It might surprise some people to learn the safety car was first used in F1 as early as September 1973.

The car was a Porsche 914 with ex-F1 driver Eppie Weitzes at the wheel and it was summoned during the rain-hit Canadian Grand Prix at Mosport.

But its first use didn’t go well. Instead of coming out in front of the leader the first car in the queue was Howden Ganley’s Iso. Many other cars gained an extra lap and it handed the win to Peter Revson.

After that disastrous first introduction F1 waited two decades before dabbling with a safety car again.

Its re-introduction came as F1 took a peek at the race management techniques used in its highly successful American-based rival CART. In 1993, reigning F1 champion Nigel Mansell became the latest and most high profile defector to CART. In return F1 pinched some of CART’s rules (and Michael Andretti, though not for long).

The 1994 F1 season saw the increased use of the safety car and the return of refuelling stops during the race – both CART devices. However while CART and other major American series (NASCAR and, today, the Indy Racing League) made sure that every car had its own pit box, that was and still is not the case in F1. This has caused some potentially unsolvable problems.

To begin with there were other causes for concern with the safety car. Drivers objected to it being used to lead formation laps as it didn’t go quickly enough for them to keep their tyre temperatures and pressures up. After their protests the practice of using the safety car to lead formation laps was dropped, but the underlying problem of the car being too slow remained.

Then came the horrors of Imola 1994. For a long time the slow speed of the safety car in the laps prior to Ayrton Senna’s fatal accident were linked to the cause of his accident and even today it is impossible to say with certainty it might not have been related. But the FIA soon made sure the safety cars were able to lap the circuit at a fast enough speed for F1 drivers to be able to look after their tyres.

Over subsequent years race directors came to rely on the safety car more and more. Race stoppages became increasingly rare as using safety car periods instead gives the impression of a continuation of action which is less of a turn-off for TV broadcasters. Since 2000 there have only been three stoppages: Belgium 2001, Brazil 2003 and Europe 2007.

Teams became more adept at manipulating safety car periods for strategic ends and this created a new safety problem for race directors. Now if the safety car was called for at any time after the first ten laps it was likely that a large number of cars would have to head for the pits at once.

This caused two problems. First, because there weren’t enough bays to service every car at once, some teams would use their second car to delay the rest of the pack to save time. That was banned in 2005.

But a second problem remained and is at the heart of the current debate over how to fix the rules: because drivers were using the safety car as an opportunity to get in a ‘free’ pit stop it might mean them rushing through the scene of an accident to get to the pits.

How should this be fixed? The FIA has spent a year and a half trying to solve it. Their current solution is an elaborate new system where during a safety car period each driver has to hit a particular target lap time. Initial reactions have been mixed at best.

But as Mark Webber said recently a solution needs to be found:

"The safety car threw up a bizarre result and I think the rules are a joke…F1 is more professional and better than the rules we have for the safety car at the moment.

"It looks very amateurish when the guy who nearly wins the race starts 17th and only overtakes one car, Kazuki Nakajima's Williams, because he spun. For me, that is not what Formula One is all about.”

We can raise a smile at the farce of 1973. But is it really that different from the contrived circumstances in which Nelson Piquet Jnr found himself leading last weekend’s race?