Just over a month ago and amidst the wailing and gnashing of teeth that surrounded the reintroduction of traction control into Formula One after an absence of seven years, you would have been forgiven for thinking that the motor sporting world was coming to an end.

Traction control represented the death knell of true competition, of drivers racing drivers. Strange then that four weeks later the system has faded into the distance, becoming a technical footnote in consideration of how performance will be affected at certain circuits and whether TCS will be a significant aid, say around Monaco's streets, where the low tight turns place a premium on grip. Strange too that, instead of fussing over the electronic monitoring of wheel slip, we are now fussing over its more arcane little brother, launch control.

In the first deregulated race in Barcelona, David Coulthard and Heinz-Harald Frentzen were left stranded on the grid as their launch control systems failed. At the time it was nothing to write home about - unless you were the McLaren or Jordan pilot - but two weeks later and suddenly launch control become a byword for potential disaster.

As the lights went out at the Austrian Grand Prix, Mika Hakkinen, Jarno Trulli and Nick Heidfeld were all left to sit still and pray as 17 other cars thundered past them as their launch programmes went bang. What had been an isolated problem, had now become endemic.

The panic escalated further this week, when concerns were express that the narrow grid in Monaco could become a disaster area if anybody failed to make it out of their grid box on race day. The FIA issued a recommendation urging any team not 100 per cent confident with its system to ditch the programme for this race and return to driver controlled starts.

That recommendation was followed on Thursday by the relaxing of rules governing teams performing simulated starts during free practice session. On Thursday, Jordan again had a problem, which was later explained away as an electronic glitch on Frentzen's car, his idle speed dropping too low and stalling the car as he pulled up to make his practice start.

The failure will undoubtedly keep Jordan thinking of manual starts, a decision they said they had already taken until the FIA allowed simulated starts on the grid in order to allow teams to fine tune their systems. So far, however, Jordan are the only team who have come out and stated that their preferred option is a manual start. The question remains as to whether other, including McLaren, who have suffered a LCS failure in each of the last two races should also be forced to make manual starts.

On Thursday, McLaren boss Ron Dennis was adamant that their system would work. "The nature of the problems (in Spain and Austria) does not create any difficulties for us using it here," he said. "I can't speak for the other teams, but we certainly intend to use them (LCS and TCS). We've performed well over 1000 starts so it's not a system issue. "

Despite McLaren's two failures, Dennis was, however, concerned about the systems of the other teams. "I would think that anybody, and I would definitely put Jordan in this category, if they do feel they have a problem they will probably do a manual start. I don't think they'd want to risk not starting properly."

While the teams bosses expressed some concern, the drivers seem less fearful of grid chaos tomorrow. Michael Schumacher was insistent that the fuss had been blown out of proportion. "Austria was an exceptional circumstance. What happened in Austria happened, but it will not necessarily happen again in the future."

It is an optimistic viewpoint. McLaren may have made over 1000 starts, but two of those were failures, and both occurred in race starts.

Monaco starts are notoriously difficult with the narrow track heading uphill for only a short distance before the cars are hurled through the right-hand sweep of Sainte Devote. In the light of such a complex stretch of track becoming potentially calamitous, Ron Dennis' unshakeable faith in so-far fragile systems and Michael Schumacher's oddly sunny optimism are perhaps somewhat misplaced.

The answer will come tomorrow afternoon. Unfortunately, a little knowledge can sometimes be a dangerous thing.