Fernando, who had been right behind Hamilton prior to the safety car period but ended up finishing 9th after dutifully waiting behind said safety car when it left the pits, found the whole business a trifle unfair.  The stewards of the meeting had, he said, manipulated the result.

Today at Hockenheim, the Spaniard’s team mate Felipe Massa dominated the German Grand Prix.  He snatched the lead at the start, maintained it through the pit stops and looked set for a first win since his comeback from the terrible head injuries sustained a year ago in Hungary.  He didn’t make any serious mistakes, and Alonso mounted only one, unsuccessful, bid to race him for the lead.  Despite that, it was Alonso who won the race.

His team, you see, had manipulated the result.

Article 39.1 of the F1 rulebook states, “Team orders which interfere with a race result are prohibited.”  Article 39.1 was a reaction to the 2002 Austrian Grand Prix, in which Ferrari ordered Rubens Barrichello to let Michael Schumacher through to win in spite of Michael being the runaway championship leader and Rubens having been faster all weekend.  To emphasise that the win was being taken away from him, Rubens slowed very deliberately within yards of the finish line.  It was obvious, it was embarrassing, it brought the sport into disrepute.

Changing the rules brought an end to that kind of blatant fiddling, but nobody is under any illusions that team orders are a thing of the past.  The trick is to encode the message – give the driver a keyword or simply let him know that the car behind is his team mate, and that his team mate is faster.  It’s not all that hard to make it appear that your driver was simply feeling generous and sporting, with the team’s best interests at heart.  Nobody believes it for a second, because top sportsmen are driven by desire to win and would sooner remove body parts than give up a result, but nobody can disprove it either.  Not unless you’re as subtle as a sledgehammer.

It was on lap 47 that the call came over the radio.  ”OK – Fernando…is faster…than you. Can you confirm that you understood that message?”  The emphasis was already present in the voice of Rob Smedley, Massa’s race engineer.  Exiting the hairpin on lap 48, Massa dawdled, cruising at part-throttle until Alonso was safely by.  ”Well done mate, good lad.  Just…just stick with him now.  Sorry…”

Massa, his spirit suitably crushed, didn’t bother to stay with him but did finish P2.  The podium ceremony was a suitably frosty affair in which none of the major players looked all that happy, the Ferrari drivers went into the press conference to receive a kicking so thorough that 3rd place finisher Sebastian Vettel playfully asked to be excused on the basis that nobody wanted to ask him anything, and their team was fined $100,000 with the possibility of further punishment to come.

Assuming that everyone gets to the end of the year in a regular sort of fashion, Felipe Massa isn’t likely to win this year’s world championship.  He has 85 points to leader Hamilton’s 157.  Alonso, in a Ferrari that now looks like a very good car to have, sits on 123 points.  Had Ferrari left Massa out in front, he’d have had 92 points and Alonso 116.  In other words, Alonso would have been slightly further out of contention, but with Massa not all that much further in contention.  Alonso, while not always well rewarded in terms of results, hasn’t made all that many mistakes this season, whereas it’s only this weekend that Massa has started to look anything like his old self.  If they’re expecting that pattern of performance to continue (in other words, if Hockenheim was a one-off, if they were always expecting Felipe to go well there), it makes sense that Ferrari would want Alonso out in front.

In saying that, it makes just as much sense that the viewing public would want him to get there fair and square or not at all.  Parallels have been drawn between this and other recent examples of Ferrari drivers swapping positions – Massa letting Raikkonen by in Brazil 3 years ago, Kimi returning the favour in China the following year – but in those instances the impact upon the title fight was obvious.  Raikkonen became champion in Brazil, and Massa’s win in China set up his heartbreak on home soil, when Hamilton pipped him to the post by a single point.  Both were at the very end of a season, and neither were met with any kind of condemnation.  Strictly speaking, both of them were exactly as illegal as today’s effort.

