Although the closing laps at Shanghai were riveting, let's not get carried away. Had Pierre Gasly not put a clumsy move on Toro Rosso team-mate Brendon Hartley, there would have been no safety car, and no opportunity for Red Bull to steal a march by bringing in both its cars for soft tyres.

To that point the Chinese Grand Prix had been pretty much standard Formula 1 fare: a long string of cars, each separated by a couple of seconds, and not much in the way of racing. Yes, there was a lead change, Valtteri Bottas getting ahead of Sebastian Vettel, but it came about in the pits, not on the track. Tyre stops: this is where the order changes come from these days. It was with astonishment that I learned that in a recent fan survey there was apparently considerable support for a return to refuelling.

Quite apart from the expense of transporting all that cumbersome equipment across the globe, perhaps some have forgotten the drivers' standard catchphrase in the refuelling era: "I was waiting for the stops..." Back then, when all the cars were running light all the time, overtaking was rarer even than now. Refuelling contributed precisely nothing to F1.