Bob Barnard Track Engineering

Who else is tired of this whole Pirelli tire deal. Paul Hembery says that it is "just a phase" we hear it every year and by the eighth race the teams work it out. Eighth race, that is nearly half a season of a lottery! I logged in at 10 pm to Sky F1 on line to watch first practice from Sepang. What did I see? Nothing for 45 minutes, the teams were conserving tires. I bet the spectator, and yes I only saw one, and no wonder with nothing to watch, was as annoyed as I was, and I went to sleep. When teams do not have enough test time, according to them, why would they just sit in the garage. Oh yes, saving tires, great show that is.

Apparently the boys finally came out and proceeded to "melt" the tires in the heat and green track. One of the Team Principles wrote an email to Pirelli suggesting an extra set of tires to be used by Friday drivers. Well I guess it would have cars on track, but we pay to watch the real drivers, not the reserve team. How would football fans like it if the teams put their reserves out for the first half?

To digress and follow the football analogy, why is motor sport stuck on this performance balancing? Success ballast? Manchester United players would be wearing diving belts by now. Federer would have a heavier or smaller racquet. They all do it one way or another, spec racing or regulations so restrictive that it may as well be. NASCAR thinks having 43 cars within a second and racing in big packs is what the spectators want. It did not seem a problem when Richard Petty won 200 races back when the sport was growing. There is an old saying that if you develop a better mousetrap the government will invent a better mouse. Well the FIA and NASCAR have done that very well lately. What happened to racing as innovation? There is a good article on where the "United Sports Car Series" should go:

http://www.racer.com/opinion-back-to-the-future-for-american-sports-car-racing/article/285560/

Without innovation where would the Chapmans and Halls be? Like Adrian Newey. Every new idea gets trodden on. You can't do that, all the teams will have to do it. So what, isn't that the point. And then there is the cost containment mantra. Let them spend what they want, if they go broke so what? Look at Rangers in Scottish Football. They survive even if it is back to square one. How about a relegation system for F1? Impossible you say, but what if the GP2 winner of 2012 is told he will get the spot in 2014 of the last team in 2013. That gives them a year to get ready, and if the winner does not want it then offer it down. Get some fresh blood in.

Bernie has success ballast of course. If you win you get loaded down with bags of money, bit like the Premier League actually, except if you try and spend it the FIA will stop you, or now take more off you. Bernie giveth and the FIA taketh away.

Sorry to wander around, but this blog is about what stirs me. Joe Saward has a great piece in his blog today about the disclaimer on Mercedes press releases:

http://joesaward.wordpress.com/

Scroll down it is the third or fourth article. Now you will have heard me talk about "the suits," the corporate men who run things now, lawyers and accountants. Well if you ever needed convincing then this disclaimer will do it. I know Mercedes is a public company and they need to be careful with what they publish, but this is a race team, a separate entity!

Talking of suits reminds me of "the blazers." These are another dangerous species in our sport, the people in the sporting bodies who spend their life being elected to higher and higher positions nationally and finally internationally. One of these, the FIA, has organized a conference this year at Goodwood to discuss the future of the sport. Being interested I checked it out, and who do you think the attendees are? The ASNs, the FIA member bodies. I would have thought that if they knew how to fix the current problems they would be doing it? How about bringing in the stakeholders, the people who have money invested in the sport. Teams, promoters, manufacturers, sponsors, drivers, and the media, and maybe Joe Blow public? This remind me of going to the FIM where the only people allowed to talk where the "blazers."

And so back to Sepang for practice two, at 2 am my time. Alarm set, ready to go, and so were the drivers this time. We were treated to lots of shots of some very nasty looking tires, but we are assured that the track is "rubbering in." I bet it is with that amount coming off the tires. We saw the usual suspects at the top of the time sheets, but as always it is hard to work out who is actually doing what. It is great that Johnny Herbert can hear and spot what is going on in the car, but at that time in the morning I am not awake enough to notice. Inevitably the rain arrived with 30 minutes to go. What did the teams do? Go out on inters to see what conditions where like in case it rained on Sunday? Hell no, they sat in the garage to save the inters, and I went back to sleep. It was bad enough when we saw teams saving tires in Q3, but it has now spread to the whole weekend, it is time this nonsense ends. If you want to know why spectator racing is dying, it is because the show is bad and getting worse.