I wouldnt be surprised if the whole testgate fiasco has something to do with it. I cant imagine the Mercedes board were too happy with being associated with 'cheating'. It probably did a lot of brand damage.

At the time Toto distanced himself from Brawn and Brawn came out saying it was all him, before the trial began. Although the result was sort of favourable to Merc, I doubt the board were best pleased.

This was inevitbale, as soon as Mercedes took the team away from him four years ago. After his success in 2009, I could never have seen Brawn comfortable being the Yes-man to a corporate animal.


As much as I would love to see a woman sitting on the grid, I don't think Suzie Woolf is good enough. She is in her thirties and hasn't got a seat yet, her time is running out and if she hasn't shown her full potential by now, it is probabaly too late.

Apparently the name was voted for by fans.

Quote from autosport

Sorry......but that's just going right over this one's head.

F14-T which looks a little like Fiat. Who own 85% of Ferrari (according to Wiki).

Ha Ha Ha, I get it now. DOH!

I am soooo looking forward to winding up a certain individual by referring to this year's car as "Alonso's FIAT" at every opportunity.

In other news...

Come on Schuey!!

Never thought I'd find myself saying those words.

So Bernie is pushing ahead with his original plan for double points at the last three races and the teams are crying foul again. Bit late to do that. They had their chance to vote down the double points idea and didn't have the balls to stand up to Bernie then. No reason why they should suddenly find the balls now and the Renault teams will actually support the idea for this season at least.

THIS article on the BBC raises a fair point; that, effectively, such a system negates any advantage gained by a team who starts a season strongly and assists teams who start poorly but improve.

Reading between the lines, this year any such rule would, effectively, help RBR overcome any early-season reliability issues and help finger-boy to a fifth title.

I like Lotus' "They should just apply double points at every race" comment.
Somebody at Lotus definitely has a sense of humour.

God help me, maybe they should create some kind of a "playing a joker" system, whereby each team could claim double points at, say, any three races where they think they'll do well, or something?
Seems like that would be fairer; certainly this season.

It's just a plain stupid idea from the outset. Everyone knows it and has said as much. What's infuriating is the way the teams have bleated on about what a bad idea it is but when the opportunity came to kill it, they rolled over for dear Bernie. Gutless idiots who deserve everything they get if that's their attitude. Everyone talks about how F1 is one big, happy family and the paddock pulls together when it matters but actually the teams are all entirely self-serving without the slightest interest in the collective good. Bernie is the master manipulator of this situation.

I suppose that, perhaps, the teams all figured that an extra 25 points at the end of the season probably wouldn't make a big difference so they just let it go but now it's getting a bit silly.

I mean, if you look at 2012, Vettel wasn't doing terribly well for the first half of the year and Alonso should have won the WDC, based on early-season form but then Vettel came back strongly and won a heap of races right at the end of the season.

This year, especially with RBRs testing problems, there are probably at least 2 or 3 teams who're relying on a strong start to build up an advantage and help fend off any late-season comeback by RBR and this double-points nonsense has, basically, just destroyed that opportunity.

I think that's a brilliant idea.

Concerning the double points thing, its not just a matter of the winner getting an extra 25 points, all the other points are doubled so it's the difference that is doubled.

All the same I think its a lousy idea.

On another note I was at Jerez last week and have to say that the new cars sound dreadfully flat and disappointing. None of the wail you associate with top flight racing engines. The Williams sounded like a bag of spanners when running on the pit-lane limiter and the Ferrari was quietest of them all.

Funniest part of the day was when the Red Bull prepared to pull out of the garage. The garage doors opened, screens came back, Ricciardo stuck the nose out of the door, moved about a foot then CLUNK !

The Spanish fans in the grandstand went wild with laughter, whistles and cat-calls as the car was wheeled back in and never came out again.

Oh and we stood next to Keke Rosberg on top of the grandstand. All that for 20 euros !

It's happened again.

Looks like there are a variety of wacky ideas being proposed to "fix" all the "problems" with quali'.

Personally, I think the current system is the best there's ever been. It's better than the half-hour free-for-all where a driver can find themselves being blocked on every run, it's certainly better than the mickey-mouse one-at-a-time system that was in use for a while, it provides fans with 3 interesting sessions and it ensures that the top drivers end up with an ever-clearer track as the dead-wood falls away.

Surely the only necessary "fix" is to replace any tyres used in Q2 and Q3 rather than anything more convoluted?

