Some have argued that the lack of action in the European GP has to be put in context, and they have a point. The truth is that this year’s regulations have probably over-delivered on the whole, and it was never going to be possible to keep that up. Besides, races like the one in Valencia were often the norm not that long ago. And perhaps the clamour for entertainment these days is in fact a sad reflection on a generation with short attention spans which prefers harum-scarum over purity and perfection.

Well yes ... and no. As I argued in my editorial after the Chinese GP, what the rules had achieved this season was to recreate some of the variables of yesteryear that would otherwise be lost in the ridiculous reliability and robotic refinement of this ultra-professional era. The combination of wearing Pirelli tyres, KERS and DRS had shown what F1 could be, without feeling too contrived or fake, and most crucially without turning results into a lottery, such that the sport’s credibility remained intact.

There were only about a dozen passes in Valencia that didn’t involve a much faster car overtaking a much slower one, or people swamping Sergio Perez on well-worn tyres mid-race. That’s still more than in some snooze-a-thons of the past, but in general even this year’s rules couldn’t liven up this event that much, especially at the pointy end of the field. And so once again the finger of blame was directed towards the layout of the track itself, and with good reason. Back in 2008, we had already given it a ROTR award.

Officially the circuit has 25 corners but in reality it only has 11. The rest are flat-out curves-in-straights or high-speed kinks. The 11 actual corners are all just brake, turn in, power down. Driver skill can’t make much difference and the emphasis on traction means cars spread out quickly, and gaps accentuate because there’s nothing else to balance out the strengths and weaknesses between cars. Despite it being a street track, the smoothness and width of the circuit also means that endurance isn’t tested.

Then the problem with straights that aren’t straight is that cars can’t get an effective tow, and a driver straight-lining the kinks is doing the equivalent of weaving. There’s only one line and it just becomes follow-the-leader. This is not only obviously detrimental for overtaking but, as Mark Webber and Fernando Alonso found out, it also makes lapping a gamble. And it’s not like the circuit can’t be altered; some parts of it are genuinely on roads but other parts, as I understand it, are permanent road course.

The culprit behind this dreadful layout, which when you throw in the permanently idyllic weather and bland surrounds makes it the worst of all worlds, is of course Hermann Tilke. Sure, some of his designs have been superb - Sepang and Istanbul come to mind, and Yeongam holds promise - but others have proven to be woeful, not least Abu Dhabi and Valencia. This dull race on a Tilke-drome finally tipped the scales, and it’s high time we gave a long overdue "Reject of the Race" award to the German designer.

From one German to another, and those who have been singing Vettel’s praises are right to do so. He made this win look easy when it was not entirely so. As if his natural speed and car advantage in qualifying isn’t enough, on race day he is proving to be the best when it comes to playing the long game and finding the precise balance between conservation and aggression. Put simply, in 2011 he is the best at what he needs to do, in the car which is the best at what it needs to do - go fast without eating up its tyres.

Of course, that is also much easier to do when you’re out in front and able to control the race. While for much of it there was only a few seconds between him, Webber and Alonso, you had the sense that the latter two were pushing harder just to stay in touch, were running closer to the edge, and were more likely to wear out their rubber or make a mistake. Sebastian was never really under threat like he was at Barcelona, or at the two races he has lost this year in Shanghai and Montreal.

On the other hand, consider how Webber had to labour to get himself onto the front row of the grid - after near-elimination in Q1 and two bites at the cherry in Q3. That was also the story of his race, and of his season really. Once you add in the recurring reliability issues and some questionable tactics, like his much-too-early final stop onto the slower primes, and while it’s laudable that he’s starting to get within range of Vettel, it just feels like he’s doing a lot of thrashing about to get there whilst Seb swims serenely on.

This was a cracking drive by Alonso, on a day when you couldn’t really fault Ferrari’s tactics. Staying out at the third stop and not being afraid of being undercut by Webber was right. Fernando’s drive was reminiscent of his Turkey effort, but interestingly both came after poor races in the previous event. For someone who used to be Mr Relentless, is this inconsistency the sign of a man whose motivation now fluctuates more than younger, bright-eyed rivals, especially when he doesn’t have the best car at his disposal?

Clearly Fernando had the fire in his belly in Valencia, but it’s so hard to get a read on where Ferrari, Alonso and Felipe Massa are all at. Massa made such a tremendous start, but once he chickened out at the first braking zone and got swamped by his team-mate, he progressively fell off the radar, and once he got undercut by Lewis Hamilton at the first stops, that was 4th place decided for the rest of the afternoon. If Felipe’s excellent speed in Canada had given him a boost, there wasn’t much evidence of it here.

Ferrari’s up-and-down form leaves them trailing McLaren significantly in the constructors’ points, but one should not immediately assume that Valencia is representative of McLaren falling back. Maybe it is, and perhaps the engine mapping and off-throttle exhaust clampdowns will hurt McLaren even more than the Red Bulls. But just as likely is that Valencia simply highlighted the silver and red cars’ weaknesses without allowing them to demonstrate any of their aerodynamic strengths.

Hamilton got the uneventful weekend he needed. But if anything he would have come away even more frustrated by the fact that, once he fluffed the start, he lost touch with the lead battle and could not push when he wanted to. Better to try and get into scrapes than to not be able to try at all, he might think. Jenson Button also made a poor start but, having cleared Nico Rosberg, KERS troubles limited the Canada winner to a lonely 6th place. Silverstone will be a much better guide as to where McLaren really stands.

