But it had a little drama, mostly generated by Ferrari. The pit incidents involving both Felipe Massa and Kimi Raikkonen and then Raikkonen’s engine failure gave the race an edge, as did the battle between Jarno Trulli and Sebastian Vettel.

Clearly for Ferrari to have engine failures for two races in a row is a major worry for them. Part of the problem is that Raikkonen had already used his free engine change earlier in the year, so after Massa’s engine failed in Budapest they couldn’t break into Kimi’s power plant and do a thorough examination to see whether it might fail in a similar way.

This may have been costly, as Ferrari’s head of trackside operations Luca Baldisserri said after the race that “initial investigations seem to point at a similar failure to the one Felipe experienced in Hungary”.