Bob Barnard Track Engineering

So now we know what the proposed changes are to Abu Dhabi to make it more overtaking "friendly." They start with the 5-6 chicane before the Turn 7 hairpin. Now Turn 7 looks like the Adelaide hairpin which is a key overtaking spot, in Adelaide. But what do we do in A-D? We put great big grandstands around it so there is no run-off. Solution? Put in a chicane before you arrive there. That kills the whole deal, so what are we going to do? Widen it. OK, making it wider gives some options for up-and-under, but not sure of this obsession with making corners wider. Adelaide is 40 feet and works just fine. Have cars got wider? Not that I know of. It is like a friend suggested Phillip Island needed to be wider. Have motorcycles become wider since Gardner, Rainey et al put on those great races in '89 and '90? Perhaps these guys need to give lessons if the current crop cannot pass on a 40 feet wide pavement.

Then there is the off-camber corner after the Turn 9 hairpin that they are going to turn into a "banked" corner. Now I always thought adverse camber, or off-camber corners were a no-no anyway and could not work out why they were built at A-D anyway. Lastly there is 13-14 they are going to turn into a sweeper for "better flow" at the end of the lap. Oh goody.

Bernie received an open letter from the opposition in Bahrain telling him to stay away until basic human rights are in place. That could take a while. Meanwhile Bernie says he would rather retire than work for people he does not like, presumably Rupert Murdoch and Carlos Slim. But I thought F1 was not for sale? Part of the CVC empire is not doing so well. Pit Pass web site tells us that the hospitality arm lost money again last year despite charging $4500 per head for the privilege of using it for the weekend! Must be serving some great champagne.

Back to the racing. Christian Horner is said to be re-evaluating the benefit of qualifying given Mark Webber's great drive in China. He is probably not alone, and I heard the Radio Le Mans boys talking about just this last week. It is another NASCAR type situation where your qualifying position does not really matter as long as you stay out of trouble. So, the fight might be to see who can go slowest in Q1 so you miss out but conserve your tires. Reminds me of a slow bicycle race. Or do the three sessions on one set of hards? Doesn't sound like F1 to me.

Hello everyone, missed you yesterday but I was at an event in San Diego, driving a Lamborghini Superleggera and Aston Rapide. All very nice and not on a track.

So Vettel is on pole again and by a big margin, but why did he sit in the car so long after qualifying? Webber's qualifying was a complete disaster, and going by the last two races he is going to have trouble staying out of trouble and moving up the field, especially if the KERS is not working and the car is now in parc ferme. Hard to see how the McLarens are going to beat Vettel on this pace unless he has a problem. Rosberg looked good through practice and qualifying, as did Michael, which is encouraging, it would be good to see Nico up there and challenging. The Ferraris are way off the pace again, but can they repeat their Malaysian trick in the race? Lewis played it canny and kept a set of softs for the race to avoid last weeks problems. I discovered the problem with my recording the sessions, SPEED are coding the broadcast so it can't be recorded on DVD, VCR works OK but of course the quality sucks. Does anyone else have this problem?

Still on F1, it seems that HRT have found enough pace to avoid the nasty 107% rule, so long as Vettel does not feel like turning it on in Q1. Pirelli came out prior to the event to say that the cooler conditions should result in fewer "marbles." Well not from what I saw after just 15 minutes of Q1 when presumably they were mostly using the hard tire.

Alexander Rossi won the FR3.5 race at Motorland Aragon, onward and upward. He has joined the Lotus, the Malaysian one's young driver group. That court case is supposed to have a verdict handed down this week.

The ALMS race is at Long Beach with two, yes 2, LMP cars, four of the spec series challenge cars and then the GTs. Oh how the mighty have fallen. Scott Tucker's two LMP2 cars did not set a qualifying time so will they race? There are really only 16 cars that should be out there aside of the grid fillers. Thank goodness for GT. Not that you can watch it anyway.

Montezemolo has continued his war of words with a warning Ferrari will stay in F1 as long as it is not "artificial" which he considers it currently is, mentioning that in 2012 the Concorde Agreement runs out. Pit Pass also has a piece about Mercedes and a breakaway series, which PP believes is never going to happen. Bernie has been to have a nice chat with the German Authorities and all seems to be well apparently, but Pit Pass has more on this. They have some very good sources or excellent researchers. Go to http://pitpass.com

David Coulthard stated the obvious, China is not interested in F1, and Malya said of India getting interested it was like playing cricket in Italy. Nice one.

Checa again took pole at the Assen WSBK round, with the BMWs surprisingly off the pace.

A bit of silliness to start the day, not much else going on. Teams in China for the F1 GP, and Glock is worried that the Virgin may not qualify here. He is even suggesting that the quick teams might use the softs in Q1 just to make sure. He obviously is not feeling the love.

Red Bull reportedly not sure about using KERS here, again, and there is even a suggestion that the radio message to Vettel in Malaysia to turn his off was just mischief as he did not slow down. Not that he was really trying being a second a lap slower than the fastest lap set by team mate Webber. Mark shared some Australian vernacular with reporters in China who dared to suggest he was playing Eddie Irvine to Schumacher. Nice one Mark.

Pirelli are defending the amount of "marbles" on the track from their tires, saying it is normal for tires to wear and put rubber on the track. Yes but it usually goes on the surface to help grip, not roll up in big balls to be thrown around. There is no evidence of tracks "rubbering in" as they used to. There is a piece in Motor Sport this week where Franchiti went to the F1 test to see his cousin Paul di Resta and witnessed a trial start. Loads of wheelspin and tire smoke, but when the car had gone no black marks on the road!