What’s the difference?  For one, the impact of today’s switcharound isn’t immediately apparent.  If Alonso becomes champion by less than 7 points, it will be, but a glance at the current standings shows the Spaniard in 5th place – it’s not easy to explain to the casual observer why asking Massa to slow down was necessary.  A knock-on effect of that is that it leads you to ask the obvious question – if Fernando was much faster than Felipe, why had he been unable to overtake him? He’d tried once, into the hairpin on lap 20, and after being forcefully rebuked he hadn’t been able to get close enough for another shot.

For another, today marks exactly 12 months since a spring detached itself from Rubens Barrichello’s Brawn in Budapest, clattered Massa in the face and came within an ace of killing him:

There’s a human aspect to this story, the kind of human aspect that the relatively safe theatres of modern motor racing very rarely offer up. Seeing Massa recover was an incredible relief, seeing him back in a racing car was heartwarming, and seeing him lead a race on merit for the first time in a long time could only ever raise a smile. What better way to mark the first anniversary of that horrific accident than a win for the likeable Felipe?

That goes not just for Massa, not just for his fans, but for Ferrari. What a lovely little PR exercise that could have been. The PR exercise they launched instead began as damage limitation and ended as a disaster. Continued insistence that they hadn’t given a team order was necessary – you don’t admit guilt in these circumstances – but the team displayed an inability to grasp why the fans felt aggrieved about Alonso being handed victory that harked back to the bad old days of the previous regime, and suggested that no lessons at all have been learned. There followed a suggestion that Massa had shifted up several gears at once exiting the hairpin that was an insult to the intelligence of the watching millions. Compounding the issue was that Ferrari had left themselves no choice but to enlist the help of Massa and Smedley as part of their damage limitation exercise. The two men are good friends, both knew they’d had a Grand Prix win snatched away from them and neither man has enough acting talent to hide their true feelings.

The cumulative effect is that instead of celebrating a fairytale success, Ferrari head to Hungary next week with the jeers of the media and the fans ringing in their ears. How odd that this episode should again have Alonso as a major player – between his 2007 season at McLaren, the Renault Liegate saga and this year at Ferrari, it’s impossible to view the constant controversy surrounding Fernando as a set of unfortunate coincidences. Circulating behind Massa earlier in the race but unable to pass, Alonso could be seen throwing his hands in the air, and a “This is ridiculous!” was picked up on his car-to-pit radio. How much of a role did Fernando’s persistent petulance play?

You’re a race fan.  That is to say, you’re a fan of racing.  You’re not a fan of races where the result is decided by men in garages wearing headphones. Are you more upset that the rules were broken, that they were broken with a complete disregard for your powers of thought, or because from a human perspective, and like Barrichello before him, Massa is a very nice man?

The popular opinion appears to be that Michael Schumacher’s return to Formula 1 racing was a mistake.  In the wake of his 11th place finish in Canada last weekend, there were forceful suggestions from fans and media figures alike that Schumi was a desperate character, shorn of his past speed, completely without answers to the pace of his younger rivals.  Martin Brundle described Sunday’s race as the worst one he’d ever seen Michael Schumacher drive.  Some of the criticism seemed a bit like bandwagon jumping, some of it was written by men very capable of forming their own opinions.  What I’m about to do is take that Indianapolis Motor Speedway blog, the opinion of a man who has forgotten more than I’m ever likely to know about motor racing, and then completely disagree with it.

Cards on the table before we start, then.  This simple blogger really wants the Schumacher comeback to work.  It feels a little strange to be rooting for him, because it got incredibly dull watching him win what seemed like every weekend in the early part of the last decade.  Brilliance is that much easier to appreciate when it overcomes a worthy opponent, and with a fantastic car in a team geared around him, Michael managed to go whole years at a time without having to take on such a challenge.  No matter how good the package is, though, you still have to drive it, and Michael did that better than anyone else in the modern era.  The idea of him returning to put everyone back in their place, the grand old man of motorsport showing he still has it 3 1/2 years after his last race for Ferrari, is one I can wholly support.

