The qualifying sessions are becoming more entertaining than the races, judging by the French GP and today’s session at Hockenheim. The Ferraris were quick, just as we expected, but Alonso failed to provide a serious challenge to them. That was left to Kimi Raikkonen, who threw in a very quick lap to take pole position on his first set of new tires. It mattered not that later he went farming in the McLaren when trying to better his time – he had done enough already.

The Hondas bounced back from their run of bad form, Button taking fourth spot and Barrichello sixth. And the Toyotas were disappointing, only Ralf managing to make it to Q3 and then slotting in at eighth.

It’s all a bit confusing as regards tires. If the Bridgestones had retained their advantage, we would expect the Toyotas to have done better. The Ferraris look very strong, however, and Michael must be favorite for the race in spite of Raikkonen’s amazing lap. Kimi often makes the McLaren look better than it is, so it is easy to assume that his time was the product of genius alone, something that will be almost impossible for him to maintain throughout the race distance tomorrow.

Or will it? The speed of the Hondas suggests that Michelin are at least on a par with Bridgestone in Germany. And we should not forget that the removal of the mass dampers from the Ferraris and Renaults may have adversely affected their performance, especially in Alonso’s Renault. It is hard to think of anything else that could have caused the sudden loss of form from Renault.

So maybe we are seeing the reality of life without mass dampers and the McLarens are as good as they looked today. Pedro de la Rosa finished in ninth spot, which is not a bad effort after his earlier coming together with Ralf’s Toyota.

All of which is bad news for Alonso and good for Michael Schumacher. Even if Kimi proves equal to the task of winning the GP tomorrow, Michael should finish no lower than second while Fernando will have to work hard to bag a decent number of points. The Ferrari team have said that they need help from the other teams if Michael is to catch Alonso in the championship – a McLaren resurgence would be just what they need. If Renault weren’t sweating already, they should start now!

One final word for the guy who grabbed tenth position: David Coulthard. Once again he proved that experience counts and confirms himself as the best buy outside the trio of star drivers. If he can produce such good results in a Red Bull, how would he fare in a Renault or Ferrari?

With the two Ferraris taking the front row of the grid at Magny-Cours, it looks as though Bridgestone’s sudden leap in performance at Indy was not purely the result of Michelin’s going conservative for that race. The Toyotas’ fourth and sixth grid slots confirm this.

If Bridgestone really do have an edge now, Alonso will have to make sure that he finishes every race for the rest of the season. He did a good job today, hounding the Ferrari of Michael Schumacher and swapping places with it in his efforts to secure pole, but it wasn’t enough even to contain Felipé Massa. We should have a good race on Sunday.

The final qualifying session also vindicated the FIA’s decision to reduce the time allowed from 20 minutes to 15. From the moment Alonso shot ahead of Michael at the start, things remained hectic and exciting.

Away from the battle for pole, other interesting things were happening too. Pedro de la Rosa kept a cool head and qualified his McLaren eighth, only two slots behind his team leader, Raikkonen. And David Coulthard showed that there is life in the old soldiers yet, making it into the final ten in the Red Bull.

The big disappointment was the lack of performance from the BMW Saubers; after being fastest in the morning session, Villeneuve was out after Q1 and Heidfeld followed soon after. Jacques explained that they had gambled by using the soft tires and it hadn’t worked out – he and Heidfeld now face a long race from poor grid positions and on rapidly-degenerating tires.

Some are suggesting that the other cars will soon sprout vertical wings like the BMW’s but, on this showing, there isn’t much (if any) advantage to be gained from them. I suppose there may be some truth in the claim that they make the BMW a little more stable under braking – which says to me that BMW thought they had a problem in that area. Not everyone else does.

Finally, Scott Speed managed to haul the Toro Rosso into Q2, beating his highly-rated teammate, Vitantonio Liuzzi, in the process. Understandably however, that was as far as he could go and he ended up in 15th place on the grid.

While watching the free practice sessions for the US GP yesterday, I heard the commentators broach the subject of Friday practice. They went on to mention that Bernie Ecclestone would like to do away with these first two sessions altogether.

This is quite understandable when we consider the undramatic nature of these sessions. Teams send out their test drivers to verify their settings and see if there are any problems, some of the race drivers might take a lap or two to put a time on the board, but no-one is really trying to break any records; lap times from these sessions are meaningless. Since the engines must last two races, nobody wants to put too many miles on them at this stage. And this makes things pretty boring for the viewers.

But hold on a minute – hasn’t anyone noticed that practice was not always like this? There was a time when practice was as fraught and nail-biting as the race.

In the seventies, when I first started watching the BBC’s televising of Grand Prix, I thought they were missing a huge opportunity by not showing the practice sessions. A large part of the viewers’ enjoyment of the sport comes from knowing the background and understanding what is going on – only then can the true drama of F1 be revealed, the constant adjustments to lower lap times, political machinations behind the scenes, the eternal competition between brilliant engineers as well as top drivers. Without this the races must seem high speed processions of very similar cars in a circle. And it’s practice that gives the viewer a chance to see more of the hidden battle for speed.

