I love the Monaco Grand Prix. Yes, it can be a bit of a procession at times, like this year in fact, but there is still something about it which captures the imagination and makes it a must-see event, whether just on TV or by actually being there. This year it was the TV for me unfortunately, but Monaco still looked glorious bathed in Mediterranean sunshine. It’s two years since I last went and I’m getting withdrawal symptoms. For atmosphere, there is nothing like it.

Chas's favourite GP venue - wonder why?

I expect Jenson Button’s pretty fond of the place as well. He absolutely dominated the race, just as he has in four of the other five Grands Prix held so far this year, but Monaco was just a bit special. It doesn’t matter how good your car is here, you’ve still got to be absolutely fully concentrated and committed to put in fast lap times and yet keep it out of the barriers. Witness Lewis Hamilton’s costly error in qualifying. But for that one mistake, he could have been on the podium at the end.

Happy Jenson!

Instead, it was another Brawn one-two and if Rubens Barrichello is still wondering why it’s his team-mate who’s doing all the winning, he only has to look at how Button preserved his super-soft set of tyres during the opening phase of the race, while the Brazilian rooted his and had Kimi Raikkonen’s Ferrari all over the back of him as a result.

Can Rubens nurse tyres? Well this was just his hire car!

And one of the things that Monaco showed was that Ferrari and McLaren are slowly catching up with Brawn and Red Bull, the early season pace-setters. It also showed that Toyota and Williams, who both showed early season promise, have not been able to capitalise on that and have lost their initial advantage. Toyota was on the front row in Bahrain. In Monaco it was at the back. As for the BMW-Saubers, they seem to have just completely lost direction.

BMW will be digging out their old car at this rate...

And talking of direction, we still don’t know which way Formula One will be headed next season. Despite a series of high-level talks between the teams and the FIA, the sport’s governing body, as I write this there is still no sign of an agreement. The FIA, or should I say Max Mosley, wants to introduce a budget cap to drive costs down. Whilst agreeing that costs do need to be reduced, the teams are united in their condemnation of the way in which it is being forced upon them and the governance of the sport in general. So how, and why, has all this come about? Formula One used to be populated by private teams, mostly using the same Cosworth V8 engine, the exception being Ferrari, which was also a motor manufacturer and ran glorious-sounding V12s.

The good old days will be the new good days?

Gradually, other manufacturers started taking an interest in the sport until we got to point we are at today where it is dominated by them. The only private teams are Brawn, Williams, Red Bull, Torro Rosso and Force India, with McLaren somewhere in the middle – a private team but part-owned by Mercedes.

And it was the manufacturers who drove up the cost of F1 to the point where it is now almost unsustainable. There has long been the fear though that any, or all of them, could pull out of the sport at short notice, leaving a massive gap, because F1 is not their core business, it is merely a way of promoting their road cars.
With this in mind, it seems that Max Mosley has decided to drive the manufacturers out of the sport and replace them with privateer teams by forcing through cost-capping regulations which he knows the manufacturers will find unacceptable.

F1's new budget

What Mosley wants instead is for privately-run teams to move up from categories like GP2 or Formula Three into F1, while at the same time have completely new teams, such as the recently-announced USF1, arrive on the scene. This might make sense from the point of view of returning the sport to its roots, but there are lots of doubts as to whether all of the hopefuls can really raise the funding required in these difficult financial times.

Anyone need an aerodynamicist?

It is also rather unsavoury to see the big manufacturer teams who have done much to raise the public profile of the sport be forced out in this way. If they withdraw, or even continue but with dramatically reduced budgets, there are going to be an awful lot of people out of a job as a result.
Whereas a sound compromise solution could probably be found if just one person left their current job…