Agreed!
It would get the skivers out instead of skulking in their pits. But then again, when have those who decide what's best ever listened to the likes of us?

I am a motorsport purist and would favour all the gimmicks removed from F1.

I would return Qualifying to a simple one or two sessions of One hour. I would remove the 12 Lap rule as well from back then.

I would remove all restrictions in tyres and let teams choose from any of the 4 compounds whenever they want.

I would remove DRS. As its the single most ridiculous thing in F1. Completely bias towards the following driver. Why should a driver who has got his midfield car up the grid not be allowed to defend his position. It just allows cars to breeze past for free with no talent or skill.

I would Change the points so only the top 6 or 8 score, not half the field.

You could either go back to 10-8-6-5-4-3-2-1 or have something like 20-15-10-8-6-4-2-1
and no double points

I would remove restrict over innovative designs to allow different approaches.

I would lower entry fee to allow new teams to have a crack at F1. Even if they are a bit off the pace. I want to a see a 26 car grid.

I would also overthrow Bernie.

I don't think it's the entry fees which put prospective new teams off. I think it's the nigh-on $100m per year budget needed to run an F1 team and the unfair way the money is distributed to the teams. Crack those two and you might get a bigger field. Allowing unlimited innovation isn't the way to go, though.

Indeed, the point of having those restrictions is to level out the playing field a little more, so that it isn't so biased towards the richer teams.

Jacques Villeneuve would agree with you...



There was some mention on this a week or two ago, about trying to prevent those teams/drivers sitting in the garage during the final session or just completing one lap. I'd change the format to two just sessions, the first to get rid of the back half of the field and then there would be another session to determine the top half (whether that is 10 or 11 or 12 cars depending on how many team entries there are).

Another female driver in F1? Story. Simona De Silvestro has joined Sauber from IndyCar with the possibility of driving in 2015. Wonder how Suzie Wolff feels about that.

Rather than try to force teams into running their cars unnecessarily (and at great cost to the teams), purely to entertain the fans, just reduce the length of the qualifying sessions. 10 minutes per session would be fine.

A lot of F1's problems are because it's caught between being a sport, a business and an entertainment. The three are incompatible.

Not sure that's true, although it can certainly sometimes seem like it is.

Clearly there's never usually any conflict between being successful at sport and in business and, let's face it, just like any other business, it's successful ones that are, erm, successful.
A crappy plumber is going to be unsuccessful in business, just like a crappy F1 team is.

As for entertainment, I guess it just depend what you're expecting.
F1 is what it is and I suspect most proper fans understand exactly why teams don't run at various times.
The only trouble occurs, I suppose, when you try to market F1 as some kind of mass-market, greatest-show-on-Earth to a bunch of people who don't know what to expect.
Funny thing there is, the same is probably true of Football or (in the USA) Baseball but nobody's ever felt compelled to screw around with those sports in order to please all the hospitality-suite locusts and the TV-viewing dilettantes.


Not really sure that's the answer to, erm, anything.

I mean, if people turn up to see FP sessions and they don't see much running it's partially due to the fact that the teams are restricted by the need to preserve engines, gearboxes and tyres and partly because once a team only does enough running to optimise their car for the race ahead there's little point in any additional running.
I suppose it might be nice if teams did more running in FP as a means to develop the cars but the limits on engines, gearboxes and tyres means the benefits of doing that are outweighed by the potential drawbacks.

Does occur to me, perhaps, that they could create a rule whereby teams were allowed, say, 2 additional "development" engines and gearboxes per season and Pirelli could come up with a "development" tyre which was just like the old Bridgestones so they'd last a whole hour of FP so the teams could get out there and do aero' and engine dev' work.

As for quali, it really doesn't matter if it's an hour long, half an hour long, 1 session, 2 sessions or 3.
Once a team reaches the point where they don't think they can improve their position, they're not going to go back out on track again and it's a bit naive to think they would.

Going back to the subject of "entertainment for the ignorant", surely the whole point of the "if you qualify in the top 10 you have to start the race on the same tyres" rule is so that teams have to decide if the benefit of optimising quali' outweighs the benefit of having tyre choice for the race?
When you create a rule like that, surely the whole intent must have been to create another opportunity for strategic planning?

