Bernie’s at it again…
The wonderful Mr Ecclestone (or perhaps not so wonderful - his wife is divorcing him, after all) has been spouting off about Formula One again today. It’s the same old story, really. Every now and then he pipes up with some lame idea, or an outrageous statement and then when he’s called out on it, will flatly deny that he ever said that.
Today’s statement covers his idea for a new scoring system. Instead of having points for the first eight places, and then the World Championship goes to the driver with the most points, he’s advocating that gold, silver and bronze medals be awarded and the Championship goes to the driver with the most wins. He says it’s to encourage drivers to try for the win, rather than settle for second or third place. He wants to put death-or-glory ahead of reliability and consistency.
In one respect, you can see where he’s coming from. Formula One is completely boring to watch unless there’s the chance of big smash-up that’s going to shake things up; most of the excitement this season was caused by crashes and safety car periods rather than tight, close racing and lots of over-taking. Bernie says that he’s “fed up with people talking about there being no overtaking”. The trouble is, he also says that no overtaking is “nothing to do with the circuits or the cars” and there is where he’s wrong.
Of course, he’s not going to blame the circuits because he chooses them. If he were to blame the circuits, it would be like blaming himself for the bore-fest that Formula One now is. Oh wait, it is your fault Bernie. You were the one that wanted to add Valenica and Singapore to the calendar. Two more street circuits that offer even less overtaking opportunity than Monaco, but without any of the glamour or tradition.
And if it’s nothing to do with the cars, why are all the technical regulations being changed in 2009 to try and enable the cars to travel closer to each other, and overtake in corners?
Under Bernie’s new scoring system, McLaren’s Lewis Hamilton would not have been champion this year because Ferrari’s Felipe Massa (controversially) had more wins. Is it possible that Bernie’s new scheme is yet another veiled attempt at making sure the sport is geared towards Ferrari winning everything? Sadly, I would not be at all surprised.
Unfortunately, I don’t think that Formula One can be fixed with the tinkering that Bernie, Max and the FIA keep doing. It has lost it’s way; it’s no longer good entertainment, but is also no longer a development arena. All of the restrictions that have been placed on the technology the teams can use means that there are not going to be any new ideas coming out of Formula One for the foreseeable future. And that’s wrong; it should be a hot-bed of innovation.
If you’re going to take that away, then you need to add extra spectacle and that isn’t happening either. The drivers (or car-pointers as Hamster would have it) don’t have a personality to share between them, all the action happens in the pits or in the stewards room (unless there’s an accident) and the races go on for far too long.
Years ago, I always used to look forward to the new season of Formula One but no more. There’s nothing there to interest me anymore - not even the prospect of the coverage moving back to the BBC and finally getting rid of James Allen is enough to get me to make any special effort to see any of next year’s races.
It’s time for Formula One to hang up it’s crash helmet.
Brief notes
I’ve been a bit remiss recently, and haven’t been blogging as much as I used to. Yes, the Song Of The Day feature continues unabated but where’s all the other good stuff? Well, to try and put that right, here’s another in my series of Brief Notes. This one is a bunch of news stories that have caught my eye recently, for one reason or another.
File under tolerance
A number of stories over the last few days have highlighted the lack of tolerance of other people’s views / lifestyles / religions / whatever that exists in society today. Which, really, is not a very cheerful thought and doesn’t inspire hope for the future.
A priest in London has come under fire for suggesting that all gay people should have their backsides tattooed with the words “Sodomy can seriously damage your health”. He maintains that he was being satirical, attacking the militant promotion of homosexuality by groups such as Outrage. The type of viewpoint that insists everyone is gay, they just don’t know it yet.
While Rev Mullen’s words might have been a little ill-thought out, is his stand against militant gay groups necessarily wrong? Shouldn’t those on both sides of this argument be able to see the other’s point of view?
