We will come on to how this is the biggest snoozefest of a Formula One season in recent memory, but first praise where it is due.

There is a lot of hurrahing and golly-goshing about Kimi Antonelli, and rightly so. If he were, God forbid, never to turn a wheel again, the Italian would still be crowned Formula One world champion aged 20 at some point in the next few weeks.

In my and my colleagues’ description of what he needs to clinch the title in Mexico City on Sunday, we have reported that he must finish ninth to be certain of it. True, after his crushing victory in Austin last weekend lifted him 123 points ahead of any pursuer with 125 up for grabs.

But, to put it more starkly, either George Russell or Lewis Hamilton would have to win every one of the remaining five races and Antonelli fail to score as much as a couple of points.

So, it is game over. Put your feet up, Kimi, in San Marino, where he lives. And he blazed to his incoming title in blistering style, blowing away Russell into a place he never expected to be – understudy to the Italian he thought he had the measure of as Mercedes team-mates of contrasting F1 experience (the 28-year-old Russell’s eight seasons versus Antonelli’s two). Russell finished eighth on Sunday in the same equipment.

Antonelli has attacked all year at almost every corner, while still modifying the exuberance of his rookie fireworks of last year to accumulate wins brick by brick, seeing things through with a lightness of touch that is remarkable to witness.

Yet, yet, yet, this is a boring season. The sport has reached the apogee of Netflix’s Drive to Survive genre, the most sanitised, anaemic shadow of Formula One you could imagine. Ha, and to think that great Rabelaisian James Hunt won the title 50 years ago last week in a more buccaneering era with scraps and taunts and honest opinions overflowing, as well as a line of British Airways stewardesses outside his bedroom door.

Antonelli, a brilliant driver just out of his teens, is chilled but also a product of corporate Mercedes, trained up to his eyeballs to be circumspect since he joined them aged 11. He has not uttered one memorable line all year.

Nor has Russell, someone I know better and have always liked, jousted with Antonelli verbally.

Again, corporate Mercedes is at play, when Russell might otherwise have ripped into the team and stamped his feet for clearly favouring Kimi. (I repeat again and again, Russell has not been sabotaged; I just don’t believe he is Toto Wolff’s favourite son.)

So there has been no intra-team tension displayed, as well as no contest on track for months. Russell has won just three times to Antonelli's nine.

Why has Russell not got out his elbows as Nico Rosberg did when he used every possible psychological device to beat Hamilton in 2016 rather than keep talking about being the team player. It seems a sad and fatal statement of submission. Bernie Ecclestone wondered: ‘I don’t know if George has that killer instinct you need.’

Ferrari have been bumping along as so often, Hamilton’s win in Barcelona revealing itself to be the false dawn it always looked like being. He is past his best at 41 and, in Fred Vasseur, has a team principal not up to the task. They are going nowhere as fast as they would like. Hamilton’s team-mate Charles Leclerc, so talented, has an infuriating magnetism to walls.

Red Bull and McLaren have been making ground, fair play to them, but Mercedes had already bolted.

Then, we have the appalling half-electric engines that have rendered overtaking a manufactured joke. A move is practically all down to when the power can be deployed, with passing and repassing. A proper emergency solution rather than putting a plaster on the sore should be found as soon as possible, not delayed until 2030 or 2031. This failure to revert to V8 engines is causing huge damage to the sport’s credibility.

Finally, we have a different set of team principals from the old days. They are engineers. Repartee has gone, neutralising the needle that was the intrigue which enlivened boring afternoons. Christian Horner taking on Wolff could often be better sport than the race itself. That’s vanished.

There are signs of revival, though, with Max Verstappen suggesting he and Red Bull can pose a threat in 2027. McLaren canter on well under astute leadership from Zak Brown and Andrea Stella.

Verstappen against Antonelli, with Lando Norris, provides hope after this year’s gruel.

And none of the whines above are meant as a word of criticism about Antonelli, essentially already a history-making world champion, and a deserving one at that.

Austin experience getting better and better 

I rated Austin my seventh favourite race on a list we published last year.

The rankings merely reflected my mood at the time. Some venues were harshly treated, such as Barcelona, placed last, because I was fed up with the concrete jungle of a track that has not progressed in terms of facilities, and, really, because I had been there ad nauseam for testing and the like for more than 20 years.

Engineers loved it for its representative data collection. Which is nice for them.

I was bored with it, at any rate. And while Barcelona is a fine city, the Sagrada Familia is tanks of petrol away from Circuit de Catalunya and the volume of traffic turned my hair grey a while ago.

But, to be honest, if you took the relatively short flight to Spain as a fan you could have a fabulous weekend. And I have had some there, for sure.

But coming back to Austin, it not only remains high among my favourites but continues to evolve and develop.

It has always been a brilliantly designed track, put together by German Hermann Tilke, though Sunday’s race was not a classic.

Getting out of the circuit used to be a nightmare of snail’s pace pain, but this year it was as smooth as a production line. Perhaps I got out at the right times, and was lucky, but it seemed a masterful improvement in organisation. These things matter in terms of fan experience. It is paying off. The attendance over the weekend was a huge 467,000.

I have reported on this race from the start and have a nostalgic fondness for it. I was in the Four Seasons hotel, next to Lady Bird Lake – the southern boundary rope of Downtown Austin – with track owners Bobby Epstein and Red McCombs, the late Texan billionaire businessman. Red walked with a stick, as I remember, even back then.

Red loved Bernie Ecclestone and called him an ‘English gentleman’. Bernie rang me as I took a coffee with the Americans. It was the eve of the inaugural race in 2012 and Epstein, who kindly showed me around the track of which he was understandably so proud a few days before the crowds arrived, was as nervous as a kitten about how it would all play out.

‘How are preparations going?’ asked Ecclestone from his London office hours before he flew across the Pond. I told him everything was in hand. ‘They are good people,’ he added. Epstein and Co got it right now and still are.

It is my favourite of the American races. Then comes Miami, then Las Vegas.

For the record, my top six races to attend, in an assessment admittedly skewed by my own nostalgia and bias, were, as of last year: 6th Monza; 5th Silverstone; 4th Singapore; 3rd Brazil; 2nd Monaco; 1st Melbourne.

Sitting here now, writing this by Lady Bird Lake, as two rowing eights go by as dawn breaks, I might swap around Austin for Singapore. The rest stay where they are.