Safe Speed Forums

Anyone else watching/watched this farce?
Just when you think Formula 1 can't humiliate itself any more, it goes and ups the ante
Such a self-serving, purile bunch of nitwits one would be hard pushed to assemble in one place.

well you can understand bridgestone runners not wanting to be penalised for a michelin c*ck up.... but they clearly weren't thinking of the 'sport' of it.

none of the drivers interviewed would really comment, 9 out of 10 teams agreed to a not very good solution of an extra chicane.
but clearly the problem was red and started with F.
their overriding goal is win the championship and there seems no room for sportsmanship or greater good in there.... winter testing restriction, which team objected? ........

this smiley seems appropriate:

I'm a firm believer in 'what goes around comes around' and Ferrari will one day come to rue its isolationist stand within F1. Hell they may one day find themselves as the only competitor signed up with the FIA if a breakaway series forms.
Unfortunately, the men in grey suits with the contracts, mobile phones and briefcases now rule F1. They'd painted themselves into a 'rulebook corner' at Indianapolis; there was nowhere to go and common sense and sportsmanship didn't just fly out the window, they took the framework with them

Yeah, that's the way I see it too - unless the problem is Schumacher within Ferrari. We know he tried to cheat his way to at least three world championship wins (and succeeded twice).

_________________
Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

They could have solved the problem cheaply, simply and quickly by sticking a Gatso up at the entrance to turn 13. Everybody slows down for those!

_________________
Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler - Einstein

Brilliant!

Here's a fact, though, that might get lost on the coverage of the next few days. The Indy circuit was resurfaced 3 weeks ago to a new, high friction 'diamond cut' one for the Indy 500 race. Bridgestone (supplying tyres to Ferrari) got advanced warning of this new surface and could practice on it as they supplied tyres under their Firestone brand to many of the runners in the Indy 500.

Michelin hadn't been near the place since last year, hand't been warned of the changes by anyone, and were expecting conditions the same as last year....

Go figure....

Yeah, I heard that mentioned on the coverage. But here's another fact that didn't get mentioned at all. Those dodgy tyres that Michelin had... good for about 15-16 laps of racing Michelin said. Well, had they been on last years rules and changed tyres at pit stops like normal, no problem. That would have made it a 3 stop race for the Michelin runners, which it would have been for many of them anyway. It wouldn't have been more than a blip on the radar, but under 2005 rules it's turned into a prize balls up.

IMO the fingers should be pointing at the FIA here. Not Ferrari who said they were up for a race with a chicane or without it. Not even Michelin for turning up with a duff tyre and spitting the dummy out when they weren't keen on the options the FIA offered them. I think the problem goes back months. When the one tyre all race thing was proposed last year I knew it would bite them on the arse if they implemented it, and sure enough it did. They've had their warnings. Only two races ago at the Nurburgring Raikkenen's tyre got so bad it wrecked the wheel and blew his race on the penultimate lap. I'm no McLaren fan, but it was clear he was going to win, and would certainly have done so had he been able to change tyres at the pit stop. That wasn't the first warning that a one tyre race was a stupid idea, but I feel it was the loudest. They had two weeks to change the regs for Canada and the US, did bugger all and it's blown up in their faces as a result. And that's ignoring how silly it looked in the early races when cars roared up to the garages and about 16 of 20+ people had nothing to do but kneel there and look at it . It hasn't even worked at slowing the bloody cars down, which was never going to happen with two tyre makers in the sport at the same time.

My tuppence worth: go back to tyre changes on scheduled stops, go back to a single tyre manufacturer supplying all teams, leave the V10s in place since the V8s are actually costing more to develop, use a rev limiter to prevent dangerously high speeds, and have Max Mosely and Bernie Ecclestone tarred and feathered.

Rant over. The soapbox is now vacant.

_________________
Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler - Einstein

I don't really know much about the political ins and outs of Formula 1 - or why today's debacle took place.

