IT would be easy to say the changes made this week to bring the excitement back to Formula One don't go far enough.

Ferrari's unerring dominance, through Michael Schumacher and Rubens Barrichello, of this year's world championship has proved a big turn off for motorsport fans who yearn for closer racing.

It's not the first time a team or a driver have so utterly dominated the sport. Fangio dominated in the 1950s but maybe he was one of the last of the true driver's champions, relying as much on skill than what was underneath the bonnet.

In modern times, the red and white of McLaren remained unchallenged for many seasons through the likes of Lauda, Prost and Senna and Williams, too, had things very much their own way when McLaren's dominance temporarily faded.

What has happened this year is that Ferrari have developed a car, and possess a driver in Schumacher, who are unbeatable.

Formula One has become a one horse race and no competitive sport can go like that, particularly a sport which relies on such vast sums of money simply to exist.

To fuel the massive budgets, race fans have to fork out over three figures at venues like Silverstone.

The noise, the colour and the spectacle are a heady mix, but take away the competitive element at the front of the field, and fans will start thinking twice of spending so heavily to watch a spectacle which has become utterly predictable.

Things change, though and in F1 teams change, too. Development races on as fast as the front-running cars. Who knows, McLaren, Williams, Renault or even Toyota could find something extra this winter to close the gap on Ferrari who let's face it, were lagging behind McLaren themselves until two years ago.

It was against the backdrop of predicable racing, plunging television audiences and spiralling costs which have put two teams, Arrows and Prost on the sidelines and have jeopardised the future of a couple of others, that an F1 Commision met this week to try and make the sport more appealing to fans and sponsors alike.

They decided against radical changes like switching drivers between teams and bringing in a weight handicap system. There was no way the big teams were ever going to vote to that, anyway.

What they have agreed to and what we will see next season is the first eight cars scoring world championship points.

But the most radical and encouraging change of all will be a new one-off superlap, which will determine where the drivers qualify on the grid.

Out goes the one-hour free-for-all on Saturday mornings. In its place we'll see two qualifying sessions, on Friday and Saturday, in which each driver will get only one lap to set his best time.

The changes don't necessarily mean that Ferrari still won't have both cars on the front of the grid.

What it does mean, though, is that they will be under much greater pressure to do it.

And if Schumacher and Barrichello have to start from further back, then, yes, we'll get closer racing, especially as most of the racing tracks around the world are ludicrously designed in such a way that overtaking is almost impossible.

Other moves to restrict testing to ten days during the season and introducing a two-hour Friday test before each race will save the sport £150m but is unlikely to be backed by the big times.

In my book, that makes it a bit of a no-no.

Race fans may well argue the F1 Commission haven't gone far enough with their changes. But at least they've made a start in the right direction.