Nietzsche wrote that, "Against boredom the gods themselves fight in vain." What would the gods of Formula One think of the 2001 season so far? Without a close-fought Championship, with several races running a procession and with little surprises, if any, F1 is living the nightmare scenario for every motor racing fan. But there is hope looming this weekend, writes Roger Horton...

"Thank goodness for Enrique Bernoldi," said one journalist in Monaco as the war of words between the Arrows and McLaren teams buzzed around the paddock immediately after the race. "At least now we have a story to write about." It might not have been much of a story - the Brazilian in his Arrows holding off a frustrated David Coulthard in his McLaren for some 42 laps - but it was pretty much the only story in town at that particular moment, and as the 2001 season has dragged itself past the halfway point, most of the races have finished leaving many observers feeling flatter than yesterday's lemonade.

That Monaco Grand Prix pretty much summed up this current season. Both McLarens had mechanical problems - Coulthard at the start, which relegated him to the back of the grid, and Mika Hakkinen, out after fifteen laps with a suspension problem. The two Ferraris of Michael Schumacher and Rubens Barrichello were left to tour serenely round and finish in team order formation. Great if you are a die-hard Tifosi, but something of a letdown if you had actually been looking forward to a race.

During the last Grand Prix at Magny-Cours I visited with a friend who has spent his entire working life involved in motor racing in one category or another. Yet, despite living just ten minutes from the circuit, he had no interest in watching a modern day Formula One race. "Just a high-speed procession," was his dismissive comment upon my enquiry as to whether he would be attending the race.

Procession. Noun. A number of people, vehicles, etc. going along in an orderly line - being the Oxford Dictionary's definition of the word. I will leave it to others to decide whether my friend was correct or not.

There are those who argue that this has been the case for many years. That in reality the whole attraction of modern F1 racing is that we have sixteen or seventeen 'events' that are held together only by the thread that they contribute towards the drivers' World Championship. It doesn't matter that these 'events' by themselves are often tedious affairs. Their main purpose is to play their part in the wider scheme of things, balancing the points out so we can have our traditional end-of-season title-deciding-shoot-out.

Michael Schumacher has now won six out of the ten races he has started this season, and he now has a lead of 31 points over David Coulthard in the points' standings. With the right combination of results, he could wrap up the drivers' WC title in just two races' time, at the German Grand Prix in late July. You have to go back to 1992, when Nigel Mansell clinched his title at the Hungarian GP, for the last time we have witnessed such a one-sided contest.

Yet the result this year actually flatters Ferrari somewhat. This is not 1992 revisited, when Mansell enjoyed a huge car advantage in his William-Renault, and it's not that Schumacher hasn't fully won his races on merit, or that he has been especially lucky. But it just seems that, race by race, his main rivals have just been finding new ways to lose. At the Nurburgring Ralf Schumacher got his famous stop and go penalty for crossing the white line exciting the pits, and in France Coulthard released his speed limiter a fraction too early and received the same penalty.

In both races you can make strong a case that without these mistakes Michael would have been pushed to the limit and the spectators would have at least witnessed a contest right through to the end of the race. But, as always in Formula One, the rules are enforced with an iron discipline, that pay little attention to the need to put on a 'show' for the paying punters.

Even three-time World Champion Niki Lauda has expressed surprise that the F1 show continues to grow year on year. "I always wonder why people watch F1, to be honest," Lauda said in a recent interview. "Some of the races I've seen are so boring, but still the TV numbers are on the up. But maybe it's the cars, the planes, the yachts, Monaco, the money - you know 50 million dollars for Schumacher. It's the whole package. And that takes over the racing."

Lauda may well be correct, and his comments reinforce the 'event' theory. The pageantry and build up before the start of a race, the sense of anticipation at the prospect of a gladiatorial contest have somehow survived lots of dull races. In France, the sense of anticipation was especially strong - with Ralf Schumacher starting from his first ever pole position, the prospect of a full-blown confrontation with his elder brother was clearly on the cards.

Yet here again 2001 style racing was to deny us the expected confrontation. This season we have a tyre war, and the Michelin teams especially are struggling to come to terms with just how to get the best out of their tyres. For the Michelins, unlike their Bridgestone counterparts, need to be well used or scrubbed before being fitted for the race. But it isn't just a question of running a certain number of laps; it's the way the tyres are run that can make the difference. Ten laps of running in practice on low fuel is not the same as ten laps of running with high fuel during the warm-up, especially if the track temperatures are different by more than 5 degrees.

So whatever particular racing God decides which set of tyres works well in whatever particular circumstances, decreed that Ralf's second set of Michelins were not going to offer anything like the same level of grip as his first. This resulted in a sudden loss of pace and led to his elder brother's Ferrari disappearing into the distance.

Followers of racing are pretty used to cars slowing down when they suffer a mechanical problem, and they are sophisticated enough to understand when a driver tries to go too far on a given set of tyres and goes 'off' or lose grip. But it appears no one, not even the tyre engineers themselves, can now actually explain just why different sets of the same compound tyres can offer such radically different performance levels.

But the end result was another anticlimactic race that was totally predictable from well before halfway and lots of disgruntled fans - how could they have gone home happy? The anoraks out there may well be interested in such fine details, but what of the more casual fan watching the race at home on TV whilst catching up with the Sunday papers?

As one might expect, the clear thinking Lauda also had some ideas about how to fix F1's problems. "First of all we have to go back to the old aerodynamics; second, we must stop changing the circuits by adding chicanes; and third, the rules must be stable so 'bad' teams have options too. We must keep the same rules for five years and then even Minardi would catch up."

The first two points are well made, but these arguments have been done to death, and the governing body, the FIA, shows no signs of listening to suggestions, let alone understanding the need for change.

The third point, which will have the effect of levelling the playing field, even if only slightly, would be a step in the right direction. Formula One is the only major racing series that makes absolutely no attempt to level the performance level of its contestants one iota, and when you have only two, or at the most three outfits capable of running at the front, the sort of tyre situation that occurred in France or the mechanical problems that afflicted the McLarens at Monaco will always ruin races.

For the purist, this is heresy. Formula One is supposed to be about unrestricted competition where only the fittest survive. It is supposed to be almost impossible to win. Raise concerns about this in the paddock today and there are those who will remind you that F1 racing survived the Nigel Mansell and Alain Prost era of domination during their stints with Williams and came back stronger than ever during the Schumacher/Ferrari struggle to win their elusive crowns. Just wait, they say; new stars will come in to replace the old, and the TV ratings will continue their remorseless climb ever upwards.

Listening to these opinions in the Magny-Cours paddock, I was reminded of the 'informed' judgements spouted by so many Wall Street stock analysts just over a year ago predicting that their seemingly endless Bull run would continue forever. Nothing lasts forever, and sometimes the market can teach nasty lessons to those who ignore its rules.

This weekend, the Grand Prix circus heads off to Silverstone: the home of British motor racing. David Coulthard, winner of the last two races there, needs to win with Schumacher nowhere if the Championship battle, such as it is, is to survive much into August and beyond.

Coulthard has actually been driving better than ever this year, and only the appalling reliability record of his McLaren having let him down. For those looking for trends, it was at about this stage last year in his Championship campaign, that Michael Schumacher suffered a three-race points' drought that allowed Hakkinen to close the gap enough to make it a contest going into the last few events of the season.

For everyone's sake, here's wishing the Scot a little bit of luck in the next few races. No, actually, here's wishing him a reliable car for the next few races. The record also shows that some rain on race day can also work wonders in producing some on-track action, and the current forecast for the Silverstone area is for unsettled weather throughout the coming weekend...