So technical, so formulaic. Why F1 is the pits

With a new Formula One Grand Prix season about to roar into gear, they're not just throwing the kitchen sink at their 2014 advertising campaign; they're chucking in the dishwasher, microwave and American fridge-freezer too.

And boy, do they need to. Having forked out a tyre-shredding £455 million to wrestle the season-long live broadcast rights from the BBC until 2018, they are now the custodians of a costly global roadshow which is in grave danger of fizzling out into one very expensive anti-climax.

I'm what you'd probably call a typical bloke where sport's concerned. That means I'll tune into inter-continental under-16s tiddly-wink flicking if I happen to stumble across it during my daily constitutional channel-surfing session. Anything pitting two teams, or individuals, against one another in a winner-takes-all combat . . . even when I've got no idea who the protagonists are.

But if the new motor racing season simply promises a repeat of the repetitive, passion-free rubbish from the past two years, I'm going to spend a lot of time creosoting the garden fence instead on Sunday afternoons this summer. Better that, than watching paint dry on the telly.

Ruthless German Sebastian Vettel takes pole position. And since ruthless German Sebastian Vettel has the most reliable car, ruthless German Sebastian Vettel goes on to win the race. No fuss, no drama, no fisticuffs . . . no excitement.

No doubt there are some very clever boffins behind the scenes leaving no technological stone unturned to keep their cars on the road and doing astonishingly smart things. But that hardly adds up to adrenaline-pumping excitement on the track.

To the casual viewer, it appears that drivers don't want to push things to the limit these days for fear of damaging their temperamental tyres; there's more overtaking on a chess board.

All of which could hardly be further removed from the raw, rollercoaster of 1970s recklessness so brilliantly evoked in Oscar-nominated movie Rush, chronicling the bitter battle between British playboy James Hunt and analytical Austrian Niki Lauda.

Back then, the drivers were showbiz themselves. Their sport reeked of ambitious alpha males living life on the edge. When was the last time you saw a modern-day F1 driver even emerge from their cockpit in a sweat, with a hair out of place?

It's all so clinical. Driven by statistics. An exercise in who can drive the slowest and safest, yet still win.

That's clearly why the Sky boys are working overtime to sell us an alternative vision of F1, with commercials which could have been ripped straight out of a Fast & Furious movie.

Metal gleaming, engines roaring, we're reminded that these beasts create vacuums so fierce they could rip up manhole covers, that their downforces are so strong they could drive upside down on a ceiling, and that they brake so fast that drivers could shed projectile tears.

If only the live race coverage was so passionate and compelling.

I'll give Formula One a last chance this year. When the cars line up for the Australian Grand Prix tomorrow, I'll be praying that something unpredictable happens. That a back-marker comes roaring through the field to notch their team's first ever place at the top of the podium.

But I fear that's about as likely as any semblance of top-level sport being found on free-to-air television in 10 years' time.