In the same edition Nigel Roebuck has a great article on politics in sport and the Bahrain situation. As I said Bernie cannot say F1 has nothing to do with politics when politicians are voting to pay most of his fees. Despite mutterings from the Crown Prince that things have settled down there and we can think about a new date, read Pit Pass web site,

http://www.pitpass.com/fes_php/pitpass_news_item.php?fes_art_id=43353

This makes for salutary reading.

Rumors circulating that all is not well at Williams, how can it be, share price dropping with their finishing places. Sam Michael is nominated as the scapegoat. There are also mutterings about Mercedes, and Montezemolo cannot be happy over at Ferrari. Jean Todt apparently paid a visit to Ferrari Wednesday, trying to shut them up about the engine I would guess.

This weekend we have the F1 race from China and the World Superbike from the "cathedral," Assen, ALMS and Indycar at Long Beach, although the lack of news on that is deafening. Remember when Long Beach was as big as Indy?

Bret asked me to comment on the 107% rule so here goes. Long, long ago in a land far far away where I grew up there was a 107% rule for qualifying in F1. I don't know who decided that 7% was a safe number for cars to be on track in the race, why not 5% or 10%? And why only in the race? In the race they start from the back so they are out of the way for the most dangerous part, the start, and probably by the time the fast cars come around they will be broken down. No, we let them out all day Friday and Saturday when cars are circulating randomly. Is this smart? Anyway, 107% it was and it was set by the pole time, as we did not have today's three sessions. We still had cars qualifying on low fuel and with special engines for most of the time, so the bar was set pretty high.

Then sometime recently the rule went away. I do not recall specifically.  Perhaps it was because the powers that be thought all the cars were so quick it was not needed. Or perhaps because we only had twenty cars we could not afford to lose any to a silly safety rule. It is there presumably to keep cars that are too slow out of the way. Then we had the three part qualifying, and then last year the new teams, who were really slow. So we reinstate it. But how do we measure it? 107% of what? Not pole time, that is set in Q3, no it is 107% of the Q1 session time because that is when the slow cars are eliminated. But why should that matter? If we are worried about their speed relative to the fast cars, then it should be measured against Q2 or 3 when they are likely to have the soft tires on as they would in the race.

But now let's look at the race. Pole time in Malaysia was around 1 min 36 secs, but for most of the race the quick cars could only manage 1 min 42-44 sec laps. We saw a couple of 1 min 40 sec times, but these were the exception, but even with these everyone except the HRT's would qualify. If you took a typical 1 min 44 sec lap then HRT 's fastest lap was 5 seconds off the pace.

So what does it mean and do we care? Bret says that we watch F1 to see the best, and he is correct, but on that basis what of the Williams performance? F1 is a cruel sport, new teams get no help at all, and no sympathy, and perhaps that is how it should be. Bruce McLaren had to go through it, and so did Peter Sauber more recently. You could argue that HRT is not better than the best GP2 Teams, but the GP2 boys do not have to build their own cars. And so the argument could go on.

Let's get back to the real reason 107% is supposed to be there, safety. It is conceivable that cars that qualified OK develop a problem and cannot keep that pace in the race. What then? Presumably the Race Director will decide if it constitutes a danger to other competitors and black flag it, but on what basis? 107% of the others lap times? I doubt it, it will be a judgment call. So why have a number? I know in NASCAR we often see the "walking wounded" come back out after a wreck and try to earn points, and often they are black flagged as too slow. So why not just write a rule that says "in the opinion of the Race Director the car is not maintaining a safe speed?" If we cannot trust Charlie then we are in trouble.

That's the problem with rules, as soon as you write them there are lawyers looking for ways around them. Look at yesterday's piece about the F1 finances. Bernie said once that the less rules the better, then no one can argue about whether they broke it. We saw the crazy 6mm under the car rule, well those of us old enough did, where the cars were blatantly not 6mm off the track when racing, only in pit lane. Now we have the Red Bull flexible front wing that visibly touches the track and mechanics are seen repairing the bottom edge, but it meets the rule. Ferrari are going to build one, so it must exist. Why not write a rule that says "no part of the car may be seen to make contact with the track at any point during the race?" Then instead of test weights and carbon fiber lay up we just rerun the tape in the Stewards room, game over. But that would be too easy.

Well the Malaysian GP has been run and won, and I do not know how I feel about it. Vettel and Red Bull could get as boring as Schumacher. You have to admire them, they find a way to win even when the KERS does not work, but I will show my bias when I say it does not thrill me. Pirelli say their tires made for an interesting race, but call me a purist, but I don't find this fun to watch. As Michael said, this is a lottery, and he should know, he seemed more off than on.

The rain stayed away, but teased everyone to add to the lottery, and the DRS did work on occasions, but not always, so not sure about that either. We saw a lot of overtaking at other points around the track, mainly Turn 15, which tells me it is more about the track than messing about with the car. The slow cars seemed to stay out of the way, so well done, and Lotus actually did OK, so maybe we will see them mixing it in the mid-field. Williams had a terrible day, one to forget, while we ponder what would Kubica be doing with that Renault? Very odd steering column failure on the Petrov car, but then he did get very airborne thanks to the hump in the run-off. Not good.

So in all a dissatisfying race for me, but not really sure why. Lewis probably feels the same, and what was Alonso thinking? The pace of the Ferraris in the race was surprising, and Massa seems to have recovered his speed and determination. Mercedes are in trouble.

Bernie is reportedly trying to get the teams to oppose the 2013 engine, and Malaysia is pondering whether to renew after 2015. At least there was a crowd today, it was empty for Friday and Saturday which must be disheartening for the drivers, and the organizers.

Chip Ganassi did not quite sweep Barber, but won the Grand-Am race of course, and finished second and third in the Indycar. Not too shabby.