That, as anyone with the gift of sight must accept, isn’t happening.  Whether he hasn’t yet quite got to grips with a 2010-spec car on this season’s narrower tyres or whether he simply doesn’t have the searing pace of old, Schumacher is not blowing everyone away.  He’s spent a fair chunk of the season in broadly the same part of the field as teammate Nico Rosberg, a jolt to all those used to seeing Schumacher, then a 30 second gap, then Rubens Barrichello (it should of course be noted that old Rubinho, whatever you may think of him and however you might perceive his time at Ferrari, was close enough to Michael often enough to earn respect, and sometimes plain faster).

What is happening, though, is that Michael’s getting progressively closer to being the kind of driver demanded by the huge weight of expectation.  Having been at best ordinary and at worst dismal through the early-season flyaway races, Spain provided the first glimpse of vintage Schumacher.  His overtaking move on Jenson Button, sweeping around the outside of the first chicane as the Brit left the pits and giving the reigning champion precisely one car width and no more with which to do something about it, was a reminder that the aggression and competitive spirit remained undimmed.  His defence of the position against a McLaren with a huge advantage in a straightline was a lesson in robust rearguard driving that didn’t once overstep the limits of fairness, and the BBC’s mid-race revelation that Michael was purposely changing his line through corners to cause maximum disruption to the handling of the man behind was startling.  The mental capacity for which he became famous, then, must still be there.

Monaco.  Leave aside your thoughts on the time penalty he was given, consider the move he made on Fernando Alonso, ask yourself whether it was the move of a man losing his touch, a man with no answers for the drivers around him.  If you answer yes, consider doing something else on a Sunday afternoon.

Turkey.  A weekend in which Michael had something in hand over Nico from the first lap on Friday morning, drove clean around the outside of Button again on the opening lap and settled in to an uneventful P4 in a car that had nothing for the McLaren and Red Bull battle ahead.  Best of the rest might not be where you’re used to seeing the 7-time world champion, but there was no realistic prospect of him finishing any higher.

I know.  You’re wondering how there’s any way to defend his performance in Montreal.  You’ve taken in all the business about being too aggressive with Kubica, being passed by Sebastien Buemi and a fleet of Force Indias, that swerve on his old mate Felipe Massa towards the end of the race, and you can’t see how it’s possible to excuse the inexcusable.

Let’s immediately get rid of this idea that the Canadian Grand Prix was the worst race he’s ever driven.  Dodgins cites the 2003 Japanese event, in which Michael drove into everything that moved on his way to a nervy 8th place and a narrow world championship win.  You might wish to select the 2005 Chinese race, which involved an accident on a reconnaissance lap 30 minutes before the race started and a faintly ridiculous spin into retirement while trundling around behind the safety car.  You could look to the Hungaroring, where Michael was classified 8th but didn’t make the finish in 2006 after a series of wheel-banging sessions damaged a track rod.

You could, but you’d be as silly to pick that race as you would be to select last weekend’s one.

There are parallels.  In Montreal, as in Budapest nearly 4 years back, Schumacher had been on the pace in practice – it suits the ‘give it up now, Michael’ argument to ignore that his pace on Friday in Canada was strong, up with the very quickest cars on a longer run during practice.  Both times his grid position was lower than it should have been, in Hungary due to a time penalty for a rule infringement and in Canada due to a bad tyre choice in Q2, the Mercedes not able to generate sufficient heat in its rubber.  Both times Schumacher made big strides in the opening part of the race, up to 5th in Hungary and as high as 3rd during the opening pit stop sequence last weekend, 7 seconds off the lead and maintaining the same pace as the Red Bulls.

