This St. Valentine's Day I expect to see bunches of flowers, with shy messages attached, arrive in Woking and Maranello. from Maranello and Woking. It is amazing what exposure to economic reality can do.

Before we get too carried away with St. Fota, bringer of peace and harmony, we should remember that the FIA is behind this year's rules. For one thing, we will not see winglets sprouting on sidepods. One of the essential points of Max's thesis is that a lot of money has been spent on developments which are completely obscure to the viewer. Formula One, whether we like it or not, is dependent on TV viewing figures. It is the excuse for sponsors to put their names on cars.

Max is right on this point, things like winglets make no sense to the TV viewer and even less sense to the diminishing number of fans at a race, who do not receive the close-ups. We couch potatoes may have grasped that the winglets directed air to the underside of the rear wing, but you had to be an aerodynamacist to appreciate the subtleties.

For every winglet which was used, there were umpteen others which were not. Teams of designers were at the problem, all being paid well and using computers the like of which are not sold on the high street. Most of the ideas were discarded, but some made it to a wind tunnel model. These then had to be fabricated to very fine tolerances by highly skilled craftsmen.

Then came the wind tunnel testing and some teams have been running two of them, 24/7. That means there will be four shifts per tunnel and that means engineers and model makers. A team will talk about employing so many people to run a wind tunnel, but there are also squads of designers generating things to put on the car.

Eventually, one winglet of all those designed, and of all those tested, made it on to a car, until the next winglet came along.

We marvelled at the £800 wheel nut, but nobody has cared to put a price on a winglet. A wheel nut can easily be priced, a winglet cannot. To get the best from one, maybe you had to shave a millimetre from the trailing edge of a wishbone, and so it goes on right until the time when Lewis gets brainfade at the first corner.

Now the FIA and FOTA are claiming all kinds of credit for coming to their senses, but they got F1 into the mess in the first place.

There has been revision to the rules, but a lot is window dressing. There will no longer be as much testing, but it was at test days when teams used to play host to those people who were not invited to dine at the table but to whom sponsors liked to throw a few crumbs. They were not going to get a seat at an actual race, but they were not forgotten. They could wring their caps, knuckle their foreheads and say, 'God bless 'e, Sir Fred.'

No matter what happened on the technical side, test days kept sponsors happy because it generated statistics. The CEO got the major perks, but he could justify the investment by reeling off the numbers of employees 'rewarded' and clients 'entertained' plus their employees 'rewarded.' This amounted to a bus to a circuit, a lot of hanging around and a buffet lunch.

There will no longer be hordes of mechanics flown to races and put up in hotel rooms so they can perform for maybe 20 seconds on a Sunday. The length of most pit stops has been determined by the time it takes to take on fuel and that, in turn, has been governed by the equipment. For the most part, the slick wheel changes have been merely for show.