16/03/2010
NEWS STORY
With the opening race of the much anticipated new season getting a serous mauling from the media, F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone has urged the sport not to panic and not to seek knee-jerk solutions.
The ten cars that headed the timesheets late on Sunday afternoon were exactly the same ten cars that emerged from the first corner heading the field, admittedly in a slightly different order.
The pit stops were over before we'd even realised and the problems with tyre degradation that we'd all thought, OK hoped, would spice up the final section of the race never really happened.
Consequently, other than Vettel's hiccough 15 laps from the end which saw the hapless German slip from first to fourth, it was business as usual, a procession. Or, as one or two media outlets described it, Bore-rain.
While fans took to the message boards journalists took to websites, blogs and newspapers, even drivers and team bosses agreed, the race was boring and certainly not what we'd all been anticipating for those five long months.
Aware of the anger and frustration, and also fully aware of the threat from other sports, not just motor sport, Bernie Ecclestone has urged caution and advised against a knee-jerk reaction in attempting to improve the show.
"There is no panic, no crisis for F1," he told the Times. "I think there is nothing we can do immediately and we should not just knee-jerk into changes."
Ecclestone lays the blame for the non-crisis firmly at the door of the teams claiming that it is their determination to be the best and most effective technically that is stifling competition.
"I had a meeting with the teams and tried to explain to them what our business is about," he continued, "racing and entertaining the public, not about playing with computers and going fast over one lap.
"The problem is that you cannot really have teams in any shape or form having a part in the sporting or technical regulations. You cannot have the inmates writing the regulations."
Meanwhile, talking to the Press Association, he said: "I don't think it was much different to some of the other races we had last year to be quite honest with you. It wasn't the sort of race that would excite most people I would suppose. But I think we ought to judge these things a little later on. It's a bit early. We ought to wait until we come back from China."
The fact is that we are in this situation because of the constant tinkering with the rules, that and the fact that in recent years the sport has been run by two men each with their own distinct agendas.
While they might talk about connecting with the fans, resorting to flash new websites, surveys, blogs and Twitter, the teams are not about entertainment they are about winning and, in these harsh financial times, either making a profit or at least cutting their losses.
The sad fact is that rather than feel let down by what happened on Sunday, fans should have been prepared for it. The reality is that F1 has lost its way, as many of the 18 world champions present for the weekend's 60th anniversary of the series could have told you.
While Nelson Piquet Snr. was absent for obvious reasons, 2007 champion Kimi Raikkonen simply cannot be bothered with F1 any longer, and who can blame him.