Even though testing is severely restricted these days, at least the teams did spend time in Barcelona over the winter. Monaco, on the other hand, remains a once-a-year challenge of man and machine. It punishes mistakes, it tests the durability of components, and it emphasises mechanical over aerodynamic grip. And yet for Webber it was the same story as in Spain - an untouchable pole lap, commanding the race from the front, and perfectly judged, ever-increasing lap speed.

This time the Australian also had to contend with seeing his lead disintegrate thanks to the four safety car periods, one of which, for the loose drain cover, turned out to be a false alarm. That would have been enough to put a nervy leader off his game, but Mark is riding on a similar wave of confidence that allowed Jenson Button to extend himself to superhuman heights that he had never reached previously, and which he has only occasionally repeated since.

It is reminiscent of Ralf Schumacher - of all people - obliterating the field at the Nurburgring and Magny-Cours on consecutive Sundays in 2003, turning himself from a solid results-gatherer into a genuine title contender. Except that Ralf didn’t score another podium for the rest of that season and Williams dropped the ball, so we’re not getting carried away just yet. But having been 8th in the points after Shanghai, Mark now leads the championship on count-back, the first Australian to do so in 30 years.

Interestingly, apart from Fernando Alonso, the other drivers who have led the points this season have been the number twos whom most thought would get left in the shade - Felipe Massa, Button and now Webber, and Nico Rosberg was 2nd after China as well. If this has caught the supposed number ones by surprise, look no further than Sebastian Vettel’s scowl after qualifying and the race. He dived past Robert Kubica going into Ste Devote but he had no answer for Webber after that.

Vettel is not used to Webber having a clear edge. But this season Mark has already out-qualified Sebastian more than he did in the whole of 2009. Deliberately or not, Webber is getting into his team-mate’s head. He even said in the post-race press conference that he was glad Vettel had moved ahead of Kubica to remove the danger of the Renault - implying that he never felt threatened by Sebastian! Both he and Vettel are no-bull enough to keep things fair, but you sense the competition has just ramped up a notch.

Kubica was of course the other major star of the weekend, not only for his blistering speed in the short-wheelbase Renault R30, but for his 200% commitment that made the on-board shots from his car during qualifying remind us why we love this sport - to see humans pushing the limits and doing things in machines that we couldn’t imagine. But for Webber pulling an other-worldly lap out in Q3, the Pole would have scored pole and from there he would also have been odds-on to score a surprise victory for Renault.

Nevertheless, with 59 points and a 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th already this season, his confidence must also be sky-high and that can only fuel an upward surge for the team. What Robert is also doing is raising the bar impossibly high for Vitaly Petrov. The Russian’s pace is decent for a rookie, but he is over-extending in a bid to match Kubica, resulting in another pre-race crash, this time in Q2, followed by more race dramas. He needs to settle down, get through a weekend unscathed, and just watch and learn.

Massa was mighty on the Monte Carlo streets last year, and he made use of Alonso’s misfortunes to start reasserting himself a little bit. He qualified 4th and pretty much ran there all race, but he also never really troubled the top three. What might Fernando have done without his free practice accident and enforced pit lane start? Credit to the Ferrari tacticians who brought him in under the first safety car and ran him for 77 laps on one set of tyres, elevating him up to 6th which is where he stayed.

McLaren remain thereabouts, but things just aren’t going quite right. They might have taken two wins in Australia and China, but they have basically been slightly off the pace everywhere in the dry, and suffered from most uncharacteristic problems, such as strategic bungles for Lewis Hamilton in Melbourne and Shanghai, the Q1 debacle in Malaysia, the Hamilton’s wheel failure in Spain. To that list can now be added Button’s bizarre overheating in Monaco thanks to a radiator cover having been left on.

