Over to you, Mr Brawn

WE WON’T, OF COURSE, START TO GET a true picture of where we stand in this latest incarnation of Formula 1 until Saturday, March 25, when qualifying gets under way in Melbourne – and even then, given the particularities of Albert Park, the shape of the season to come may not be definitive.

Although it is never wise to set great store by the first test session of a season – not least because we don’t know who was running how much fuel when – the opening week at Barcelona did seem to present certain fundamental truths, few of them unexpected. Unsightly bargeboards and the like are back in force, and with great swathes of increased downforce, the cars are indeed significantly quicker than those of the recent past, with Mercedes yet again at the top of the pile. This, Lewis Hamilton said, was the fastest car he had ever driven.

So far so good – but Lewis then added that fans should not expect much in the way of great racing this season: already it was proving noticeably more difficult to follow another car through a quick corner. As Dan Gurney has said: “It’s simple: more downforce means less racing – I mean, we’ve known that for more than 30 years, right?” How, then, did this escape the attention of those who came up with the latest rules?

Ross Brawn says he’d like to do away with DRS, suggesting that its introduction “artificially solved a problem that we didn’t want to tackle head-on – it doesn’t have the quality or merit of a full-on overtaking manoeuvre…” Ross is right – many of us have always thought DRS an abomination – but if we are to have any overtaking, this may not be the moment to get rid of it.