While the rest of the motorsport world is dusting off the cobwebs and beginning another long season, the folks at A1 Grand Prix have entered their summer hibernation.

The new championship shut up shop until the autumn with a final flourish in Shanghai.

The result on track was clear-cut - France were by far and away the strongest team and walked off with the self-styled World Cup of motorsport' with consummate ease.

But how did the new series fare off track?

Opinion is sharply divided between those seduced by unpredictable racing in a unique series and those appalled by amateur standards from a championship short on substance.

One major bone of contention was the wildly differing standard of driving down the field.

Alex Yoong's speed, or lack of it, was well known after a year in Formula One - to have the Malaysian win a race in a one-make series spoke volumes for the shaky standards in A1GP.

But while drivers of the calibre of Tengyi Jiang and Armaan Ebrahim have no place in an international series, the mixed bag of drivers contributed directly to the Wacky Races-style entertainment on a Sunday.

And entertainment was fundamentally the point of A1GP.

The enduring disappointment of A1GP's inaugural year was the series' failure to attract fans through the turnstiles.

Admittedly the super-human promotional efforts of the Brands Hatch team captured a bumper audience for the opening round but after that crowds were thin.

A street race in Durban brought in a huge crowd but amid the back-slapping, few pointed out that 60,000 watched a two-seater parade of Minardis in 2004, so starved is South Africa of top-level motorsport.

Crowd' was hardly the right word to describe attendances at Lausitzring and Estoril, which resembled a club meeting on a rainy day.

Even circuits in Malaysia and Dubai, flagship venues for a series keen to bring motorsport to a new audience, did little business come race day.

A move to Zandvoort in Holland will add another sell-out venue for next season, when more sponsors as well as more fans are on the wish list.

With a royal family behind the venture, A1GP enjoys an apparently firm financial footing, so it came as surprise that South African authorities impounded cars for unpaid bills after the Durban race.

Indeed, Sheikh Maktoum Hasher Maktoum Al Maktoum is one of the few obvious sources of revenue to the series, which has only a handful of low-key sponsorship deals on show.

That needs to change come season two if seat holders, who are alleged to have paid astronomical and scarcely credible figures for their entries, are to see a return on their investment.

No start-up series can expect to tick all the right boxes right from the start but the jury remains out on A1 Grand Prix after the first season.

Maktoum confounded his critics just to see his A1GP dream fulfilled, now he has to do it all over again to see it succeed.