council meeting give cause for optimism – not least those proposing fundamental changes in the way FIA stewards conduct themselves at a Grand Prix. A most encouraging start to the new regime in Paris, I thought.

The case is to be heard in France’s high court, the Tribunal de Grande Instance, on November 24. Briatore and Symonds will claim that many of the procedures followed during the investigation and hearing were not in accordance with either the FIA’s own International Sporting Code or, indeed, the laws of France, in which the governing body’s HQ is situated. Among other things, Briatore claims that the ‘obligation to boycott’ him (imposed effectively upon everyone working in the sport) is not a sanction authorised by the Sporting Code. As things stand, not only may Flavio not be associated with any team in an FIA-sanctioned series, but also he may not act as manager or agent to any of its participants

Mosley really might have guessed that Briatore would not go quietly: Flavio – like Max – is fundamentally a gloves-off streetfighter. While his cognisance of the plan for Piquet to crash deliberately is not seriously in doubt, there are very considerable doubts that he was the instigator of the plot – Symonds, in his original testimony, was adamant that the idea had come from Piquet himself.

In the event, neither Piquet (who was granted immunity by the FIA) nor Renault suffered any punishment, the axe falling only on Briatore and Symonds. Even Flavio’s biggest detractors thought his lifetime ban excessive, but few were surprised by it. Ever since the formation of FOTA, he had been in the front line in the constant battles with the FIA, and this of course did not go down well in the Place de la Concorde.

Briatore is also suing the FIA for a minimum of a million Euros, in compensation for the damage to his reputation and image. This is small change to Flav, of course, a merely symbolic token, but he is very serious indeed about righting what he perceives to be an injustice against him. In light of the fact that Briatore has given public voice to an opinion privately expressed for years in the Formula 1 paddock – dared to speak out, in other words – there will be not a few folk rooting for him and Symonds on November 24.

We shouldn’t, probably, be any longer surprised by the actions of the outgoing president, but still there has been shock at Max Mosley’s behaviour in this pre-election period: far from keeping out of the debate, he has made it abundantly clear that he wishes Todt to succeed him.

The theme throughout has been seamless transition from Max to Jean… an undertaking that Todt will strive ‘to continue the great work of President Mosley’.

Vatanen, meantime, has been highly critical of the way in which the FIA has been run these years past, perhaps – being aware of where lie the sympathies of the FIA hierarchy – figuring he had little to lose.

Clearly, though, Ari’s words have registered with some, not least in the Middle East region, most of which is expected to back him. Predictably this has not gone down well – as revealed by a breathtaking letter from Mosley to Prince Feisal of Jordan.

‘It is very unfortunate,’ he wrote, ‘but the campaign run by Ari Vatanen has been marked by untruthful claims, and has now descended to insults such as his recent statements that the FIA is a “stagnant pool” which stinks, and that the entire FIA system is unfair, autocratic and unjust.

‘The more Vatanen criticises the FIA’s policies, and the more insulting and untrue his claims, the more he damages the interests of those associated with him. The FIA membership will naturally assume that his supporters fully endorse his statements.

‘Any thought that, after the election, everyone can unite and work together can now be forgotten. It is not possible to make outrageous and divisive statements like Vatanen’s, and then expect the victims of insults and untruths to forget what has been said.

‘The simple fact,’ Mosley went on, ‘is that Vatanen will lose the election, and lose badly, not least because he chose to denigrate the FIA, and those currently in office, rather than run a constructive and civilised campaign.’

It’s not too difficult to read between the lines here: vote for Vatanen, and you will not be forgiven. I find it astounding that Mosley would commit something like this to print, for the sinister implication is that, after the election, it will be known who voted for Vatanen and who did not – this, despite the fact that, according to the FIA Statutes, the vote must be conducted by secret ballot.

It is particularly remarkable that Mosley should have sent a letter such as this to Prince Feisal, who invited him to the Jordan Rally last year in the immediate aftermath of the News of the World affair, when Max was otherwise short of friends.

