F1 finally shows signs of closer racing

TWO swallows don’t make a summer, and two races is hardly enough to judge a season, but the early trend indicates that we may have ourselves an interesting Formula One championship in the making.

In the past three years F1 fans have been robbed of an inter-team battle due to a basically untouchable Mercedes, but in Australia and China this year the Ferrari and Mercedes were evenly matched for pace, and so too Sebastian Vettel and Lewis Hamilton who have so far quickly established their superiority over their team-mates.

With Vettel in the better car (Red Bull) when he won his four championships, and with Hamilton in the superior machine to take his trio of titles (one with McLaren and two with Mercedes), the two dominant drivers of their generation have never gone head to head in equal machinery. Now, the two drivers who have between them won seven of the last nine world championships going mano a mano is a tantalising prospect.

It raises parallels with the legendary Senna vs Prost era in the eighties and nineties (two drivers who also won seven titles between them - Prost four and Senna three).

It is perhaps too early to judge yet whether the technical rule changes will foster more exciting racing.

We have witnessed that the air turbulence caused by the cars’ bigger wings has made it more difficult to overtake, but by the same token it encourages riskier overtaking moves such as we saw with Vettel’s daring passes on Kimi Raikkonen and Daniel Ricciardo in Shanghai on Sunday.

Throw in Red Bull’s Max Verstappen, who is proving himself to be a rare talent in lowgrip conditions, and you have an exciting young driver waiting in the wings to spearhead the next generation of champions.

With dwindling popularity that saw F1 lose one-third of its TV audience since 2008, the sport was in need of a makeover and so far the signs are positive. This weekend’s duel in the Bahrain desert, for round three, will reveal more.