I’ve not watched F1 for a while, because the toxic anti-McLaren bias of Mosley and the FIA made it a pain in the butt. That, and Hamilton’s habit of coming unstuck under pressure – and he almost blew it last year!
I was, though, looking forward to a “clean” season this year, with new teams, no aggro, a clutch of young drivers hitting their stride (and the hope of Massa reinforcing his No. 1 position at Ferrari, a sport with too few nice guys at the top), but the diffuser farce has put paid to that. Rules should be drawn up clearly enough that they are not subject to creative interpretation, and enforced rigorously for all. A minority of teams should not
be permitted to bend the rules to the disadvantage of the majority.
The matter has gone to the court of appeal, to be heard on April 14 – this is going to be tricky, as FIA favourites Ferrari don’t have diffusers, and they’d benefit from them being declared illegal. However, McLaren will also benefit – can the FIA bring itself to do anything that will benefit a team it loathes, even if not to do so penalises its blue-eyed boys?
That, the Ecclestone/FOTA dispute (if you’ve missed it, FOTA claim that they’re owed millions of pounds from commercial), rights revenue and the fact that the FIA will undoubtedly find more ways to screw with McLaren and favour Ferrari, as usual, before the season is over (not to mention McLaren’s inadequate car – how the hell did they screw up so badly?), have ruined the season for me before it’s properly begun. Personally, I think the diffusers will be declared illegal in an attempt to destabilise FOTA.
Also, in F1, far too much power and influence is vested in just two people, and its deeply-rooted problems will not be resolved while Ecclestone and Mosley remain. Or until the teams have had enough, and go off to do their own thing – long threatened, but maybe it’s time now to make the threats reality. F1, or whatever it becomes, needs a fresh, and clean, and above all unbiased, start.
I have a horrible feeling, too, that deaths or serious injury will result from the KERS system. We’ve all seen F1 cars all but disintegrate in massive shunts, leaving little but the drivers’ cell intact (not least in Australia), and the massive amount of energy stored in a flywheel (is anyone actually using that system, I wonder – Williams were said to favour it pre-season, but their website is mute on the subject), may find itself catastrophically released in a split second, to the detriment of all concerned, including the driver sitting in front of it, not to mention the risks from the very high voltages of the electrical version, with the driver actually sitting on top of it.
KERS is supposed to demonstrate just how F1 technology can spill over into road cars, but under what circumstances, on the road, could you safely and legally use such a massive burst of energy? Not to mention the cost of the system and the maintenance.
I can see that the electrical version of KERS could have beneficial ramifications for electric road cars, putting energy back into the batteries under braking, but the flywheel version, no, I can’t see it going anywhere, and people more technologically knowledgeable than I am have described KERS as a very expensive trip down a blind alley, as far as F1 is concerned.