In 2006, Michael and Giancarlo Fisichella made slight contact, the Ferrari front wing being knocked askew and necessitating a pit stop that sent the German down the order.  Last weekend there was no contact, but close quarters racing with Robert Kubica that saw the Mercedes puncture a tyre.  Schumacher had Kubica touching the grass on the inside of the track towards turn 3, exactly the kind of aggressive move to maintain position we’ve seen in the past – ask Alonso about the shove into the scenery he took on the opening lap at Silverstone in 2003.  Kubica arrived at turn 3 going too quickly to make the turn, and while you could argue that Schumi should have conceded position and passed Robert again as the Renault recovered back to the racetrack, it’s not entirely fair to ignore Kubica’s later admission that he wasn’t in position to complete the pass and would have ceded the place had he not wanted to demonstrate how little he’d been intimidated.

Kubica isn’t averse to the odd dangerous manoeuvre himself, unless you consider violently swerving into the path of a rival at 200 mph in a late, misguided bid to enter the pit lane a safe activity, but I digress.

Puncture repaired, the Merc was now out of sync on tyre strategy, vital in a race that saw teams struggling to get any kind of life out of the softer tyre.  Some drivers couldn’t get 5 quick laps from them.  In a call that Ross Brawn later admitted was optimistic, Mercedes tasked Schumacher with making them go for half a race.  Since he couldn’t, they didn’t.

Lacking grip under braking and visibly down on traction under acceleration, Michael was a sitting duck.  Buemi made a very well judged move to claim 8th position, while Massa’s attempted pass was a badly thought-out affair – there wasn’t time to pass on the outside before the final chicane and still turn into the corner, and ample space on the inside for a move that would surely have worked – though there can be no doubt that Michael wombled across the road prior to contact being made.  Liuzzi and Sutil snatched the final points positions away on the final lap, after a scrap that occasionally bore greater resemblance to tag team wrestling than to motor racing – Liuzzi and Schumacher made contact through the chicane of turns 6 and 7, matters being resolved in the Italian’s favour when the Mercedes’ rubber cried enough again through the following 8-9 chicane.  Sutil’s pass, taking advantage of Michael’s reduced speed as he rejoined the racetrack, was an altogether cleaner affair, but none of Schumi’s aggressors had any doubt that there’d been a race.

A race, though, brought about by the degradation of those soft tyres, which were surely never going to make it, and it’s a fool who overlooks that.  Those with longer memories may recall a race a few years back in which, recovering from an unscheduled pit stop, Schumacher found himself on worn tyres (intermediates on a drying track this time), with a queue of cars behind him and no grip to fight them off with.  Michael held his ground forcefully, perhaps a little too forcefully at times.  More than once, he visited previously uncharted stretches of land, usually located some distance away from the prescribed racetrack, in a bid to hold position.  More than once, he refused to concede position even when it seemed prudent to do so, hitting both Pedro de la Rosa and Nick Heidfeld.  If you were paying attention a few paragraphs ago, you’ll not need to be told that the race was in Hungary, or that it took place in 2006.

Michael, who came within an ace of making it 8 world titles in what everyone thought was his farewell season, was no spent force then.  Incredibly resistant to being overtaken, yes, and driven to stretch the rules to their limits and beyond if it helped him to stave off a challenge from behind, but far from over the hill.  Wondering what’s changed since then?  As far as I can see, it’s this:

Nothing at all.

Didn’t it?

After qualifying at the Manama International Circuit, the scene of 2010’s opening Grand Prix, the picture looked a little different.  Red Bull had an advantage thanks to Sebastian Vettel, a man who’ll be King one day, being chased hard by Felipe Massa and Fernando Alonso, a pair of Ferraris looming ominously in the young German’s mirrors.  Everyone else was nowhere, but nobody really seemed to mind.  They give out the trophies on Sunday afternoon, not Saturday.

The new teams were an entirely different kind of nowhere, but since this was their first race weekend, that was to be expected.  The Virgin’s hydraulic system went on strike every 10 minutes but the car seemed reasonable whenever it wasn’t breaking down, Lotus were similarly paced but more reliable, and Hispania – sorry, HRT – were tugging around 10 seconds a lap off the pace with a car that hadn’t turned a wheel before this weekend.  One of their cars, that driven by Karun Chandhok, didn’t move at all until halfway through qualifying, the Indian starting the race with exactly 3 laps of track time under his belt.

