Not even those of us who can barely distinguish their FIA from their FOTA, and for whom the rasp of a Formula One engine is an invitation to attach a length of garden hose to their own exhaust pipe, start the car, and close the garage doors, can deny that the sport has produced a bit more “vroom vroom” than “zzzzz zzzzz” of late. Not on the track, of course, where Formula One resembles the Olympics in reverse (beginning with a flurry of action and ending with a procession) and where the current dominance of the Brawn, as in racing car, has rendered this year’s championship about as exciting as the Braun, as in electric toothbrush.

Off the track, however, the battle between the teams and the governing body is the kind of wheel-to-wheel dogfight we used to get when the cars had pneumatic handbrakes and gearsticks, and when the winner of this afternoon’s British Grand Prix at Silverstone rounds the final bend, he won’t know whether he’ll be greeted by a bloke waving a chequered flag or a lawyer waving a writ.

It’s the same every year. Formula One finds new and various ways of reinventing itself, grooved tyres, smooth ones, rear diffusers, front diffusers, and nothing much changes. There’s a guy at the front breezing around in such a comfort zone that he’s probably got his radio tuned into the Sunday Omnibus edition of the Archers, while the blokes behind him might just as well be behind the wheel of a Morris Minor.

In which case, if the threat by Ferrari, McLaren and other leading teams to form a breakaway championship comes to fruition, it might not be such a terrible blow to the sport. They might come up with revolutionary new ideas, such as overtaking, rather than having the lead change hands only when someone pops into the service station for a refill.

Apart from when a driver occasionally roars out of the forecourt with the fuel hose still attached, and takes out the lollipop man at the same time, this is about as dramatic as it gets, although they could inject more interest by making the drivers get out and pay by credit card, like the rest of us. The governing body, under the dictatorial leadership of Max Mosley, wants to impose a spending cap of £40m per team from next season, which in F1 would barely cover the cost of winter testing on a new, revolutionary aerodynamic wheel nut. It is, so the teams say, the straw that broke the back of the camel, or would have been in the days when all the cars had Camel, or Marlboro, daubed over the back of them.

The wider agenda, though, is that the teams have had enough of Mosley telling them what to do and when to jump. Mosley’s power is such that when it came to a personality clash with the McLaren team principal Ron Dennis, Ron paid with his head. A savage outcome for a man who so lived and breathed Formula One you could imagine him spending his holidays in a deck chair, reading Autosport, or Cylinder Gasket Monthly. Nobody objected when Mosley was making Ron the whipping boy — if such a term is permissible given Max’s recreational leanings — but the spending cap seems to have imbued the various teams with a collective will to finally get together and hand Mosley the Churchillian salute. In short, either Max goes or we do.

It’s certainly detracting from the apparently unstoppable march to glory for Jenson Button, whose emergence from Lewis Hamilton’s slipstream would appear to be QED for the argument that the best driver may not be the bloke spraying champagne over the balcony but the one squeezing a couple of points out of a comparative milk float. That’s why some people just don’t get modern-day F1. Usain Bolt has the same, or much the same, pair of spikes as the runner in the lane next to him, and the same cricket bat is available to, say, Kevin Pietersen and Freddie Flintoff. Which makes it considerably easier to identify the best sprinter, or the best batsman, than it does the best racing driver.

It’s probably why no British driver — James Hunt, Nigel Mansell, Damon Hill, and now Hamilton and Button — has ever quite managed to capture the aura of a Stirling Moss, who never won a world championship but who is still the British No 1 when you apply the nabbed-for-speeding test. “Hello, hello, hello. Who do we think we are then? Jenson Button?” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.

Button is finally demonstrating that he’s a very good driver, but only after years and years of wringing considerably more perspiration out of his overalls than champagne. And all because, at a time when his career was in doubt, someone finally offered him a drive in a vehicle that wasn’t struggling to keep up with the safety car.

If FOTA want rid of Mosley because they have finally had one dictatorial demand too many, then that’s their business. But for the sport as a whole, there’s clearly a case for getting shot of anyone in charge of the rules and regulations who can’t find a way of making it more exciting.

This afternoon’s grand prix may be a thriller but nobody’s holding their breath. If you really want to spend an afternoon watching hair-raising manoeuvres, death-defying charges for the first corner, breakneck speed, and the potential for spectacular collisions — and all free — take a fold-up chair and get down to Hyde Park Corner.

Hitting the men for six