Jenson’s dry weather form remains a real concern, but so too is Hamilton’s frustration as he started and finished 5th this time around. After last year’s late-season surge which saw McLaren carry some serious momentum into 2010, the radical MP4-25 has not met expectations in the face of the Red Bull onslaught, and Lewis is too easily boiling over into petulance. His angry response to a routine radio message asking him to keep his brakes in mind during the race was quite simply unnecessary.

Mercedes are still behind, although Rosberg appeared happier in Monaco than he did in Spain and reverted to out-qualifying Michael Schumacher, but only after the team’s plan to stagger their drivers in Q3 went awry and the two Germans ended up getting in each other’s way. However Rosberg fell behind Schumi at the start and different tyre strategies managed to keep neither of them in front of Alonso, and they remained 7th and 8th until the last lap.

Until, that is, Schumacher made his audacious dive inside the Ferrari going into the Anthony Noghes chicane when the safety car pulled in at the end of the last lap. The stewards deemed that to have been illegal, and slapped Schumi with a 20-second penalty that effectively dropped him to the tail of the field given that everyone had been bunched up behind the safety car. Although initially Mercedes intended to challenge this decision, they have decided to withdraw the appeal.

Not for any lack of justification, mind you. Debate over the penalty since it was handed down has uncovered a particularly unfortunate ambiguity within the Sporting Regulations. The stewards ruled that Schumacher had contravened article 40.13, which states: “If the race ends whilst the safety car is deployed it will enter the pit lane at the end of the last lap and the cars will take the chequered flag as normal without overtaking.” Two problems emerge immediately, simply from the wording of this rule.

The first is the word “if”. This makes the whole question of whether a race finishes while the safety car is deployed a conditional matter, or a matter of discretion. There is no rule that mandates how a race is deemed to finish if the safety car is out on the last lap. Secondly, the juxtaposition of “whilst the safety car is deployed” and “it will enter the pit lane” is a non sequitur; without clarification, it makes no sense. If the safety car enters the pit lane, it is no longer deployed!

Quite simply, if the lawmakers wanted to mandate an artificial state of affairs if the safety car is out on the last lap, whereby the safety car pulls in, the race remains under yellow flag conditions, the field can dawdle to the line, the winner is the first to take the chequered flag, and photographers can have a field day, then that needed to be stated clearly in the rules. As it stands, the regulation is open to interpretation and nothing more than understandings - which not everyone necessarily shares.

This defect in the regulation made no practical difference in the past, because whether racing resumed in the last few hundred metres or not if the safety car pulled in, no-one was allowed to overtake before the start-finish line anyway. Cars were obliged to hold position, whether at racing speeds or not. For 2010, however, passing can occur after the safety car control line. There is the option of trying to make a move in a dash to the flag. It thus became vital to clarify whether the race restarted or remained under yellow.

That did not happen here. Indeed, all the indications were that the race resumed for a sprint to the line. The broadcast message was the same as at the end of any other safety car intervention - “safety car in this lap” - without reference to the race remained neutralised. Unlike in Australia last year when the safety car pulled in but waved yellow flags continued to be shown, here the green flags came out. In anyone’s book, that means full racing conditions.

If Red Bull thought that the race was still under safety car conditions even though the safety car had pulled in, would they not have driven to the line slowly to savour their 1-2 result in the most famous Grand Prix of all? Instead they drove across the line at close to full speed, as did everyone else behind. Alonso says he allowed Schumacher to go because Ferrari knew what rule 40.13 meant. That is probably self-justifying fiction, but if it were true, I dare say that Ferrari was the only team that did know.

Ultimately, the issue is that Schumi made a brilliant, opportunistic, daring and perfectly-executed pass and got penalised, based on the interpretation of a rule that was not clear, when all the evidence pointed to the opposite interpretation. At the end of the day, the stewards applied article 40.13 as the FIA intended, and gave the penalty required, so the problem is not with them but with the hopelessly ambiguous rule itself, and it is article 40.13 that takes out the 'Reject of the Race' award.