In general, though, when it comes to feeling disappointed when you see teams like, say, ForceIndia not going out in Q3, that's simply pragmatism.
They are likely to know the other 8 cars will be faster so what's the point in burning up tyres just to prove the theory, especially when it means you deny yourself the chance to pick a different tyre for the race and, possibly, use that to do well and, of course, create some of that all-important entertainment by doing so?

And, of course, the same thing will still occur if quali' was a single session.
Teams would just run until they felt they'd achieved their optimal result and then stop in order to avoid wasting tyres.
The only difference would be that you couldn't really continue to have the "top ten tyre rule" if you did that.
Well, you could but then you'd risk creating the farcical situation where midfield teams would probably attempt to drive to a delta in order to deliberately achieve no better than 11th position, which certainly wouldn't be good for the image of the sport.


Does occur to me that some of the moaning about various things in F1 comes from people (and businesses) interested in betting because the strategic nature of F1 means their results can be skewed but, frankly, they can go screw themselves, IMO, and if the punters aren't fully aware of the strategies involved when they place their bets, more fool them.

Individuals can make money from sport but in general 'businesses' i.e. teams, do not.

Name a competative global sport that is also a successful business on the scale we're talking about (£1 billion annual revenues or more). About the only I can think of are the N American sports which are strictly controlled franchise businesses designed to ensure their financial health via effectively controlling the competition. That's the way F1 is heading.

F1 as a package in terms of the commercial activity controlled by Bernie is a success, at the moment. To be a successful business F1 has to be 'entertaining' but F1 is not intrinsically 'entertaining' so it has to adopt these silly tactics to make it more attractive to the casual viewer. More viewers = more money for the teams to race. Thankfully none of the teams try to operate as businesses so all the money goes into racing. I'm not aware of any teams operating at a profit and most manage to only make small losses by curtailing their development activity through the season. The issue for the teams is the same as we see in football - those with large financial backing (Mercedes = Man City, Red Bull = Chelsea, Mclaren = Utd, Ferrari = Juve... OK, not the best choice) are obviously going to have more resources and therefore be more successful on the track. But if any one team is too successful (i.e. spends too much money) it gets very boring and TV viewers switch off so Bernie hits the reset button to level things off. That's not terribly sporting and it's also very expensive. It's a massive Catch-22.

I dunno.

Ferrari seem to indulge in F1 as a means of energising their thriving keyring, flag and baseball-cap business.

I suppose I take your point, though, but I'm not really sure that F1 is different to any other commercially successful sports in that regard.
They all require the "whole package" to be working in order for them to make money.
The main difference seems to be that F1 seems to be expected to pander to ignorant (in the objective rather than pejorative sense) people who think it will be something that it isn't.

I guess that is a little worrying because, basically, what we're talking about here is, say, Bernie wanting to sell F1 to the US TV market where an audience of beer-swilling idiots with a 15 minute attention span want to see drivers ramming each other off the track and exploding cars.

Possibly.

It's kinda worrying that, if market forces dictated that's what F1 should become, it might be changed so it becomes that.
That's not something that happens in any other sport.
It's kind of like FIFA deciding that, to break the US market, football teams should start picking up the ball and wearing body armour.

Actually Football/Soccer is a good case study. US sport is built around the TV product - high scores, slick TV presentation, frequent add breaks etc... so on the face of it football (soccer) shouldn't work - dreary 45 minute periods with frequent low-scoring games. However the US is slowly adopting it mainly because it's actually one for the few sports that they can both watch and participate in quite easily so they have a connection to the teams through their own experiences of playing.

Now that doesn't exactly help F1 and as you say the N.American race formulas are very much the same as their other sports - constant leader changes, lots of incidents and frequent yellow-flag periods for the commercial breaks. But maybe the soccer model does show that the US population can be educated over time to adopt something different. What Bernie really needs is firstly a successful US driver and then a successful US team.

Oh dear, Red Bull have started the 1st day of Bahrain testing as they left off in Jerez... 5 hours before Vettel finally got the car onto track and so far a paltry 10 laps.

Some interesting tidbits from Newey about their issues. He's admitted it was primarily over-heating due to their tight packaging of the power unit but he lays the blame squarely at Renault's door saying he had to be aggressive with his design to counter the more demanding cooling requirements of the Renault engine. RB have brought 2 solutions to their cooling issues but are not sure how well either will work. Basically they're going to have lost another day and are more or less 5 days behind Mercedes in terms of testing.

Some good news is that half way through day one and the lap times are already ahead last year's fastest race lap so the fears of the 2014 cars being significantly slower seem unfounded.