Revving up for a real rammy

STAR names and new rules are all designed to raise the excitement levels for the new F1 season, reckons Richard Bath

SO, FORMULA One is boring is it? If that proves to be the case this year, it won't be through a lack of effort from the expanded corpus of teams, judicious tinkering from Bernie Ecclestone and Co and a hefty helping hand from the Gods of chance. When the season kicks off in Bahrain at midday today, it should prove to be the most gloriously unpredictable championship in living memory.

For a start, there's the fact that there are four world champions on the grid in an uncanny echo of the halcyon days when Senna, Prost, Mansell and Piquet were in their pomp. More specifically, there's the fact that two of them, Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton, will be slugging it out in the same team. If they produce even a fraction of the on- and off-circuit pyrotechnics that Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost generated the last time a British team had two world champions in it, when the over-heating Brazilian and cool Frenchman scrapped like two ferrets in a sack, this will be a season to remember.

So far the two men seem to have been getting along fine, but it won't last, it never does when two drivers used to being top of the tree have the same car and one loses out. When Fernando Alonso was at McLaren with the rookie Lewis Hamilton and lost out, he blamed the team's Britishness; Jenson Button will have no such fallback position, and all the signs are that he will be beaten by Hamilton. Button is quick, but Hamilton is quicker, as their records suggest: Button has won seven times in 170 starts, with all the wins coming in a blistering start last year when Brawn had a technological jump on the pack; Hamilton has won 11 times in 52 starts and bested a world champion in his rookie year. Yesterday was surely a taste of things to come, with Hamilton almost half a second quicker than his team-mate and compatriot.

If the battle at McLaren has a better-than-evens chance of turning ugly, that pretty much sums up the relationship between 41-year-old seven-times champion Michael Schumacher and the rest of the grid. He makes his comeback in the team of Ross Brawn, the mechanical genius who helped the German to all his titles and whose team last year won the drivers' and constructors' titles in their first year of existence. With 91 wins from 248 starts, his record is undoubtedly the greatest in the sport's history.

While Hamilton said that Schumacher is "a legend in the sport … all us drivers are extremely privileged to be on the same track as him – just him being there will attract so much attention" and the younger drivers who never raced him are raring to have a bite at the big German, not everyone is pleased at his re-emergence. Commentators such as Eddie Jordan have been horrified at his decision to stage a comeback, but then the German has a keen eye for sporting history and knows that Juan Manuel Fangio and Nino Farina both enjoyed title-winning Indian summers at an even more advanced age than his 41 years. The chances are that Schuey won't dominate the grid in the way he once did, but only an idiot would bet against him winning at least one race this season if his neck can take the strain.

As if that's not enough, there are plenty of noises off to drown out the confrontations that are being billed as the main event. Irascible former world champion Fernando Alonso has teamed up with Ferrari and is lauding the new F10 car to the heavens, and has been installed as the bookies' favourite to win the title. He was certainly pretty competitive in qualifying yesterday, finishing third on the grid. Over at an increasingly competitive Red Bull team, Sebastian Vettel, who many good judges believe is the most talented driver on the grid, will surely have a say in the championship. He certainly looked it yesterday when grabbing pole ahead of Ferrari's Felipe Massa.

So, too, might Williams' Nico Hulkenberg, a young German prodigy who has a junior formula record that eclipses even that of Hamilton. Williams, the last privateer on the grid, have become increasingly competitive since they were ditched by BMW, and in Frank Williams and veteran aerodynamics genius Patrick Head they have men who know what it takes to win. Not that the Hulk is the only sideshow that will be watched avidly: Nico Rosberg and Bruno Senna carry some pretty heavy baggage and will be keenly watched, as will the returning Lotus team with which Scotland's world champion Jim Clark won 25 grands prix.

With Mercedes, McLaren, Red Bull and Ferrari scrapping it out for the silverware while Williams, Renault, Sauber, Toro Rosso and Force India contest division two and hope to scrape on to the podium from time to time, Lotus have an experienced boss in Mike Gascoyne and two experienced drivers in Jarno Trulli and Heikki Kovalainen and are likely to be top of the new boys' third division, where they will scrap it out with the Hispania and Virgin teams.

Then there are a whole raft of technical changes which will push all of the drivers towards the ragged edge. The ban on refuelling means that race strategy will now consist largely of overtaking rather than pointy-headed calculations about the best time to pit (although drivers will still come into the pits, it'll only be to change tyres, with teams already saying the stops are down to well under two seconds).

New qualifying rules, removing the slowest eight cars after each qualifying session and forcing drivers to go flat-out from the get-go, will add to the spectacle. So, too, will changes to the tyre regulations which mean that every driver will have to use soft and not-so-soft compounds during every race. Just to underline how contentious a lot of this apparently minor detail will be, there's already been a proper F1 rammy over McLaren's controversial dorsal fin rear wing, which was designed to reduce drag and increase straight-line speed, but which Renault's Bob Bell described as "a complete joke – McLaren have driven a cart horse through the spirit of the rules" despite the FIA approving the innovation.

If some of the technical detail is beyond even the most dedicated petrolheads, the ramifications of the new points system, brought in partly to take account of the expansion of the grid from ten teams to 13, will be comprehensible to even the most luddite of spectators. The ditching of the system which sees the top eight finishers get 10, 8, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1 points in favour of a system which gives the top ten drivers 25, 20, 15, 10, 8 6, 5, 3 and 1 points will encourage risk-taking and reward overtakers.

So there you have it: the most competitive and talented collection of drivers in living memory, the return of the king, a clutch of new teams desperate to establish themselves, and a raft of regulations that will actually encourage risk-taking and overtaking. Finally, Formula One might just be about to live up to the hype.