That was all interesting enough for those who care about that kind of thing, but the majority were looking forward to a titanic scrap at the front, and the majority were to be disappointed.  What you’re about to read is what happens when someone tells me they’re expecting a rip-roaring blog entry and I realise I’ve got absolutely nothing of note to say.

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Lap 1: F1 2010 is go go go!  Where’s Murray when you need him?  All fairly orderly at the front, Massa being outfumbled by Alonso around the outside of turn one while Schumacher puts an identical move on Webber to take 6th.  Webber’s car is paying out a lot of smoke, the unsighted Kubica and Sutil making contact in the fog.  Bad news for Renault and Force India, but both teams have another driver going strongly – Petrov up from 17th to 11th on his debut while Liuzzi runs 9th.

Lap 2: Vettel leads by a couple of seconds from Alonso, Massa’s another couple of seconds behind.  Rosberg’s jumped Hamilton after an early error from the Brit, with Schumacher, Webber and Button in close attendance.

Lap 3: Chandhok’s in the fence.  Front wing torn off the HRT, Karun having lost control on a bump.  First retirement of the season.  Another debutant off the road, Hulkenberg getting the Williams a new and exciting shade of sideways, over-correcting the slide and booming into the scenery.  He’s back in the running, though.  At the same place, in the same moment, a Virgin retires with what looks a lot like a hydraulic problem, Di Grassi’s debut lasting barely any longer than Chandhok’s.

Lap 5: The recovering Sutil passes my old mate Cakey Hovaloaven.  Follow the link for an explanation and a terrible joke about Bunsen burners.  You don’t get this on autosport.com, do you?  Cakey’s in a Lotus, though, so not even in the same race as Sutil.

Lap 6: Don’t take that too literally.  It is the same race, he’s not got lost, but the Lotus is a sitting duck for all the established teams.  Running solidly so far, though.

Lap 7: A train of cars forming behind Kobayashi in the Sauber.  De la Rosa is in there.  Alguersuari and Buemi too.  Could be some action there shortly.

Lap 8: Chandhok’s giving an interview.  Says he didn’t know the bump was there.  No, really.  Nothing much going on at the front.

Lap 9: Kobayashi, de la Rosa, Alguersuari, Buemi.  No action at all there.

Lap 10: Due some pit stops soon.  Liuzzi’s on the harder tyres, about 20 seconds off the lead, and he’ll be staying out a while longer so the leaders need to be sure they can stay ahead of him when they pit.  Action there, maybe.

Lap 11: Pedro de la Rosa slices past his teammate Kobayashi into turn one.  I could kiss him, I really could.  Koba’s losing 4 or 5 seconds a lap to the leaders on some laps, and they’re still sat queueing up behind him.

Lap 13: Senna pits the sole remaining HRT.  No great rush to change the tyres, and Bruno can’t find a gear as he leaves his pit.  A polite observer would call that pit stop ’steady’.

Laps 14-18: Pit stops for the front runners.  Still Vettel, Alonso, Massa at the front, still evenly spaced.  Hamilton takes 4th from Rosberg, the German being delayed by traffic in the pit lane.  Kobayashi’s in to retire with a hydraulic problem, and Petrov’s debut is over too.  Some sort of suspension problem.  Virgin and Lotus are having a fine old scrap for 17th place, resolved in favour of Lotus when Glock slows suddenly.  Twenty quid says the hydraulics have packed up.

Lap 19: What we’re left with, then, is Vettel leading Alonso and Massa.  Hamilton’s 4th, nowhere near those ahead but with a decent gap back to Rosberg.  Schumacher’s keeping a watching brief just behind, Button’s a few seconds off the back of that, and Webber’s clearly faster than Button but equally clearly can’t overtake him.

Lap 20: Senna’s out, a wispy trail of smoke and a bloody awful noise signalling his retirement.  Look at his eyes through his crash helmet and he looks eerily like his uncle.