We know where Mercedes stands: clearly the fourth best car over a lap, but with a rather incomplete race package which has left them still behind Renault on the points table. Rosberg had an uneventful race in which he managed to keep his pace up, and thus took 7th. But it was hero-to-zero stuff for Michael Schumacher, who not only crossed the white line on pit exit, but clattered into Vitaly Petrov, somehow escaped all sanctions, but only really managed to overhaul Pastor Maldonado the rest of the race!

It was yet another leave-your-head-shaking performance from Schumi. With such a golden opportunity to build momentum after Canada, this is what he comes up with? How did the ruthlessness of yesteryear become this kind of clumsiness? When it comes to building momentum, he could take a leaf out of Jaime Alguersuari’s book. For a second race in succession he was poor in Q1 and qualified 18th, but managed to come through to finish 8th in the race.

That has put the under-pressure Spaniard ahead of Sebastien Buemi on count-back, and seemingly saved his bacon such that Toro Rosso reserve driver Daniel Ricciardo is now being farmed out to HRT. Whilst most others in the midfield went for three stops, Jaime not only went for two stops and made his tyres last, but he played that strategy to perfection. He passed Perez and Petrov early on and ran options in his first two stints to make hay while the sun shone and secure his track position.

This was unlike Kamui Kobayashi, who messed up his version of the two-stop strategy, but we’ll come to that in a moment. Meanwhile, Alguersuari’s team-mate Buemi was one of a midfield three-stopping sextet featuring Adrian Sutil, Nick Heidfeld, Paul di Resta, Rubens Barrichello, Buemi himself and Petrov. Add in an out-of-sequence Sauber at various points during the race and their battles looked exciting, but really there was little relative positional change between those six cars all race.

The only one to rise and fall out of that half-dozen was Di Resta due to some mistimed stops, but probably for the first time all year Sutil really seized the initiative at Force India and turned his points advantage into pace advantage as well. He put in a great Q2 lap to get into Q3, and towards the end of the race had broken free of the midfield pack and was pressurising Alguersuari. This was much more like the kind of performance that we had seen from the German last season.

Renault, whilst still 4th in the points, are stuck in a no-man’s land. They now ought to own the 5th row of the grid, unless an interloper like Sutil demotes one of them, but in the race if they fall into the midfield at the start, as both Heidfeld and Petrov did, they don’t have enough extra speed to escape. And then there was Vitaly’s ill-fated decision to start on the slower primes. What’s the point of dumping time and positions early on when the DRS at this track is too ineffective to make use of a tyre advantage later on?

Barrichello’s performance, at a track where he has really excelled for Williams and Brawn in the past two years, was reflective of his team’s status as the anonymous midfielders of 2011, but the interesting life and times of Maldonado continued after an awful start saw the Venezuelan stuck amongst the bottom three teams for the first third of the race. By the time he cleared them all the only man he was duelling with at the tail of the midfield was Schumacher, and he quickly lost that battle too.

Sauber have tended to be brilliant with strategy, both at Valencia last year and this season in general, but they were off-song here. Perez played the long game well and finished 11th despite dropping like a stone through the midfield in the middle stages, but that’s because he went all-out and risked a one-stop tactic. Kobayashi’s two-stop strategy went wrong because he ran primes mid-race, losing time and track position. Like Petrov, it was a disadvantage that DRS couldn’t help cure in the latter stages.

Once again, as was the case in Barcelona, it is intriguing that no-one seemed to have tested the effectiveness of the DRS during practice. It seems like an essential part of a team’s preparations especially if they are even remotely thinking about saving option tyres for the final stint, because that kind of strategy depends on being able to pass with DRS help. At any rate, this was Kamui’s most disappointing race of the year to date, which was a shame given just how stellar his first seven outings were.

Another man who went the two-stop route was Jarno Trulli for Lotus, but his only direct opponent on a three-stop strategy was Heikki Kovalainen. Unlike Alguersuari, who was caught by Sutil but not passed by the Force India in the latter stages, Kovalainen on the newer tyres did find a way past his team-mate with 12 laps to run. It confirmed the Finn’s continuing dominance in the intra-Lotus battle, as the Italian gives off more and more signs that this could be his last season in Formula 1.

Timo Glock in the Virgin initially made a banzai start and was ahead of the Lotuses for the opening two laps until the DRS kicked in, and thereafter his battle was only with his team-mate Jerome D’Ambrosio. After the recent challenge from the HRTs, this was a circuit where the Virgins had the edge, indicating that perhaps the HRT has the stronger aero but the Virgin has better traction. So the Virgins were faster around Valencia, and they made one fewer stop than the HRTs to boot, and so that was that battle decided.

Vitantonio Liuzzi was once again very good in qualifying to go faster than D’Ambrosio, but in the race the Spanish team was no match for its rivals, and Liuzzi easily won the team-mate battle, finishing almost a full lap ahead of Narain Karthikeyan. The Indian has the distinction of becoming the first man to finish 24th in a Grand Prix in this race of no retirements, a rather unwarranted distinction as he gets benched until the Indian GP whilst Red Bull’s money buys his seat for Ricciardo.