Australian Grand Prix, 3.30am, March 16, ITV1, bet here 

The new Formula One season starts this weekend, with the ancient gentlemen of the committee still fretting away about how to make their sport more interesting. Years of “safety first”, technical dickering and comic inequality between teams have made F1 less of an enthralling contest and more of an easter parade. Until suddenly last season, that is, when suddenly something interesting happened. So why, given last year’s drama, have the people in charge allowed the friction generated by the enmity between tax-dodging Lewis Hamilton and big baby Fernando Alonso to vanish? Alonso shouldn’t have been allowed to switch teams and hide at Renault, he should have been handcuffed to Hamilton breakfast, dinner and tea, until their rivalry developed into something even more frenzied than last year. It’s amazing that the assembled boffinry of F1 is capable of building a car that can fly to the moon, yet still hasn’t got the faintest idea of how to engineer the human drama that makes racing compelling. More downward thrust and tax avoidance strategy is not going to do it for the youngsters.

The statistics

* Good news for Kimi Raikkonen - no driver has won the Championship for the first time and then not retained it the following season for over a decade.

* It may be bad news again for Lewis Hamilton - no driver has ever won the Driver’s Championship in their second full season of Formula 1.

* The winner of the first Grand Prix of the season (Australia) has won the Driver’s Championship on the past two occasions.

For more betting information on the Driver’s Championship, visit chickendinner