The tactics of street fighting

Formula One Monaco Grand Prix: Friday in Monaco, and after the throaty roar of more than two dozen F3000 cars has faded to just the faintest echo resounding around the principality's Legoland of concrete and glass palaces, the harbour turns to the serious business of Grand Prix weekend.

Out in the harbour, where weekend berths change hands for the national debt of emerging nations, the great and good get down to the posing and pouting for the cameras, as models and managers, moguls and media darlings line up on the decks of multi-million yachts like lizards on the rocks of the Galapagos, to bronze and tone and mull over whether €1,000 is really too much to pay for a bottle of Cristal in Jimmyz nightclub, the town's legendary billionaires' playground.

But behind the yachts, the parties, the gratuitous displays of ostentation, there is a motor race. It offers a thrilling spectacle which, despite the bloated fat-cattery of the attendant spending spree, never fails to excite.

Twenty 800-plus horsepower rocket-sleds will arc through streets designed a century and more ago for stately horse and carriage to ferry Victorian-age plutocrats from harbour to gambling den to palatial hotel.

The plutocracy may not have changed but the transport has. Formula One cars in a city is madness, but what glorious madness it still is.

For Monaco is the great leveller, the one race which is still about drivers triumphing over each other, over the limitations of their machinery and over the most demanding circuit in racing.

And after several years in which speculation over the future of a race that on many occasions has descended into the processional, tomorrow's Monaco Grand Prix could, because of Formula One's new rules, be the most intriguing for some time.

Monaco, they say, is all about qualifying. On a circuit where overtaking points are rarer than the pink, 59.6-carat diamond adorning the neck of supermodel Helene Christensen at a Jaguar photo-op on Thursday, claiming a points position starting place for tomorrow's race is crucial.

But today's qualifying shoot-out could be the biggest lottery of the season. Each of the 20 drivers will be afforded just a single chance to claim an advantageous spot, a single chance to get a clear run, a lap free of mistakes on a circuit where the margin for error is infinitesimal on tiny streets that can bite back at the least provocation.

And even when that clear lap has been achieved and a position close to the front of the growling pack has been won, it is only then the real battle begins. Armed, under the new rules, with the same fuel load and tyres as on the car at the end of today's session, tomorrow's race will become a test of tactical nous, a mind-game in which the temptation to qualify light of fuel to secure grid ascendancy must be offset by the knowledge that too early a pit stop to refuel tomorrow could wreck any advantage gained.

Five-time winner Michael Schumacher, sights set on Ayrton Senna's record of six Monaco wins, was, predictably, quickest in Thursday's first qualifying, three-tenths quicker than team-mate Rubens Barrichello.

McLaren's David Coulthard was fifth, with Kimi Raikkonen a lowly 11th, both, though, on conservative programmes early in the weekend and confident of being thereabouts in today's shake-up. Williams' Ralf Schumacher was sixth, team-mate Juan Pablo Montoya eighth. The usual suspects, suitably placed for parade ground identification.

But there are others who could fit the frame, others capable of the larceny of a racing driver's most coveted prize.

Renault's Jarno Trulli, already a Monaco front-row starter with Jordan in 2000, was an impressive fourth on Thursday. His wunderkind team-mate, Fernando Alonso, was wayward for 14th in a problematic car, but nonetheless the car is reckoned to have the best launch and traction control system on the grid, crucial assets around Monaco's slippery streets.

Or Jenson Button's BAR. The Englishman was a surprise third on Thursday. The team's Honda engine may not be a world beater but around Monaco that ain't an issue. The chassis looks balanced, Button is quick and a podium is not out of the question.

Or even Jordan. The EJ13 may be an unlovely beast, but on Thursday it put on its party frock for Monaco and swept Giancarlo Fisichella to seventh and Ralph Firman to a creditable 13th. Such positions are possible again today.

The winner is still likely to come for the Ferrari/ McLaren/Williams trio, but this year in Monaco, in the heat of tactical battle, the possibilities are many.

"Anything can happen", that much-abused phrase, this time might be about right.