Lap 21: Speaking of his uncle, here’s something I wrote nearly a year ago.  Be forewarned that I can be incredibly pretentious sometimes.  Oh, and those videos – yes, that really is Jonathan Ross narrating the first one, and no, I’ve no idea why people overlay Robbie Williams songs over the top of racing videos.

Lap 22: By the way, you know I mentioned how Liuzzi might interfere with a few races?  None of that actually happened.

Lap 25: The circuit is longer this year than last year.  They’ve added a horrible new twisty section in the middle of the lap, designed to encourage overtaking.  If you like, go back over what I’ve written so far and see how many overtaking moves you can spot.  While you’re at it, I’m going for a cup of tea.

Lap 30: I was back three laps ago.  It’s milky yet reasonably strong, thanks.  No, no sugar.  Pedro de la Rosa’s about to exit, and it looks a lot like the same issue that sidelined Kobayashi earlier.  Every team wants their race to go off like a military operation, and if the Charge of the Light Brigade is the closest they can manage, who am I to criticise?

Lap 31: Is that reference going to travel very well?  Just in case…

Lap 34: Vettel’s slowing down, and his engine sounds sick.  Alonso drives around him into the lead, Massa takes 2nd place down the start/finish straight.  The Red Bull is still moving, and going well through the corners, but it’s custard down the straights and Hamilton’s only a few seconds back.

Lap 37: Vettel’s on the radio to his engineer.  “Rocky, is there anything you can do to fix it?”  I welled up a bit there.  He sounds heartbroken, and he’s easy meat for Lewis Hamilton, who takes his McLaren into 3rd position.

Lap 40: Drama!  A vibration at the front of Hamilton’s car!

Lap 41: Hamilton sets his quickest lap time of the race so far.  As you were, boys and girls.  Nothing to see here.

Lap 42: I should probably also mention that yes, it is Mother’s Day in the UK, but that none of this is costing me Brownie points because she’s sat on the other side of the room watching the race with me.  She’s currently a bit disappointed because Alonso’s walking away with it now, and she doesn’t like Alonso.  She is, however, happy that Lewis Hamilton is doing fairly well, and also feels really sorry for Vettel, whose pace has suddenly started to improve again.

She’s fab, my Mam.  Hope you’ve all been good to your Mam, Mum or Mom today, and that none of you have postponed that meal you were taking her for in favour of watching this tripe.  The morals of it all are fascinating, and it’s time you’re never going to get back.  Frankly, you deserve this, you selfish get.

Lap 44: Red Bull have got Liuzzi’s name spelt wrong on their pit board.  Liuzzi used to drive for Red Bull, you know.  Presumably he was a popular lad there.  Yes, it really has come to this.

Lap 45: Trulli’s laptimes have fallen off a cliff in the other Lotus.  He’s 30 seconds per lap off the pace now, carrying some kind of (*dum-dum-dummmmmm!*) hydraulic issue.  Cakey’s now up to 16th, best of the new team runners on account of being the only other one left.  He’s only 3 seconds a lap off the leading pace now, though, and going brilliantly.

Lap 48: The gap had come down to less than a second but now, all of a sudden, Vettel’s pulling away from Rosberg, duff engine and all.  There’ll be a perfectly good explanation for that, and you should let me know as soon as you find it.  Elsewhere on the circuit, Buemi rolls to a calm, measured stop.  There’s no smoke, no fire, nothing’s fallen off the car, and the whole scene contains absolutely nothing of note.

Lap 49: Alonso wins first time out for Ferrari, with Massa following him home in his comeback race and showing no ill effects at all from that horrific accident in Hungary last year.  Hamilton’s 3rd, some distance ahead of his new teammate Button in 7th.  Vettel hangs on to 4th somehow or other, trailed by a pair of Mercedes, Rosberg a couple of seconds ahead of Schumacher.  Webber’s 8th, Liuzzi and Barrichello round out the points scorers, and it’s finally over.

