The wheel is about the only thing the FIA hasn't tinkered with

A new season in any sport is always exciting, but let's face it, in Formula One there's that little bit more to get you worked up. Football fans will always spend hours pre-season talking about new signings for their team and the prospect of promotion.

But no matter what the new term brings, the goals will always be the same size and it's highly unlikely that the penalty spot will have been moved to the corner flag. Football's rules have remained largely unchanged for over a century. Not so F1.

A new season kicks off this weekend in Bahrain and the average petrol head will be coming to terms with the fact that the powers that be, the FIA, have been re-inventing the wheel.

Actually, the wheel is about the only thing that hasn't been tinkered with, but the tyres on them have gone through yet another rule change. Once again teams can change tyres during pit stops. The big winners are Bridgestone, who suffered under last year's regulations, and their biggest customers, Ferrari.

The cars themselves are different too, forced to use smaller engines. Why? It's hard to tell. It's a prime example of rule changes for no good reason that F1 is infuriatingly good at.

Then there's qualifying. The good news is the end of one-shot qualifying. Sadly the new one-hour format has been complicated with slower cars dropping out after 15 minutes and half an hour. Why couldn't the FIA just leave everyone in for the whole hour like the good old days? I better get off the subject of rule changes and the FIA before I get a nosebleed and get down to the nitty gritty of the racing. On the surface there's a lot that's changed. And yet at the front of the grid it could be Groundhog Day. The new McLaren has been lightning fast during testing ... when the engine wasn't blowing up. Sound familiar? Kimi Raikkonen certainly hasn't been happy and, if reports are correct, could be packing up his troubles in a (designer) kit bag and heading to Ferrari next year.