And the ranting and the whining and the complaining from people like me. And you probably. (Assuming that by "you" I do not mean a Ferrari fan).

Another week, another country, another race. The same winner. There was actually some cause for hope during this race as we saw several passes during the first few laps and for a while it actually looked as though Montoya might be able to challenge Schumacher for the lead. But it turned out that in reality Ferrari had simply been told not to make everybody else look quite so bad and so periodically Michael would ease up a little in order to allow the others to get a bit closer.

I think this should be a perfectly acceptable solution for the remainder of the season and, indeed, for the rest of Schumacher's career. Instead of having a bunch of teams spend billions of dollars trying in vain to stay on the same lap as the Ferrari, let's just ask Michael nicely if he would mind slowing up a little bit on, say, every other lap. We can retain the illusion of competition but the designers, mechanics and assorted boffins can put in a regular 40-hour week and maybe even skip out early on Friday afternoons.

THE SHOUTING. IT'S ALL OVER BAR.

Nice job by Jenson Button and the BAR team. This was of course the most exciting part of the weekend, in fact the most exciting part of the last seven seasons, for us poor suffering Brits. With David Coulthard as our standard bearer since Damon Hill died and went to Arrows, pickings have been mighty slim. Now that Jenson has lost his podium cherry, it's only a matter of time until Button becomes the youngest ever six-time world champion. (Dutch fans of Jos the ex-Boss are invited to take me outside and slap me silly).

AND SPEAK OF THE DEVIL

I was shocked, yes, shocked and appalled to hear that Eddie Jordan had received death threats as a result of his decision not to offer Jos Verstappen a job. I have always maintained that Jos was the best driver since the one wood. If I owned a Formula One team I would have let Jos drive both cars. He's that good. I'd have let him drive the team transporter and I bet he could have won the World Championship driving it. If all the Formula One drivers of all time were laid end to end, Jos would be one of them.

Seriously though, as somebody with experience receiving death threats from Jos fans, I would just tell Eddie to ignore it. Keep doing what you're doing and don't let something like this affect you. Most importantly, show no fear. Nil illegitimum carborundum. Shake it off and don't let them know that they've gotten to you. Except of course that you should probably stop taking the same route to work each day. And have somebody else open your mail and taste your food. Above all, do not accept any unexpected tulip deliveries.

Oh yeah, one more thing. Give Jos a job.

AND SPEAK OF THE DEVIL 2

I really should get something more resembling a life. I was surfing the web the other day, as you do, and discovered that www.jos.org is available for a minimum bid of $500. This is only slightly less than the minimum requirement for the highly coveted www.cuddlebearcards.com!

THE JOS WATCH

So while I'm on the subject, the Jos Watch continues with a clear winner yet to emerge. Sato and Webber managed to spin off into the gravel this week but their performances left me cold. Massa didn't manage a gravel shower but he did take a nice off course excursion through the grass so, based on previous efforts and a much better nickname, the front runner remains Felipe the Jefe.

Now having said that, one of the main reasons for tweaking Jos was because of his rabid, irrational fans. Based on that, Michael Schumacher could be the next Jos Verstappen. Since my last column, and now that I think of it, since my first column, I've had to listen to Schumacher fans complaining because they require that I not only acknowledge Schumacher as the best but that I also enjoy his victories as much as a Schumacher fan no matter how many of them there are, how boring they are or how predictable they become. And yes, that last sentence was deliberately ambiguous - Schumacher fans are numerous, boring and predictable. (That should fill my inbox nicely!)

One final nominee from this weekend: Kimi Raikkonen, for a pointless punch up at a racetrack.

HOW BORING WAS THIS RACE?

Now I don't want to knock Speed TV too much because they still have a lot of brownie points saved up for running Formula One Decade. (By the way, in race 2 of the 1994 season - Aida, Japan - Jos Verstappen spun off into the gravel. I don't know why I thought you'd want to know that). But I've got to call them to task for trying to make this race sound exciting above and beyond the call of duty.

Approaching the end of the race, Barrichello was running third but had to make one more stop. Button had made his final stop but was nine seconds behind. Bob Varsha and crew pondered and deliberated, wondered and postulated, speculated and lactated, could Button catch and pass Rubens during his pit stop?

Are you kidding me? The gap was nine seconds. They could have instituted a front straight speed limit and Button still would have got past. Speed TV commentator Steve Matchett can time a pit stop and calculate from that one datum when the next pit stop will be, how long that next pit stop will last, and what the front jack-man had for dinner last night. But even he couldn't figure out whether Barrichello's pit stop would last more than 2 seconds.

C'mon guys. You're all fans and the contract is already signed. Call 'em like you see 'em. By the way, your graphic that claimed four lead changes... I guess I'm going to have to let you slide on that on a technicality but then this really was only a race in a technical sense of the word.

I SAY I SAY I SAY...

What's the most important thing when you're telling a joke?

I don't know. What is the most important thing when you're tell...

TIMING!!

Who the hell is MOY? Is it not MON because MON can't follow SAT on a Sun?

RAI I can spot pretty quickly although I have a nagging feeling that it's a European TV station. BUT is one of my favorites but I still have to wonder whether it's my guy, a preposition or just some ass. KEI is obviously a common mis-spelling of the familiar KLI and it's a good job that Jolt's name isn't really Bumgardner.

I know TAG-Heuer left F1 for the fame and glamour of the IRL but why did we suddenly lose the ability to spell beyond the first three letters of a word? If I wrote like that, you peo wou hav a hel of a tim und wha the hel I was tal abo eac wee. Actually, I just saved a whole helluva lot of electrons; I might take that up in future. And just a couple of other comments for the boffins at Siemens:

1. Size does matter - when it comes to fonts, I gotta tell you baby, the bigger the better.

2. Trap speed is not the answer to a whodunit mystery. You can reveal this information before the last lap without spoiling the story for anybody.

3. Could we do a lap count-up instead of countdown? Calculating the pit stops is tough enough without having to do subtraction instead of addition.