It was fitting that Sebastian Vettel would be the one to send Lewis Hamilton into a tailspin of frustration in Melbourne on Sunday and the early signs suggest 2017 could be the first truly thrilling Formula One season in a decade.
The brave new era started steadily around Albert Park on the weekend, but the subsequent bluster about a lack of overtaking would have you believe the season is already worth writing off. Oh, difficulty overtaking on a tight street circuit, you say? For shame!
Such criticism smacked of the instant-gratification age striking again, and a longer-term view offers plenty to get excited about. Melbourne's traditional exhilaration comes from the very fact that getting cars side by side there is difficult. They crash, we wince, and it's great.
This year, there was no safety car to bunch a field together and Vettel won the race in the pits. But Vettel won the race. And he won it clean as a whistle. It was hinted at in testing, but now we know, the one-horse race is no longer. Brawn, Red Bull, Mercedes. F1's last eight seasons have generally been dominated by a single team. Fernando Alonso drove the wheels off his Ferrari to push Vettel close in 2010 and '12, but it was also Scuderia red vanquished the last time we had two teams of genuine equality fighting for glory - Hamilton's bonkers last-lap pipping of Felipe Massa in 2008.
Sure, the Hamilton-Nico Rosberg, all-Mercedes duel of the last three years was intense, but Formula One is an engineering battle as much as a personal one. And that is why Ferrari pulling level with the Silver Arrows is so crucial. With Hamilton and Rosberg able to see all of each other's data - to the Brit's great chagrin - there was little mystery between them and victories on either side of the garage were often conspiratorially dismissed by the other. Even Hamilton seemed invigorated by having a different coloured car to worry about.
"We're now finally at a period of time when we can actually have a real race," Hamilton said after following Vettel home on Sunday.
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