Priests are not having a good time of it just lately; Yvonne Hobson, a parish priest in Cornwall, has received death threats simply because she’s a woman priest. Not exactly the peace and love that religion supposedly teaches us, is it? Why does the fact that Ms Hobson is a woman affect her ability to be a priest, or her ability to believe in God? I know they can be a bit insular down there in Kernow, but even so…
Once again, Muslims are getting their knickers in a twist - this time over a novel. Seems that we can’t say anything about their faith - good or bad - without them wanting to firebomb the infidels. As with so many religions, the fundamentalist view seems to be the only one that hits the headlines, and the millions of peace-loving Muslims across the world are tarred with the brush of their violent, bomb-happy brethren.
Every religion has been guilty of this at some point in history, but the modern world offers much greater capacity for death and destruction than existed at the time of the Crusades. Again, isn’t religion, belief in God, supposed to be about peace, love and understanding?
Even Corrie has had to pander to minority opinion recently, after they received complaints about a Scottish character suggesting that he could never support Rangers. Apparently, Rangers fans - being the delicate, sensitive souls that they are - felt hard done by over this, and Corrie bosses have changed future scripts to remove similar references.
Two things about this: first, it’s only television - it’s not real! Second, why is television programming being changed according to the wishes of a very small percentage of the viewing population? I don’t watch Corrie and couldn’t care less about Rangers, but what worries me is the trend we seem to have at the moment to not want to upset anyone, however much of a minority they might be. TV is already bland enough, if we continue on like this there won’t anything left to watch, no programmes out there to question what is happening in the world, no hope for the future.
We’re all green
Starbucks have come under fire again (they must be used to it by now), this time for wasting millions of litres of water every day. Apparently, staff are not allowed to turn off taps that are used to clean spoons; this helps to reduce the growth of bacteria and helps the global chain to achieve health and safety standards. I’ve never been in a Starbucks (because I have a kettle at home and know how to make a cup of coffee for myself), but I can’t imagine that the experience is worth the waste of so much water.
Lung disease is set to kill 83 million people in China over the next 30 years, according to a recent study. Mainly because of widespread use of wood burning stoves for heating and cooking and the fact that the Chinese smoke one third of all the cigarettes in the world.
China has a population of just over 1.3 billion people, crammed into a land mass of about 9.3 billion square kilometres (as opposed to the US where 303 million people live in about 9.1 billion square kilometres), so you’d think they might be glad of the extra room.
Got him at last
We all knew it had to happen some time; OJ has finally been thrown in jail. Not, as you might expect, because they’ve found some way to find him guilty of his wife’s murder after all these years, but because he committed an armed robbery.
But we all know that really he’s been put away because no-one ever believed he was innocent of his wife’s murder.
Not our fault
Apparently, the fact that they shot an innocent man seven times in the head, on a crowded London tube train, is not the fault of the officers with the guns, nor of the Metropolitan police as a whole. It’s the fault of the nation for not preventing the 21 July bomb attempts of which Mr de Menezes was suspected. And, just to make sure that we all feel re-assured, it has been said this sort of thing could happen again. Is DAC Cressida Dick living up to her name?
And finally, a Max Moseley story
Max has been in the news again, saying that Formula One needs to drastically cut costs if it wants to remain credible. Which I think is a bit much, really, coming from the one man who has done more than any other person (except perhaps for Bernie Ecclestone, who insists on taking the sport to tracks that even Ferrari don’t like) to make Formula One a laughing stock across the world.
If Max wants to make F1 credible again, then he should stand down as president of the FIA.
Bernie, what are you doing to us?
With much fanfare and publicity, Formula One has today had its first night race at the new Singapore street circuit. Much has been made of the added excitement that night racing brings to the sport, how fantastic the circuit is and what a great day it has been for the sport.
The main force behind getting a night race, and another street circuit, has been F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone. For some reason of his own - probably something to do with European television rights, as if the man wasn’t rich enough already - Bernie has decided that night races are the way to go. The same thing was tried with the opening race of the MotoGP season this year.
Having watched both the MotoGP and now the F1 race under lights, I find that I have to ask the question “Why?”. I just don’t get what all the fuss is about. After all, it’s not like they’re racing in the dark; there are so many floodlights around the place so that the cars can be seen on TV that they might as well not bother and just hold the race in the daytime.
