Who's Racing Who In F1?

When the Spanish Grand Prix at the Circuit de Catalunya finishes on Sunday 10th May we will be more than a quarter way through the 2009 season. That's the bad news.

On the other hand, the pot is still almost three-quarters full, and that's the good news.

And we have we F1 fans learnt so far this year?

The politics of the sport, the in-fighting, back-stabbing, and general dirty fighting for power has erupted on the grandest scale for more than 20 years, but that is not my concern today. Suffice it to say that I do not accept that the lunatics have taken over the asylum; they've been barricaded in the management office for decades.

Let's turn our innocent eyes to events on the track.

It seems possible to (very cautiously) say that overtaking has been more of a race feature this year. That is my subjective impression, I can offer no statistical backing for my contention.

There is one thing that keeps nagging at me when I watch a race. It's an old thought, really, but it is one that grows stronger, and shows every sign of becoming a certainty.

Who really won in Australia, Malaysia, and Bahrain? I know the record books will show those races as victories for Jenson Button, that's not my point. And who now would like to challenge Button for victories, and ultimately the championship? Obviously Sebastian Vettel would.

Or so we are meant to think, for the drivers are the human faces we can love or loathe, support or oppose.

My contention here is that there is no race between Button and Vettel, or between Hamiton and Massa, or between driver X and driver Y. Put Vettel or Hamilton or Massa or X or Y in the Brawn GP car and he would be leading the title race.

F1 is not a contest between drivers at all. It's a technical challenge faced by design teams, and thus we do not really see Vettel challenging Button, we see Adrian Newey's design team trying to catch up with Ross Brawn's.

If the issue is who can tweak the aerodynamics to shave a tenth of a second off a lap, have we reached the dead end of F1? Is the battle of wills and courage between men in barely under control cars a thing of the past?

Who's racing who, and why should I care who wins?