Years later, when at last television began to broadcast practice sessions, I was confirmed in my view. Now we could see the teams beavering away to find those last few tenths of a second to move perhaps one more place up the grid, now we saw the frantic haste of the last pit stops for adjustment as the time ran out. And, on the track, we were treated to drivers going to the absolute limit of their ability in their attempts to improve their grid spot. In those days, times from both Friday and Saturday counted towards the grid.

Then the FIA stepped in and began a series of rule changes that effectively destroyed the show. They limited the number of tires that could be used at a race, thereby ensuring that teams had to run fewer laps in order to conserve their tire allotment. Then they insisted upon engines not being changed, at first for one race and then two; suddenly everyone was reluctant to use their engines any more than they had to. And they did away with Friday qualifying, in the process reducing it to a bedding-in session without much meaning for the spectators.

The result is what we have today: two sessions where the teams are not really competing against each other, tracks that stay empty for much of the session, and only brief glimpses of the star drivers in the last few minutes. How fair is it that, having reduced Friday to such a meaningless parade, Bernie should now turn around and suggest getting rid of it?

I understand that the FIA is concerned about costs and it is right that they should be. But not every cost-cutting measure of the past has had the desired effect, especially when we allow that the retention of a viewing audience is just as important in that this is where the money comes from. Surely it is time that the FIA examined their rule changes and admitted that some mistakes have been made. Is it really that impossible to find ways of reducing costs without destroying the entertainment value of F1?

Now that it seems F1 will be going to a standard tire and homologated engines (also a contentious issue but it will happen because the FIA say so), there seems no justification for limiting Friday practice in the way that it has been. The extra costs involved in returning to Friday qualifying would be tiny in comparison to a team’s outlay for each race. And once again we would be treated to two days of intense struggle for the top spots on the grid.

So don’t do away with Fridays, Bernie – just give them back to us!

At Silverstone, Max Mosley talked about the possibility of changing the rules yet again by reducing the final qualifying session from 20 minutes to 15. This is what he had to say: “It would be 15 minutes of non-stop action. But whether the teams want to do that, I don’t know.”

To my mind, this illustrates the condescending attitude of the FIA towards the fans. The assumption is that all we are interested in is “non-stop action”, like teenagers with attention deficit disorder. Well, I have news for Mr Mosley: F1 fans have to be amongst the most knowledgeable of all sports fans. The sport is extremely complicated, even without the constant rule changes introduced by the FIA, and yet every F1 fan understands and appreciates it. They wouldn’t be fans otherwise.

It is about time that the FIA ate some humble pie by rescinding some of the most ridiculous rule changes ever made by a governing body. So the one-lap qualifying rule was a complete flop? If he’d listened to anyone who knew the sport, Max would have understood that we don’t want a lottery – we want to see drivers getting the utmost from their cars in a battle for grid positions. And we don’t think it’s fair that one blown engine can ruin a driver’s chances for the GP. Let them battle it out over two days of qualifying as they used to, swap engines when necessary and recover from momentary mistakes.

Yes, it’s true that, in those bad old days, we had to sit and watch an empty track for three quarters of an hour before the cars came out to give it everything. But here’s the thing, Max – we didn’t mind. We understood what was happening and were prepared to wait for those incredible final minutes when the best drivers in the world showed us just how fast they really were.

You can say to me that the last three minutes of qualifying at Silverstone were as tense and involving as one could hope for. Three minutes? You mean all those rule changes boil down to this – three minutes of real competition? It sounds very familiar.

And let us not forget that there were two very capable drivers who were excluded from those minutes by bad luck in the first session. Does it not occur to anyone that Button’s and Trulli’s fans might be a bit disgruntled that their drivers were given no chance of a realistic grid spot through a silly rule that reduces F1 to a lottery?

Many of the rule changes of recent years have been made to make F1 more of a “spectacle” for the benefit of TV audiences. Time and again, the FIA introduces changes in an attempt to make things more competitive and exciting. Yet the net result is confusion to the casual viewer and irritation to the real fans. We really don’t need this constant meddling that merely makes things worse.

This is what Ferrari’s Ross Brawn had to say on the matter: “Too many changes confuse the public and are bad for F1.” How true. Let’s have one more rule change to put things back the way they were and then never touch them again. And let the FIA get back to its real business of designing an engine and chassis formula that makes sense and attracts the greatest number of competitors.

F1 is the pinnacle of motor sport; it was gripping before anyone had ever heard of Mr Mosely and it will remain so only if we allow the drivers a decent chance to prove themselves. And that means qualifying sessions that give everyone a fair crack of the whip.