If you remove all the risk from Formula One, you lose the sport. Everyone knows this. Even so, it won't just be the health and safety lobby calling for tighter regulations after Kimi Raikkonen suffered that horrendous jet of champagne spray under his right eyelid.

Even with a good-quality champagne, that's going to sting. Sure enough, the victorious Ferrari driver spent the best part of his time on the podium in Malaysia bent double with his back to everyone and clutching his head - not a good celebratory look.

In the official, post-race interview, a still blurry Finn was contrite. “We should put it in the mouth and not in the eye,” he said. “But sometimes things go wrong.” Indeed. It's down to the authorities, of course, but technical insiders reckon that we could be looking at the introduction of some kind of limiter on the bottleneck. Alternatively, goggles - which would be a nice touch, in keeping with motor racing's heritage.

Incidentally, how dull and mumbly does Raikkonen come across in those interviews? He makes Nigel Mansell sound like The Monkees.

This was also, one noted with concern, the race in which Lewis Hamilton's drinks bottle jammed. Last week, in Australia, in the eagerly awaited first broadcast from the crew-to-driver radio link of the 2008 season, we heard Nick Heidfeld come crackling urgently through the static to say: “The drinks bottle is running and running and running.” And now this. A whole winter of testing and these teams can't even get a plastic straw right. Our view is, the sooner the sport returns to cup-holders, or even to hampers and flasks secured in the boot using straps, the better for everyone.

With the news of Formula One's recapture by the BBC, the season has shifted under ITV's feet. Now it's a farewell tour. It would have been no surprise to find Steve Rider looking a touch misty-eyed (tears, not misfired champagne). He wasn't, in fact. He was as professional as ever. But referring to the punishment that resulted in the McLaren drivers being demoted down the grid for dawdling in qualifying, Rider asked Hamilton: “How much have you had to revise your ambitions?” And in the context of Rider's shattered dreams, the moment had an almost unbearable poignancy.

It's limbo time for the ITV team. None of them knows for whom they'll be driving next year, or if they'll be driving at all. Was it an illusion, or was Mark Blundell working just that little bit harder to impress? “You see he's got a pack of ice on the top of his helmet?” Blundell asked as the drivers readied themselves on the grid. “That's basically to try and keep his head as cool as possible.” Thanks for that, Mark. We weren't totally under the impression that the driver concerned was trying an in-helmet approach to Martini mixing, but it was good to have any doubt removed.

Meanwhile, Ted Kravitz (I've got all his albums) was attempting to pin down Martin Whitmarsh, the chief executive of the McLaren Group, just as a number of cars were inconsiderately making their noisy way up the pitlane. Whitmarsh leant in closer and said: “Ask the question again, James.” “Ted,” Ted said. Gutting for him. In this week of all weeks, you wouldn't want your indispensability to the sport undermined by some backroom person in a short-sleeved shirt.

Martin Brundle, one imagines, will not want for a job offer in 2009. During a pitstop we were party to the black brake dust clouding out of Hamilton's front wheel. “If you blow your nose,” the race analyst said, “for two days afterwards, that stuff is coming out.” This man isn't just inside the sport. He's been there, done it and used the handkerchief.

No pre-race grid-walk from Brundle this week, though. In Australia - in what historians are already referring to as “the longest walk of all” - Brundle rushed about the tarmac getting flat refusals from almost everyone he sought a word with who wasn't Kelly Osbourne. This week, he didn't even bother. Was he stung, or was it because we were in Malaysia, where the grid was peopled mostly by the managing directors of Pacific Rim car-parts companies? Either way, let's hope that he hasn't retreated for good. Brundle failing to secure an interview with someone is at least as entertaining as most other people in the business securing one.

Formula One's transfer to the BBC has generated almost unanimous delight. It's nothing personal about ITV, of course. It's the prospect of uninterrupted race coverage. But let's not forget that sometimes over the past few seasons, when the sport was at its most processional, the opportunity provided by the adverts to watch, for example, a Peugeot 308 survive a volcanic landslide was most welcome. At last, you felt - a car doing something entertaining.

Of course, that was before Formula One was reborn in the all-action, hellzapoppin', traction control-free era. ITV will miss it. But let's not be churlish: we'll miss ITV a bit, too.