Elsewhere, the Force Indias ran line astern for most of the afternoon and after Schumacher’s demotion was classified 8th and 9th, their first double-points score of the year, confirming their place on the fringes of the top 10. Vitantonio Liuzzi responded well after his recent malaise by out-qualifying Adrian Sutil and getting into the Q3, and ran ahead of his team-mate early. But Sutil’s inherent edge came to the fore when he stayed out longer on the super-softs and leapfrogged Liuzzi that way.

Toro Rosso were another team that ended up with their cars running in tandem, with Sebastien Buemi ahead and promoted up to 10th to score his first point of the year. This was arguably Buemi’s best weekend of what has been a fairly anonymous season so far, regularly out-pacing Jaime Alguersuari and starting to reassert himself within the team after some of Jaime’s impressive performances so far. The Spaniard didn’t help himself with a quick trip down the Ste Devote escape road during the race.

The remaining teams saw neither of their cars make the finish. Williams’ double-DNF was obviously the most spectacular, with both Rubens Barrichello and Nico Hulkenberg involved in large accidents, both after a breakage. In Hulkenberg’s case he damaged his front wing on the back of an HRT at the first corner having started at the back after a clutch problem on the formation lap. Barrichello’s spectacular accident at the top of Beau Rivage was caused by a suspension failure.

The extra repair bill was the last thing Williams needed right now. Monaco is a place where a driver can compensate for the deficiencies of the car, and Barrichello had shown that by qualifying 9th and leaping up to 6th at the start ahead of both Mercedes. But a poor pit stop had dropped the Brazilian back behind Sutil. His frustration was clear after his crash when he threw out his steering wheel which was collected by Karun Chandhok. At the very least, that was a part that did not need replacing!

Both Saubers were out by one-third distance, but that has been such a regular occurrence this year that it is no longer unexpected. Interestingly, Kamui Kobayashi was the only man to start on medium tyres, while Pedro de la Rosa started on super-softs, and neither had pitted at the time they retired, showing the C29’s gentleness on tyres. But so what? It is said that you can make a fast car reliable, but it is harder to make a slow, reliable car fast. But what if your car is neither reliable or fast?

Sauber have fewer finishes this year than even Virgin. After Virgin’s upgrade package disappointed in Spain, it would have been pleasing for Timo Glock to be closer to the Lotuses here, and he was splitting the green cars in the race until his retirement. Lucas di Grassi tried to get himself into the spotlight by taking the fight up to Alonso, and while a little bit of that was good, it’s the kind of thing you can do at Monaco if you’re two or three seconds off the pace, not when you’re five seconds a lap slower.

Once again Lotus get some of their act together but can’t put in a trouble-free weekend. Heikki Kovalainen became the first team-mate to ever out-qualify Jarno Trulli at Monaco, but at a circuit where he may have had some hope of causing a major surprise and leaping into Q2, he frankly overdrove and spun twice on his last two flying laps. His race was already delayed thanks to a problem changing the right rear wheel before his eventual retirement with steering difficulties.

Trulli also suffered from the same difficulties with the right rear wheel at his pit stop, which dropped him behind both HRTs and left him stuck behind Chandhok until his ill-fated move into Rascasse late in the race. Many have criticised Jarno, probably more for how the incident ended up with the Lotus on top of the Indian’s car, but actually it was not that bad a move. The Lotus had got fully alongside, except that Trulli lost the rear end under braking. His win at Monaco in 2004 must now seem an eternity away.

HRT continued to be well off the pace even of the other new teams. At a track where his uncle reigned, Bruno Senna was over 0.6s behind di Grassi in Q1, and Chandhok - after we had lauded his efforts in the last review - was confused as to why he was a full second off his team-mate. But their steady attitude to race day was once again reaping dividends when they were both running ahead of Trulli. The Spanish cars’ speed may be somewhat embarrassing, but you can’t fault them for effort or for their overall approach.