Then Trulli spun, which brought out the pace car. His team originally insisted that he had spun on some fluid on the track, although just where this fluid had come from they were unable to say. From a distance it certainly looked like something broke on his car. When racing resumed on lap twelve, Montoya jumped Schumacher (who had been distracted by Coulthard sliding off the track before even crossing the starting line) and so Montoya now led, and these were his lap times with a clear track:

Lap 12 - 1:31.869
Lap 13 - 1:32.186
Lap 14 - 1:33.215
Lap 15 - 1:32.951
Lap 16 - 1:33.769

Montoya's pace on cold tyres is almost legendary, and it was impressive that he was able to beat Coulthard's best time on his first flying lap, but thereafter he was forced to defend his position from Schumacher, a battle that he lost on lap sixteen. From then on Schumacher led, and here are his times for the few laps he drove at anything like full pace:

Lap 17 - 1:31.205
Lap 18 - 1:30.120
Lap 19 - 1:30.391
Lap 20 - 1:29.691

So on almost the same fuel loads, and on tyres that had done almost the identical amount of work, the Ferrari was some two seconds per lap faster than the Williams, and by the end of lap 20 Montoya was 7.970 seconds in arrears. Clearly McLaren, Williams, and Michelin have a lot of work to do, although Ron Dennis for one was insisting later that his cars would be on the pace in Malaysia and Brazil. We shall see.

In the end this was a mixed day for Montoya. The six points he got for second position were the best he could have hoped for given the performance deficit he faced. On the other hand, he was lucky to even start the race, an electrical problem having surfaced with his car just four and a half minutes before the start. His mechanics did a great job to recover the situation.

"Get it on the ground and start the engine," were the curt instructions coming from the pits as the seconds ticked away. Afterwards, a smiling Sam Michael, chief operations engineer, and the man who calls the shots at Williams during the races, could laugh about it. "I had Spa (last year) coming up in my mind immediately," he said, explaining why Juan Pablo had been forced to vacate his cockpit with the parade lap so close.

With so many cars being taken out so early in the race, and with qualifying also being such a disjointed affair, with rain limiting most cars to just one run, it is impossible to fully analyse just where all midfield teams stand in their relevant performances against each other.

What did stand out was that Renault have made a lot of progress, Jaguar looked frankly awful, and the Arrows team could well embarrass them on a regular basis. BAR were once again struggling in most departments and they didn't look to be as quick as the Jordans, or at least the one being driven by Giancarlo Fisichella.

Toyota looked as if they were old hands at this F1 business, and Minardi got lucky, but there is no rule against that. If anyone says that modern F1 is all about men in grey suits and slim briefcases, then they should have been in the Minardi garage as Mark Webber crossed the line to take fifth place on his Grand Prix debut, while Alex Yoong made it home in seventh.

There were grown men with tears in their eyes and others who couldn't bear to watch those final laps at all, but afterwards there was the sheer unrestrained joy that only racing people who have worked untold hours for so little reward can understand. It was a magnificent achievement by an outfit whose owner seems increasingly at odds with some of the F1 establishment over the future direction of the sport and the way the 'club' is sometimes administered.

When the news broke on Friday that a consortium that involved Arrows boss Tom Walkinshaw had bought the assets of the defunct Prost team, Minardi owner Paul Stoddart made some rather impassioned comments at the official FIA press conference. This led to an increasing bitter war of words between the two team owners, who, of course, are neighbours in the pitlane. When both Arrows cars were stranded on the grid at the start of the race, there wasn't, it is safe to say, much sympathy for them from the Anglo-Italian team. "Poetic justice" one team member was heard to mutter, and it was hard not to agree with him from Minardi's point of view.

For Arrows this race was a disaster. By rights, the points garnered by Minardi should have been theirs, if only they had got their cars off the line. Then Heinz-Harald Frentzen was black-flagged for driving out of the pitlane through a red light, and Enrique Bernoldi received the same penalty for rejoining the race in the T-car after the race had started. A point could be made that some at Arrows might be better off spending their time reading the FIA book of rules rather than doing complicated deals at the other side of the world on race weekends.

So should the race have been stopped after the first corner accident that affected at least half the field in one way or another, and did Rubens Barrichello cause it? As always when something like this occurs you can walk down the pitlane and get totally different answers depending on just how the incident had affected the person you are talking to.

But first to Rubens and his part in the accident. The rules state that a driver can move once to defend his position. Barrichello changed his line at least three times, and he was braking as he made his last move to the left to block Ralf Schumacher's advances. These seem to be pretty clear-cut, but like many things that affect Ferrari, the stewards decided to take no action, calling it a racing accident.

What's the point of having a rule that says you can't weave to defend your position and then take no action when a driver does it and causes an avoidable accident?

"He was blocking me for position, which was not the problem when he did it the first time, but he did it several times and in his last move he moved across and braked, and that was the problem," said a rather aggrieved Ralf Schumacher afterwards. "One, he is not allowed to do it, but common sense should also tell you that you shouldn't move across in front of another car and brake."

He was backed up by Patrick Head and others at Williams, and predictably McLaren boss Ron Dennis also called for the stewards to investigate the incident, believing that all was not correct with Barrichello's driving, although no one was very surprised when nothing happened.

Apart from Jordan's Gary Anderson, who complained that the worldwide TV audience missed out on watching half the field compete, there was general agreement that FIA's Charlie Whiting was correct in not stopping the race, having been made very clear to all the drivers prior to the start that unless the track was blocked, or a driver hurt, only the Safety Car would be deployed. As neither was the case, Whiting was correct to keep the race going. This is F1 and the rules that affect the running of the race are not supposed to be made up as they go along, but consistency is the key.

There were some muttering about why this race had been continued behind the Safety Car whilst the German Grand Prix at Hockenheim last year was stopped after a very similar first corner collision, and some suggested that it was only the different number on the Ferrari that was out of the race that made the difference then!