Change on testing rules will compromise great formula

Cliches are as much at home in Formula One as they are anywhere else, and the hackneyed adage "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" applies perfectly to the sport.

As Michael Schumacher and Ferrari made history here on Sunday - the German as the first six-times world champion, the team as the first to win five constructors' championships in a row - you have to conclude that with Ferrari winning only half the races, and eight drivers sharing out the victories, there isn't too much wrong with the sport. If you doubt that, just look back to the crisis it faced after Ferrari's domination in 2002.

The reliability of the top teams has been superb. Schumacher has gone 38 grands prix without a mechanical retirement, in a car whose engine, for example, produces 900 bhp while revving to 19,000 rpm, or 316 times every second. And four teams fought one another tooth and nail for the spoils of victory (Ferrari, Williams-BMW, McLaren-Mercedes and Renault), with an interloper (Jordan) snatching one race.

After abysmal performances in 2002, Williams and McLaren raised their game brilliantly and took the fight to Ferrari, and there was even some chicanery over tyre widths to spice things up as the championship moved into its final phase.

Lower down the grid, the other teams also did well. If you take into account the resources of individual enterprises, nobody really disgraced themselves. The overall standard of engineering is remarkable, and everybody did the best they could on the budget they had. It was a great season that thoroughly vindicated the changes introduced for 2003.

There are, however, moves afoot to make further changes. Some fall into the category of sensible cosmetic fine-tuning, but the reversion of Friday to a day purely for testing, and with no official qualifying session, is media suicide.

You need a reason for Friday to be important, and making the afternoon practice session into an official qualifying session to determine the running order for Saturday's grid-deciding session, was an inspired idea. At a stroke, the day had genuine news value. Now there will be none, just as there has not been since the two official grid-counting qualifying sessions were abandoned in the mid-1990s.

Friday morning's two-hour private testing worked well at races too, with the teams that signed up to it agreeing to limit their testing elsewhere during the season.

Now, in return for that private testing being dropped, those outside the top four are being given the chance to run a third driver during the day, but with the suggestion that this must not be a driver who has raced in Formula One in the past two seasons, just in case they gain any real advantage.

There are, thankfully, plans to limit teams to one engine per weekend, and to give the paying punter something to watch.

Last year Max Mosley, the president of motor sport's international governing body, the FIA, outflanked the team principals by implementing his own rules after suggesting that they had been slow in coming up with ideas. Now there is a plethora of them. But the end result will probably be the same.

Tomorrow, the latest suggestions will be put before the Formula One Commission in Paris. There is every chance that some of them will be batted back to the teams for a rethink. It is to be hoped that this will be the more fanciful ones that could make things worse rather than better.