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And…it’s over.

The remaining three races on the 2011 Formula 1 season calendar suddenly became a battle for silver after Sebastian Vettel clinched his second consecutive World Champion title at the 2011 Japan Grand Prix.

Congrats to Vettel and all that for becoming the youngest double world champion in F1 history, but I sincerely hope my Formula 1 race reports will be more interesting next year. If there was anything unique about this particular race, it was the fact that Vettel didn’t win, that achievement going to his primary rival for the title, Jenson Button. It was at least a competitive race, with several lead changes, McLaren’s pit strategy and discipline vaulting Button past Alonso’s second-place Ferrari and Vettel’s Red Bull car, which finished third. Early in the race the German driver complained that his car’s rear tires were wearing abnormally fast, not an unusual declaration at a circuit known to be particularly hard on tires. Still, it did influence Vettel’s pit stop sequence and allowed Button to take the lead and the win. Truth be told, at the rate Vettel was setting fastest laps early in the race, had he chosen to let the red mist descend and go into attack mode, he could have made a stronger play for the win; however, he chose to drive more conservatively, aware that a finish anywhere in the points would allow him to claim the season title.

So the 2011 F1 season marches on, having already crowned a victor. Given the Red Bull’s and McLaren’s dominance this season, I’ll be rooting for underdogs Alonso and Schumacher to finish the season in good form.

It’s profoundly ironic that for all the regulatory meddling the Formula 1 administrative body, the FIA, engages in to try to contain development costs, level the playing field and promote competitive racing, there’s one factor they can’t equalize: Driver talent. And that one factor is making this Formula 1 season into a supremely uncompetitive, lopsided farce to rival Schumacher’s rampage through the 2004 season.

What am I talking about? Sebastian Vettel’s win from pole position today at the Singapore Grand Prix, easily clinching his ninth victory of the season. As with so many events this year, the true battle was for second place, with Vettel turning in machine-like fastest laps far into the race. Apart from a couple of incidents, most notably a fender-bender between Hamilton’s McLaren and Massa’s Ferrari and a botched overtaking attempt by Schumacher that sent him into the tire wall, it really was a snoozer. A pretty snoozer, but so, so boring nonetheless. The first night F1 race I’d seen, the track certainly looked spectacular. We were treated to gorgeous aerial shots of F1 cars duking it out on the track while “mere mortal” cars coursed along the arterial highways above the circuit. One commenter on the linked Autoblog writeup mentioned the absence of views of spectators, and he’s on point: The cars looked as though they were racing around some perfectly-lit, inert urban canyon, tearing through a life-size video game with none of foliage, heat waves or general human elements that characterize other circuits.

Far be it from me to wish ill on anyone, but I do hope something happens in the remaining few races of the season to make things a little more interesting.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, Sebastian Vettel ran away with another Grand Prix today, notching his eighth win of the season at Monza. Except for a a half-dozen breakdowns and a first-lap misstep by Tonio Liuzzi in his HRT car that saw him lose control and take out three other drivers in addition to himself, the race was a largely uneventful speedfest in the classic Italian tradition.

With Vettel’s Red Bull and Alonso’s Ferrari firmly ensconced in first and second until lap 36, when Button’s McLaren finally squeezed by the Ferrari, the main excitement of the day belonged to the battle between Hamilton’s McLaren and Schumacher’s Mercedes, who finished the race in fourth and fifth places, respectively. Hamilton, driving the clearly superior car, made multiple attempts to get around Schumacher, who for his part displayed, depending on your perspective, either masterful defensive driving, or a stubborn refusal to let the faster car by. After a good dozen laps of the McLaren nipping at the Mercedes’ heels, Schumacher’s boss, Ross Brawn, got on the radio and instructed him to let Hamilton by, strongly hinting that the German was at risk of being penalized for his antics in holding up the McLaren.

It was the first I’d heard that F1 drivers are allowed “one defensive movement” as a faster car attempts to overtake. And I’m sorry, but if that isn’t a crystal-clear example of the micromanagement that passes for regulation of the sport these days, I don’t know what is. I mean, how can we praise, for example, Senna’s tenacity in holding up his rival Mansell at the end of the ’92 Monaco Grand Prix, but penalize present-day drivers for doing what they’re supposed to do out there on the track, namely, be competitive. It’s just humiliating to have to be told over the radio to essentially “give up” and let the other guy through. I felt bad for Schumi.

Germany’s Sebastian Vettel continued his relentless march toward a second consecutive Formula 1 driver’s championship with a win today at the 2011 Belgian Grand Prix.

Held at the storied Spa-Francorchamps circuit, the race was eventful, full of overtaking and great drives by some of the top drivers, notably two-time world champion Fernando Alonso, who held on to fourth place driving an inferior Ferrari and recently un-retired seven-time world champion Michael Schumacher, who worked his way up from the very back of the grid (24th) to finish in the points in eighth place.

On a personal note, it was the first Formula 1 race I’d watched on TV since I can remember, and although I only caught a dozen or so laps before church this morning, the experience reminded me a lot of my time in Europe. There, the sport is as big as, say, NBA basketball over here, and watching a whole race every other Sunday afternoon was a must-see event. I have to confess that as easy as it is for me to rant against the seemingly arbitrary micromanaging of the participants by its regulatory organizations, and the death of technical leadership by the sport, it remains a thrilling spectacle, a fitting showcase for what are still the highest-performance racing cars in the world. You can bet I’ll catch the next race at Monza in two weeks.

Senna, the much-anticipated new documentary chronicling scenes from the life of the Formula 1 racing giant, opens today.

I’d like very much to see it. I’ve always been an F1 fan (chalk it up to having lived in Europe for a time, where the sport is huge), but the prime of my interest spans from ’87 to around ’94, a period of time neatly bookended by my two trips to the Monaco Grand Prix. I only observed the qualifying sessions, and not the actual race itself, but the noises, the smells, the mix of technology, speed and glamor weren’t lost on me. In spite of the fact that ’87 to ’94 happens to coincide nearly perfectly with Senna’s heyday, from his first solid seasons to his untimely death at the ’94 San Marino Grand Prix, for whatever reason, I was never a huge fan. Much like Michael Schumacher at his peak, Senna was always the “bad guy;” I rooted for his challengers, from Alain Prost and Nigel Mansell to Damon Hill and especially Gerhard Berger.

Formula 1 has lost it way in recent years, and even though interpersonal drama has always been an integral part of the sport, the past decade or so have seen that spectacle increasingly trained on the technical aspects of the cars—which for me really is the main draw. The formula of regulations which gives the series its name has grown so restrictive and so rigidity focused on micromanaging the engineering decisions in order to produce a “spectator-friendly” outcome that the sport is quickly degenerating into a NASCAR-like “single car” straightjacket for would-be innovators.

To be sure, the creative lengths engineers go to in order to extract maximum performance within the bounds of the rulebook will always excite the imagination. I just wish they were given more free rein to create cars of the caliber of the truly spectacular F1 racers of the past. Let new drivers of Senna’s brilliance tame the machines.