“Oh, but it makes it more exciting” I hear you cry. Which is a nice idea, but unfortunately isn’t borne out by what actually happened in the race. Singapore is a street circuit, like Monaco. It’s narrow, there are no real straights and there are only about two places where an overtake can be attempted. So, basically, it’s a procession from start to finish. Yes, today’s race was full of incidents and the pole sitter didn’t win - but those incidents were either in the pits (Massa’s fuel rig still being attached as he drove off) or caused by accidents and subsequent safety car sessions (Piquet, Sutil).
F1 has been processional for quite some time, but there are circuits that do at least have some chance of giving us some racing. The street circuits don’t do that. Monaco was under threat not so long ago because it doesn’t make for good racing, and was only saved (I think) because so many of the drivers are based there. But at least it’s pretty to look at. But now we’ve got this new Singapore circuit, which is even worse from a racing point of view and most certainly isn’t pretty to look at - most of the time, it looked like the cars were driving round a multi-storey car park.
Yet, this is apparently what Bernie wants for the sport. He’s also added a new street circuit at Valencia this year (didn’t see that race, but apparently it was no better) and has said he wants more. And he wants more of the long haul races to become night races, too. What he should be trying to do is move the races to proper circuits where cars can overtake each other and we don’t have to rely on incidents and accidents to give us some entertainment.
Brands Hatch summer
Over the summer (such as it was), me and a good friend paid a few visits to Brands Hatch to watch some of the smaller, club meetings that get held there. Pretty much every weekend there’s something good happening at Brands and, if you’ve never been, a New Era bike meeting or an Autoglymm Historic meeting are excellent ways to experience the noise and the spectacle of motorsport really close-up.
I took a number of pictures and video clips each time we went and I’ve been meaning to get round to editing the videos together and putting them up on YouTube. I’ve finally done it, and the clip above is just one of 10 or so clips that are now available on my YouTube channel, which you can find at http://www.youtube.com/user/wolfieb1968
You’ll have to forgive the quality of the video - I’m no cameraman, and I was using a stills camera. But I think you’ll get an idea of just what an adrenalin rush Brands Hatch can be.
FIA at it again
This story adds more fuel to the fire of the inconsistent nature of rulings by the FIA, the ruling body of Formula One motorsport.
In case you’re not aware, earlier in the year the FIA fined McLaren-Mercedes - who were then leading the Constructors Championship - $100 million and excluded them from the Constructors competition for being in possession of technical information from Ferrari, their major championship rival. It was not proved that McLaren had used any of the information in their possession to later their car or gain a performance advantage and Ferrari were shown to have been just as deeply involved as McLaren but only McLaren were punished.
It was later shown that Ferrari had run an illegal car in the first race of the season, but no punishment was made. If - as happened with Honda a couple of season ago - they had been docked their points, Kimi Raikkonen would not have been world champion this year.
McLaren are also going to be under intense scrutiny for 2008, with FAI President Max Moseley saying that “Finding something will not be easy. On the other hand, there are sources we are going to deploy who will give us as good a chance as its possible to have to find it.” Which says to me that McLaren might as well pack up and go home, as they haven’t got a hope of not getting penalised for something this season.
But now Renault are the subject of the FIA’s inconsistency. It seems that they obtained McLaren techincal data back when an ex-McLaren employee joined the team. It has been suggested that they did use the information gained to alter their car, but - apart from being found guilty of the charges brought against them - they have not been punished. They did the same thing McLaren were accused of, there was apparently more evidence against them, and they get away without punishment.
I’ve become very cynical about Formula One, the FIA and Max Moseley over the course of the 2007 season and it seems to me that everything done in the sport is done to serve the interests of Ferrari. I’m sure Max Moseley would argue that this is not the case, but lets see him prove it by having a bit of consistency with the application of the rules. Otherwise, the 2008 season is not going to be worth watching.
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