As headlines go, "Bahrain GP is boring" is up there in terms of shock value with "Sun rises in east" or "U2 record crap album". But the scathing criticisms of the entertainment served up by Formula One's new refuelling-less formula in Bahrain at the weekend has caused the powers that be to start panicking like a bunch of headless chickens suddenly becoming aware that now none of their hats will fit.
Fan forums across the internet are full of confused and disorientated posters, baffled by the fact that the holy grail of a return to a 1980's halcyon combination of slick tyres and no refuelling has manage to deliver a spectacle more torpid than the days of fuel stops and grooved tyres ever managed. The poor moaners don't even have Max Mosley to blame any more.
But, while it may be a forlorn hope that the teams, the fans and the FIA stop and think about what they're doing before they rush headlong into another dizzying round of kneejerk rule changes and tacked-on extras, it really is time to think about the bigger picture. What, precisely, was wrong with the race on Sunday.
Well, the answer to that is fairly obvious. Bugger all happened. But actually, quite a bit did happen towards the back. Admittedly the sight of the recovering Robert Kubica, Adrian Sutil and Nico Hulkenberg powering past the painfully slow Lotus and Virgin cars was hardly pulse-racingly thrilling, but if it's overtaking you want, there it was. As well as that, the new rules had the desired effect of producing action thanks to drivers being on tyres with different performance cycles. Both Kamui Kobayashi and Sebastien Buemi saw a number of drivers surge past them as their first set of Bridgestone rubber destroyed itself.
But the problem was that at the front, where the cars were better and the drivers more talented, we had a procession. Lewis Hamilton could do nothing about Nico Rosberg's slower Mercedes for his first stint, finally getting past at the sole round of pit stops in predictable fashion, albeit far too late for him to hope to catch the cars ahead of him.
And Fernando Alonso seemed powerless to make a telling pass on Sebastian Vettel prior to the Red Bull's engine drama. The lap after he eased past the German's ailing machine, his lap times immediately dropped from 2:01s to 1:59s, indicating that despite a clear performance advantage, he had been unable to do a thing about the "dirty air" off the back of Vettel's car. Even Michael Schumacher, who put in one of the least inspiring drives of his career on his return to the sport, lamented that "Overtaking is basically impossible, other than if somebody makes a mistake".
A number of swift plans have been bandied around as being the latest solution to F1's latest problem, including widening the tyre performance gap and introducing a second, mandatory pit stop. Both of which sound a little bit dubious. The latter is essentially an admission that the refuelling ban was something of a mistake, and that rather than inhibiting on-track overtaking, the sprint-stop-sprint-stop-sprint setup of GPs from seasons past was actually helping to push drivers to the limit more often, while the former seems to be massively counterintuitive.
The main problem with Sunday's action was just how slow the drivers were going. Alonso dropped below the two minute laptime barrier towards the end, but most of the rest of the field was ensconsed in the 2:02 area, even at the end when their cars should have been getting close to qualifying-esque levels of fuel. To see F1 drivers en masse toddling around some 5-6 seconds off the predicted pace was embarrassing. Even Jenson Button admitted in the BBC's post-race show that he found this race easier than ever, because the drivers were deliberately staying away from the limit to conserve their tyres.
Introducing even less durable rubber, then, would seem to be designed to force drivers to go even slower, or simply make their switch to the harder compound even earlier. And besides, even if some shambolic tyres that grain after half a lap did produce masses of overtaking, it wouldn't be exciting. Formula One's rulemakers seem to have got confused recently between the differences in excitement of genuine, edge-of-the-seat racing and overtaking merely caused by performance degradation. If someone passes someone else because the other guy is having to save fuel, or his tyres are knackered, it is not particularly interesting. Even when Buemi was being passed left, right and centre, the BBC commentators struggled to raise an eyebrow, never mind their voices.
The random approach of throwing around new rules to "spice up the action" got us here in the first place, with the increasingly inexplicable refuelling ban, and idiotic ideas like drivers starting the race on their qualifying tyres. Simply throwing new and even more baffling wacky schemes at the problem is likely to be even more of a turn-off than just leaving things be.
Whatever happens, the FIA needs to wait a while before making any changes. Trying to judge the entertainment value of an F1 season based on Bahrain alone is as stupid as judging the entertainment value of Arrested Development based on that crap third season plotline involving Charlize Theron as an Englishwoman. For all we know, Australia will produce a bonkers, thrilling race and everyone will be happy again. Well, nobody will be happy, because we're F1 fans and we're never satisfied, but we'll at least be less moany.
So, lets give it a while before writing F1 2010 off. After all, we still have one of the most jaw-dropping lineups in F1 history, we still have plenty of more interesting circuits to come, and we still have the hilarious story of HRT to watch if all else fails.
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