Clearly, however, his letter did not have the desired effect, for the prince was understandably outraged. At a motoring conference in Amman on October 1, he responded thus: “Jordan has always maintained a strong relationship with the FIA president, so I am deeply disappointed by the content and the insinuations of his letter, which have raised serious questions as to the credibility of the upcoming and future elections.”

As of now, most believe Todt will win, but there remain many who think it not necessarily a foregone conclusion.

“Actually,” said an insider, “this letter to Prince Feisal suggests to me an insecurity in the Todt/Mosley camp. All the ‘motor sport’ people in the FIA member clubs are supporting them – for all the reasons we know only too well – but the ‘mobility’ clubs are very different. There’s a view that because Formula 1 has the loudest voice that’s what will carry the day, but I’m not sure that’s necessarily the case…”

Stay tuned, as they say.

When Felipe Massa was injured in Hungary, there was endless conjecture about who might sub for him in the No 3 Ferrari, and when Michael Schumacher announced his intention temporarily to return there was considerable elation both in the paddock and among Formula 1 fans. Equally, when a while later Schumacher declared that he wouldn’t be coming back after all, that his injured neck simply wasn’t equal to the demands of the job, the sense of disappointment was profound – not least, of course, within Ferrari. What to do now?

Perhaps the most sensible course of action would have been to hire an outsider, as Ferrari did in 1999, when Mika Salo was brought in to partner Eddie Irvine in the wake of Schumacher’s accident at Silverstone.

This summer perhaps the most logical choice would have been Sébastien Bourdais, who had lost his drive at Toro Rosso, and was thoroughly familiar with both the Ferrari engine and, of course, the Bridgestone tyres.

As it was, Ferrari took the sentimental route, announcing that Luca Badoer would drive the second car at Valencia. It was seen as a ‘thank you’ to a man who had served as the team’s main test driver for a very long time.
Not too much, it must be said, was expected. Briefly there had been enormous excitement at the thought that the most successful F1 driver of all time was coming back; now, in his place, we had one whose only claim to fame was that he had driven in more Grands Prix without scoring a point than any man in history.

Still, everyone was willing to cut Badoer some slack. He was 38 years old, and he hadn’t raced an F1 car for 10 years. Even more significantly, perhaps, the intra-season testing ban introduced this year necessarily meant that he hadn’t so much as sat in a Ferrari for some months. Plus, he didn’t know the Valencia track. It was asking a lot. Give the bloke a chance.

All that being so, it was still a surprise that Badoer qualified last in Spain – and even more of one that he was a second and a half slower than anyone else. In the race it was the same story, but Badoer said things would be better at Spa, a circuit he knew well. Again, though, he qualified – and finished – last. Team-mate Kimi Räikkönen, meantime, won.

It goes without saying that even one of Badoer’s talents drives a Grand Prix car at a speed beyond the understanding of normal folk, and it’s hardly a disgrace to be a couple of seconds – almost a blink of the eye – slower than Räikkönen around Spa. Multiply that by 44 (laps), though, and it’s the difference between first and last.

Clearly this couldn’t go on, not least because Ferrari has constructors’ points to consider. Most observers were of the belief that Valencia should have been enough, that Ferrari should have had someone else in the car at Spa, but the races were run on consecutive weekends, and the simplest solution was to stay put, however dismal the prospects.

After the Belgian weekend, though, it was obviously out of the question even to contemplate running Badoer a third time – and at Monza, of all places. As expected, Giancarlo Fisichella got the nod, whereupon Badoer announced to the world it was the press what done it. “The media,” he said, “played a fundamental role in the decision to replace me. I would have done better from the third Grand Prix.”

Upon what delusion was that forecast based? Badoer was never ‘quick’ even when he was young, and many wondered how he kept his test job all those years. The only positive comment one can make on his brief return to the races was that he was at least commendably fit. To blame the press – or anyone else – for Ferrari’s decision not to waste a car for a third successive race is palpably absurd, and in doing so Badoer has merely added petulance to his other shortcomings.