The knee-jerk reaction of putting in ballast and trying to handicap to improve the show I don't think is right. It goes against what Formula One stands for, which is a set of regulations, with which people with the cleverest minds and the best budgets do the best job."Schumacher has won a record 10 of the 16 races so far this season to romp to a fifth drivers' crown while Rubens Barrichello has triumphed four times. But Ferrari sparked outrage by ordering Barrichello to move over for Schumacher in Austria. Schumacher then turned the climax to the last race, in the United States, in to a farce when he slowed to try to engineer a blanket finish, only to lose the race to the Brazilian."Michael screwed up," said Irvine "But he should not be playing with F1. They [Ferrari] are not doing a very good job at the minute for anyone."Irvine said the governing body should revolutionise the way the millions of pounds from television is shared by giving more to the smaller outfits."At the end of the day why give Ferrari maybe 15 times as much money as you give Minardi and then give them a load of lead to stick in the car to make it go slow? It is probably a better idea to give the smaller teams an equal share of the money. It won't allow them to beat Ferrari but it will pull them up a bit."The weight thing is having a rising scale going against success which I think is a bit wrong. But if you had all the money and split it differently it would make a lot of difference to the Minardis, Saubers and Jordans of this world and make damn all difference to the teams up there.".

There has never been much accounting for sporting taste. Mick "Jumpin' Jack Flash" Jagger loves a mellow afternoon at Lord's There has never been much accounting for sporting taste. The late, mystical George Harrison admitted to a "tremendous buzz" along the pit lane of a Formula One track.But would George have lapsed, like most of us, into near coma at the prospect of watching another processional win by Michael Schumacher and his all-conquering Ferrari team?The question has never had a sharper edge as the motor racing chiefs Bernie Ecclestone, who has owned and manipulated the sport for so long, and Max Mosley, head of the ruling FIA, wrestle desperately with ideas that might just halt a catastrophic slump in television ratings.Some of the more absurd proposals reflect the sense of crisis. The booby prize goes to the suggestion that Schumacher should swap his Ferrari for one of the chasing pack at each grand prix, right down to the hapless Minardi. Here we are hitting the practicality level of giving Frankie Dettori a leg-up on a donkey for the 3.15 at Torquay or Blackpool.What those outside motor racing may not understand is the obsessive need for power and victory of some of the team leaders. Formula One is not so much a test of Schumacher and Juan Pablo Montoya as a commercial platform for the makers of Ferrari and Mercedes and BMW cars and tyre manufacturers such as Michelin and Bridgestone.

All the rulers of the "sport" can do is try to limit the means by which one team can dominate another, but the idea of imposing a handicapping system of weights, as in horse racing, is surely to create a falsity of competition that would make nonsense of the strivings of the engineers and the aerodynamists.Motor racing at the grand prix level will always be an industry and an "experience" rather than a sport. The once hugely successful Sir Frank Williams, who currently can do no more than peer disconsolately at the disappearing rear end of Schumacher's Ferrari, said a few years ago that choosing his star driver was like "pinning the tail on the donkey". Any assessment of a driver's ability had to be conditioned by the question: "How fast is his car?"The more the money, the better the engineers, the further Formula One moves away from the duels of great men such as Fangio and Moss, Clark and Hill.One thing is certain. Frankie Dettori will never ride a donkey, not professionally anyway – and nor will Michael Schumacher ever slip into the cockpit of a Minardi. Formula One has been shaped by the forces of greed and power that dominate the real world It is simply too late for it to try to make a new one.. HISTORY COULD confirm Sunday's Japanese Grand Prix, the final round of the 2002 World Championship, as a landmark in Formula One.