But commenting generally on what I see, I will say this.

As the seasons have gone by, fewer and fewer cars; fewer and fewer teams. Also less and less exciting overtaking manoeuvres. 50% of the races are won in the pits at fuel & tyre stops.

How would I make it more exciting? Although I have more than a fair few ideas, I'd make these 2 suggestions to start.

1 Give points for the 3 best qualifying times on qualifying & test day.

2 Abolish the starting grid as it stands. The cars with the fewest points to start at the front of the grid, cars with the most at the back. Where points are level, then the starting order to be determined by the fastest in 'qualifying / testing' (eg. after 6 races, 5 cars still have no points at all, those 5 to start at the front, the fastest at the very front, the slowest in 5th, followed by the car with 1 point, right the way back to the driver with 40 or 50 points at the back of the grid).

I'd make the start a 'rolling' start too, to avoid carnage on the 1st bend. Basically, I want to see the better cars handicapped by being behind the slower ones and have to overtake them at least once. I'd also look at ways of preventing 'overtaking' on pitting where a quick pit-stop gets a driver out in a better order than he came in

Max, yes.

Bernie, maybe not!

He's the one with the pants down right now, and I hope he realises that that Max dropped him right in it this weekend....

Gave up watching F1 a few years ago. Boring to the max

I am hooked on MotoGP now........now that is racing!

_________________
Speed camera policy Kills

Y'know, we can have a thread that doesn't mention speed cameras

I would just say that the one tyre rule was only going back to an earlier form of F1, in fact they didn't used to stop for fuel either.

And Michelin have no excuse - OK maybe Bridgestone went there before (sort of) for a different form of racing that is all high speed, and therefore low downforce, and therefore which doesn't test the tyres half as much, but Michelin could have sent a team to investigate a month or even two weeks before the race. They didn't, and it was a huge mistake.

But the failure of the race through finding some accommodation is purely down the FIA - I cannot imagine how anybody would want to be the US F1 promoter again.

I guess this was the inevitable result of the non-stop tinkering with the rules that we've seen over the last two years. All of these barmy rule changes are sold to the teams under the cost reduction banner, but in truth are more about making the finishing order more random.

You can see the way their minds work: if you think about it, making the finishing order completely dependant on team performance, with no random factor whatsoever would mean that any team with even a 1% superiority would walk away with the championship. Which makes for bad television.

We are now rapidly approaching the other extreme, which would be where team performance had no effect and the result was completely random. This would ensure an unpredictable result to the season, with all teams vying for the lead right to the death. Which of course would be seen as great television.

But is it motorsport?

They need to make up their collective minds which extreme they want to tend towards. If the latter then make it a one-make championship and have done with it. For the sport to have any value in terms of engineering development it needs to be recognised that periods of dominance are inevitable. As it is it is just becoming (sorry, has becom) a pathetic orchestrated circus.

If they want to tweak the rules to make it more exciting then I'd suggest...

1. Limit on total calorific value of fuel used during a race
2. No external aerodynamic aids.

Then go develop, and go race!

_________________
CSCP Latin for beginners...
Ticketo ergo sum : I scam therefore I am!

The surface of the track was altered less than 3 weeks ago. Bridgestone got advanced warning of the changes while Michelin didn't. Bridgestone (under their Firestone brand) supplied tyres for the Indy 500 and apparently had to alter the construction of the tyres they supply for the Indy Racing League at the 11th hour to accomodate the high-friction surface (this was revealed by the commentators of the American 'Speed' channel who were covering the race there).

Michelin were unprepared while Bridgestone weren't, but several compromises were available - Michelin offered to ship stronger tyres over and take a penalty but this was rejected by the FIA, then Michelin asked for a chicane to slow cars through the last turn and that was also rejected by the FIA. With either of these compromises in place the Michelin teams accepted that they would suffer penalties and even agreed to forego their championship points and/or let the Bridgestone cars go to the front of the grid. Again this was rejected by the FIA.

