San Marino looks to be in pole position as Europe faces cut in grands prix

What if they held a race, and nobody came? A facetious thought, as old as the sport itself, but one that occurred more than once over the weekend of the San Marino Grand Prix.

Time was that any Formula One event in Italy attracted spectators in their droves, all chauvinistically desperate to see the Ferraris dishing out a beating to everything else. But there has been a worrying trend in recent years for fewer and fewer people to visit the Autodromo Enzo e Dino Ferrari. When Ferrari was still the underdog – even when it had won the constructors' world championship but not the drivers' in its latest wave of domination – the tifoso flocked to worship. In 2000, the year in which Michael Schumacher finally succeeded in his quest, 180,000 spectators visited Imola over the Grand Prix weekend. In 2001, when Ferrari was the recognised performance yardstick, the figure dropped to 120,000. Last year it was 105,000. Last weekend only 82,000 saw him win yet again.

Part of that lay in the timing. The Easter Festival is an important event in the secular calendar in Italy, but motor racing is also a religion there. And at a time when the European Commission is hell-bent on bringing all tobacco advertising in sport to a halt by 31 July 2005, rather than the original date of 1 October 2006, which would mark the end rather than the middle of a season, and world motor sport's governing, the FIA, is looking at grands prix further afield in places such as Bahrain and China, and possibly Turkey, there must be casualties in Europe to accommodate the newcomers at a time when 17 grands prix a season is deemed the maximum that is feasible. Imola may just have moved itself on to pole position on that list.

Italy has the luxury of two grands prix a year, of course (as has Germany), and the generally depressed state of the economy and the €380 (£263) price of a grandstand seat played key roles as well in the poor turn-out. But, having survived the deaths of Roland Ratzenberger and Ayrton Senna in that fated 1994 weekend when so much went so wrong for the sport, Imola now faces an uncertain future.

The drivers like the anti-clockwise track that winds up and down by the Santerno River in Bologna's Via Emilia region, but the fact remains that since it was modified for 1995 there are too many chicanes. The late designer Harvey Postlethwaite said once that he had designed a new car specifically to be at its best in second and third-gear corners, such as those that proliferated at Imola, and he was not joking.

That is one of the reasons that there were so few genuine overtaking moves in Sunday's race. The stop-start nature of the track militates against the flow and rhythm that drivers in well-matched cars need to establish in order to build up to a pass. The Tamburello curve, where Senna died, had to be modified, for common sense dictated change. "If one was to be faced with the choice of making changes or keeping the wall, one could never again choose the wall," says the FIA's medical delegate and safety crusader, Professor Sid Watkins. But the second chicane at the Villeneuve corner where Ratzenberger perished broke up the flow of the high-speed run down to the Tosa hairpin and changed the character of Imola forever. Only now, perhaps, has the true impact of that change made itself felt.

Schumacher's victory signalled Ferrari's return to complete health and the real start of the 2003 world championship battle with McLaren-Mercedes and Williams-BMW, four races into the season. But it may also have signalled the passing of an era.

CHAMPIONSHIP STANDINGS

DRIVERS
1 K Raikkonen (Fin) 32pts
2 D Coulthard (GB) 19
3 M Schumacher (Ger) 18
4 F Alonso (Sp) 17
5 R Barrichello (Br) 14
6 R Schumacher (Ger) 13
7= G Fisichella (It) 10
7= J P Montoya (Col) 10
9 J Trulli (It) 9
10 H-H Frentzen (Ger) 7
11= J Villeneuve (Can) 3
11= J Button (GB) 3
13 N Heidfeld (Ger) 1

CONSTRUCTORS
1 McLaren-Mercedes 51pts
2 Ferrari 32
3 Renault 26
4 Williams-BMW 23
5 Jordan-Ford 10
6 Sauber-Petronas 8
7 BAR-Honda 6