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If the powers that be manage to gather up 24 of the best racing drivers in the world, some of them genuine superstars destined to leave a permanent mark and one of them a man whose place in history has long since been guaranteed, and that’s the best race they can manage to serve up, we’re in trouble.

Sorry to all those who wanted some kind of informative report on this afternoon’s race.  I did sit down to write one, but in the end it was either give the race this kind of treatment or not do it at all.  In future, unless things change very dramatically very soon, ‘not do it at all’ is going to win out.

The F1 launch season began in earnest earlier this week with the unveiling of the new Ferrari F10, the car scheduled to carry Felipe Massa and Fernando Alonso through the coming year.  Hopes have been high for the F10 since the Maranello team’s designers, led by Aldo Costa and Nikolas Tombazis, abandoned work on last year’s F60 in order to concentrate their efforts on the 2010 machine.

The designers might have been hard at work, but one wonders whether the Original Thought department have been on an extended break.  It’s difficult to look at the F10 and escape the conclusion that Ferrari’s efforts were concentrated on borrowing design concepts from everyone else.  The most obvious visual differences from last year’s F60 are a new nose design heavily influenced by the Red Bull RB5, and sculpted sidepods oddly reminiscent of those seen on the BMW F1.09, a car which did nothing to mark itself out as ripe for plagiarising.

Also noticeable is the increased length of the car and resultant longer wheelbase, brought about by the need to accommodate a larger fuel tank than the one carried in 2009.

Rumours from Italy, reported in Britain by The Times but so far unsubstantiated, have it that there is some concern about the F10’s projected performance figures, and that a B-spec car is being hurriedly designed and put together to improve matters.  Any alarm would be caused by wind tunnel performance and simulation data, since the car has yet to run for the first time – cold, icy conditions at their Fiorano test base have prevented the team from giving the car a shakedown.

How much of a worry that is for fans of the Italian team isn’t clear; every single team will start the Bahrain Grand Prix with a car substantially modified from the one appearing at their launch.  Cars evolve, whatever their purpose, and a racing car evolving before the start of a season isn’t a story.  A fundamental redesign, though, would be an altogether different thing.  One to watch, perhaps.

Meanwhile, in Newbury, a place that rivals northern Italy for cold, ice and absolutely nothing else, Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton unveiled the new McLaren MP4-25 earlier today.  Compared to last year’s MP4-24, a beautiful machine that was also desperately slow for much of its life, the most obvious visual differences from the front are a Red Bulling of the front end, albeit a much more conservative effort than Ferrari’s design, and a reshaping of the sidepod air intakes.

Compare the 2009 car with the new model side-on, however, and things are markedly different.

For a side-by-side comparison of MP4-24 and MP4-25 that doesn’t require you to flick between two links, direct your browser here.

The fin on the engine cover, the only blemish on an otherwise very attractive face, is designed to improve airflow to the rear wing and also accommodates a cooling duct made necessary by a repackaging of the car’s internal cooling systems.  The chassis and bodywork have been lowered, and the rear of the car has been modified to make better use of the double diffuser (banned for 2011, but very much a part of the 2010 regulations) that had to be hurriedly shoehorned into the back of most of last year’s grid.  As Nigel Mansell once famously said, “If it goes as fast as it looks, everyone else had better watch out.”

1995, of course, didn’t end all that well for Nigel.

With the knowledge gained during 2009’s rapid recovery fresh in their minds, it’s easy to assume that the MP4-25 will be as fast on the timesheets as it looks on camera.  Next week, we’ll take the first steps towards finding out how safe that assumption is.

The final grid will not be announced until tomorrow, since penalties must be assessed in the order that the original offences were committed.  What is it about watching the video and looking at the GPS data to see who went past the scene first that can possibly take until tomorrow?

I’ll start you off.  Buemi goes first, because it was his accident.  Barrichello, Button and Sutil went through in that order, as a quick look at the footage from the end of Q2 confirms.  Find where Alonso went through, and you’re golden.