One race into Max Mosley's brave new world and Formula One is making the headlines for all the right reasons after a thrilling season-opening Australian Grand Prix. But to what extent did the race benefit from the changes imposed? Was the show improved only because of the rain? Roger Horton reflects on the vital first race of the 2003 season

Whichever way you look at the 2003 Australian Grand Prix it was one hell of a motor race. Four different leaders, some wheel-to-wheel racing for the lead and the top four finishers separated by less than 10 seconds after a race in which four of the six best drivers in the world threw away their chances of victory by their failure to keep their cars on the black stuff.

In the end David Coulthard emerged as a deserving winner. He was cool, calm, and fast enough when it mattered. Who knows, maybe it really is going to be his year at last!

So was this race - the first to be run under FIA president Max Mosley's controversial new rules package - the total success that his supporters will suggest, or did the FIA get lucky with a damp track that shook up the order together with a bunch of drivers seemingly suffering from the effects of too much testosterone after a long off-season away from racing?

Perhaps the fairest answer is to say the jury is still out on this question. But there was nothing over the weekend that could be said to make a farce of Grand Prix racing. Apart from a few minor glitches the new qualifying system worked well and for the first time the TV audience got to watch every single driver on his fast lap. Surely it doesn't matter whether the driver is loaded down with five kilos of fuel or fifty, he is still driving the car as fast as he can and isn't that part of the spectacle the show is supposed to produce? Under the old system all the cameras had to focus on for at least half the session was an empty track, and when the action started the cameras did not capture everything anyway.

Of course the grid order no longer means what it did in the past in terms of awarding bragging rights for the fastest car/driver combination in terms of outright speed. But does that matter either? Isn't the weekend supposed to be about who wins the race? And isn't the driver and team who does the best job over all three days supposed to be rewarded on the top step of the podium and ultimately the Championship? In the recent past, qualifying has only become the highlight of the weekend because the races themselves have been so boring and predictable.

Some will argue that the one lap format unfairly penalises a driver to a lowly grid position after making just one minor driving error as happened to Kimi Raikkonen. But there was a time, during the 'blood and guts' era of motor racing, when just a small error could cost a driver his life and so drivers had to learn to drive up to the limit but not over it. Now, the class of 2003 will have to learn the same lessons and it was no surprise that just about every rookie driver had a torrid weekend and some of their senior rivals too.

Some have complained that the all the new rules were 'artificially' contrived to spice up the show but it's hard to see much substance in these claims. Long ago cars raced between cities on closed roads and carried riding mechanics to assist with on-the-spot repairs. Since then the rules have changed and evolved and you can be sure that with every change someone was claiming that the racing was being artificially 'dumbed down'. In the end all racing is artificially controlled by man-made rules, but surely what matters most is that the rules are the same for everyone and the best man wins, and in Melbourne it was hard to make a case that Coulthard and McLaren didn't deserve their victory.

Because the damp start to the race messed up many of the refuelling plans it is still hard to judge just who had been quick in qualifying and who was bluffing, but certainly the Big Three are still the big three and only the BAR team showed enough to suggest that they have, perhaps, made a major step forward. It may take another couple of races before the new and more reliable pecking order is established.

Despite all the changes, the new regulations had no influence on the tyre choices that faced the teams as they waited for the start on the grid. Michelin chose to advise all their teams to start on dry weather tyres, advice that was followed by everyone except McLaren, although Raikkonen changed tyres in the pitlane before the race and Coulthard after just two laps. By contrast, of the Bridgestone runners only the Jordan drivers Ralph Firman and Giancarlo Fisichella and the Minardi of Jos Verstappen started on dry tyres with the remainder on intermediate wets. One has to wonder, given this huge imbalance of tyre choices between the two tyre types, just how forceful Bridgestone had been with their advice and just how much a factor the previous almost legendary performance of the Bridgestone intermediates had been in influencing their teams' decision making processes.

So in the end, just what effect, if any, did the new regulations have on Ferrari? Well, they didn't win or even have a driver on the podium, and whereas last year there had been an air of calm assurance about the team, and Michael Schumacher won at a canter, this year just about everything they touched went pear shaped. Mistakes by both drivers (and two by Schumacher); a botched pit stop; the wrong tyre choice at the start; and they committed their best driver to a high-risk three stop run that looked like the tactics of an underdog rather than a team that has swept all before it for so long.

Whether it was just a "bad day", as Ferrari Technical Director Ross Brawn stated after the race, or whether the new rules had created an element of self doubt in what has been hitherto a super confident outfit is for the future to decide. Either way, Mosley's ultimate nightmare - a Ferrari clean sweep and the derision that would have heaped on his new rules - was thankfully avoided for this race at least, but perhaps it would be best to hold off the champagne party at the FIA headquarters for a few more races at least.

Ironically, it was Williams, the team with perhaps the worst reputation in recent years for their strategy, that got it all right in Melbourne. The right fuel tactics (two stops), the right tyre choice at the start, and clearly without the two safety car periods Juan Pablo Montoya would have cruised to an easy victory. As it was he threw away a race win with a silly spin at a time when the track was at its most benign after an earlier brilliant display of car control when the track was damp and slippery and his grooved tyres cold and struggling for grip. Despite his error Montoya was at least a factor in both qualifying and the race, which is more than can be said about his teammate Ralf Schumacher, who was almost totally anonymous for all three days.

So one race into Mosley's brave new world, and at last Formula One has made headlines for all the right reasons, after a sensational race that thrilled all who watched it. No doubt question marks remain, and nothing that happened in Melbourne reduces the longer-term challenges that the sport still faces, but the opening race of the season was a huge step in the right direction. Roll on Malaysia.