The fact is that the FIA (Max Mosley) put his pride before safety.

Interesting observation. More like football then. I realised years ago that the number of goals scored in a typical football game is way below the threshold required to obtain a statistically significant result.

_________________
Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Precisely!

Football is a game that inherently has a huge bias towards random chance, which is why it regularly turns over shock "giant killing" results and keeps the fans interested right to the end. Football is a game where each team is effectively trying to "contain" the advances of the other, without really having sufficient resources to do so, hence it results in semi-random "breaks" that dictate the end result.

But is it desirable that the "pinnacle" of motor racing is determined by random breaks? I think it should be better than that...

_________________
CSCP Latin for beginners...
Ticketo ergo sum : I scam therefore I am!

there was no way the FIA could allow this. Bridgestone had to pull cars from one of the previous races (i forget which) this season on tyre safety grounds... they asked for the same dispensation but were refused.

If they'd wanted to they could have "fudged" it, on the basis of Bridgestone having had the testing / development opportunity that Michelin didn't, or some such.

But clearly they didn't want to. The cynical side of me can't help observing just how much this whole thing has been in the news, I mean look at us all here suddenly talking about F1!

Meanwhile Bernie finds the lucrative Far East very attractive financially for future events, so a good excuse to walk away from the US might not be that bad a thing for him, especially if combined with a blazed of publicity.

What was I saying about an orchestrated circus???

_________________
CSCP Latin for beginners...
Ticketo ergo sum : I scam therefore I am!

While this is a sorry situation for fans and the sport, you have to see the FIA and the Bridgestone runners' point.

The FIA say that all the teams knew what the track was like (or had the opportunity to find out). The Bridgestone teams had presented their cars at the start in a fit condition to race. The Michelin runners effectively had a technical failure equivalent to a mechanical breakdown and had to retire. Unfortunately this was a mass retirement.

Why should the track be modified? If I turned up with a technically poor car, would I expect them to change the race to favour me?

_________________
Malcolm W.
The views expressed in this post are personal opinions and do not represent the views of Safespeed.

Not that I want to defend the FIA, who I think deserve about 90% of the blame for this, but Michelin were also offered compromises all of which they rejected. The FIA said they could use the duff tyres and had the drivers simply go slower through the risky corner off the racing line to allow faster cars past safely, which would have meant the Ferraris passing them easily sooner or later. They could have used replacement tyres shipped over from France and had the stewards penalise them - probably not black flags, they said, but harsh enough to deter anyone trying to use this in the future to get an advantage. Or they could have come into the pits and changed tyres under the rule that allows unsafe tyres to be replaced (rule 74 of the sporting regs - I'm sad enough to have got a PDF ). Michelin were told that if they were deemed to have got an advantage by changing tyres in the pits their teams would be penalised, which isn't exactly unfair and they had already said they were prepared to accept penalties on their own terms i.e. the chicane. Why accepting a penalty for this wasn't acceptable to Michelin when they were happy to have penalties for their own solutions hasn't been made clear as far as I've been able to find out. Rule 74 bans refuelling when stopping to change unsafe tyres, which would effectively double the number of pitstops for the Michelin teams and hand the race to Ferrari. Under those conditions it's hard to see where the advantage is, so the stewards wouldn't have needed to impose any further penalty. The cynic in me suspects that they thought they still had a chance of a Michelin winner on their own terms but not on those the FIA offered.

What I hope comes out of this disaster are a serious rethink of the sporting and tech regs, a single tyre supplier and not a few rolling heads. Not one team boss or tyre supplier came up smelling of roses IMO, and the only people who are blameless are the ones who got screwed - the fans, the circuit owners and the poor bloody drivers and spanner monkeys who have to obey the guys holding the purse strings.

Point taken, but it was that or launch straight into rants. Sorry.

_________________
Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler - Einstein