12/04/2010
FEATURE BY GLEN CROMPTON
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Following the snorey 2010 Bahrain GP, Bernie called for calm and cautioned against knee jerk reactions. I know because I quoted him in my second last article. He added, in no uncertain terms, that the teams should have no say in the rules and sporting regulations. Now I read that prior to the start of 2010 Malaysian GP, Bernie's earlier calls for calm evolved into calls to action, incongruously directed at the teams! To be fair I have relatives of Bernie's age and their medical carers tell me that at this time of life, short-term memory lapses and radical changes of opinion are not uncommon.
In the interest of objectivity here are the quotes of Bern I read from Malaysia. "Don't be fooled, we have been lucky with the rain. However, we have got to do something. For the first time the teams have realised that they have to do something about it. We don't need reverse grids, we just need more overtaking." Apparently when pressed for detail about exactly what needs to be done, Bern suggested "make the front wing smaller and get rid of the double diffuser." In a final hint of irony, he is supposed to have added the quip about deciding grid order; "Why not just get a beautiful girl in and draw out the drivers for the top 10?"
In Bahrain the podium - reliability not withstanding - was decided at the exit of turn one. Then came Melbourne and thanks to a little rain-sprinkle things seemed better. The predicted rain did not materialise for the Malaysian GP, though it did for qualifying which nicely mucked up the grid. Sadly, we were back to the turn-one-podium-decider.
Three races do not a season make but it's increasingly looking as if there won't be much interesting racing this year unless leaking clouds intervene and now it seems I can count upon Bernie as an ally - or is he counting on me?
Me, I don't think a formula requiring climatic unpredictability to generate good racing is a particularly good formula. Keyword is Formula. Because that's all F1 is; a formula, a set of rules. Sounds a lot flasher for the inclusion of the word "formula" in the name but it's just a set of rules. Think of any era in F1 and you have a corresponding set of rules - the formula - by which it was run.
That raises an interesting point about the history of F1 rulemaking - one I find most disturbing and which may explain why I find myself eternally critical of each season's rules and results. Two glaring points grab my attention. F1 rules have tended to be reactive rather than proactive and F1 rules have tended to be subtractive rather than innovative. Both accusations, should I be correct, lean towards a rather negative way of conducting things.
For those who are befuddled by my language, permit me to elucidate. The reactive boss is the one who waits until your disgruntlement causes you to hand in your resignation and then offers you praise and a pay rise. The proactive boss makes sure you never want to write that resignation. The subtractive legislator begins from the flawed position that they fully understand the paradigm and then sets about banning things that do not fit the flawed vision while the innovative legislator lays a path that accepts lesser skills than their subjects. In both cases, leadership based on vision is required and I have not seen that in F1 for a goodly long time.
It seems to me that the pinnacle of motorsport has an alarming history of reactive, subjective rulemaking. I've been regarding the sport for the better part of 30 years and here's a bit of a sad précis. Turbocharged engines - banned, Ground Effect aerodynamics - banned, Six-Wheeled Cars - banned, Ground-Effect-Sucker-Fans, banned really quickly, Active Ride Height - banned, Traction Control - banned, Anti-Lock-Brakes - banned, V12 Engines - banned, V10 Engines - banned, Automatic Gearboxes - banned, Slick Tyres - banned then un-banned, Refuelling - banned, un-banned then re-banned. Banned, banned, banned and banned.
I could go on but I risk boring myself as well as you. You could be forgiven for thinking the only requirement for an F1 rulemaker is an ability to ban anything that comes their way. Not that the seemingly endless banning of things is as a matter of fact bad or a portent of bad rulemaking. But before you go banning anything, it helps to know why you are banning it and what your original point was. Without consulting historical texts, I seem to recall that safety, reducing budgets, improving the spectacle of the sport and parity have been cited as the basis for reactive rules.
Me, I happen to think that if your want to ponce about claiming to be the pinnacle of motor sport, the routine banning of things does not help your cause - at least not if you didn't know what you were trying to achieve in the first place.
And that, hopefully, uncomfortably for some, raises the obvious, underlying question - what is F1 and what are the rules supposed to achieve? That is a question I cannot answer and I wonder if any F1 commercial rights holder or FIA president can. F1 enjoys, and has for some time, massive budgets. It attracts the brightest and best young minds of all engineering fields. It is the province of these bright minds to out-think the rules and they have done it with great success for decades.
I nearly choked with when I read that meetings were held in the paddock at Sepang to discuss important issues. If my sources are correct, those issues concerned the tyre supplier that would replace Bridgestone and, oh, I don't know, I yawned off into disinterest as soon as I realised that nothing being discussed was going to improve F1 as a viewing spectacle. Hang on, now I remember, the other big issue is supposed to have been F1's green credentials. I hear there was talk of resurrecting KERS despite its voluntary abandonment being the one of the few things F1 teams have been able to agree upon in years. F1 and green credentials still makes me roar with laughter. Cars burning fossil fuels at a rate of more than a gallon to the mile and whose administrators want to get on the green wagon? PRICELESS!
So why, what, when, where and how are F1 rules made? Pretty good question and I have no good answer.
At the top of the theoretical tree is the FIA. Much of the inner workings of the FIA - the means by which they elect, appoint and administrate themselves and their premier sport, F1, are not are things members of the common public have access to. My complaints apropos transparency not withstanding, logic should decree that this is the supreme rule-making body of motorsport and particularly F1. Sucks to be us but, like I said, it ain't that simple.
Next comes the contractual deal between the FIA and whatsoever commercial incarnation of Bernie currently owns the commercial rights of Formula One. Last I heard, the FIA had signed over those rights to a company run by a man well into his second century of life, for a century. At the time, I questioned the logic and have been wont to repeat my concerns at every opportunity. Unsurprisingly what, if any, power this gives the commercial rights holder over the rules of F1 is yet another matter F1 fans do not have access to.
Thirdly there are the teams. Their power supposedly stems from something called The Concorde Agreement. The odd press release suggests that the teams do have some kind of say in the way F1 is run. As far as I can tell, the document named for the Heathrow airport suite in which was hammered out is a tripartite agreement between F1 teams, the FIA and the commercial rights holder. I gather that merely sighting this document binds the reader to impossible levels of secrecy and signing it multiplies the obligation. We poor, dedicated fans upon whose whims all F1 commercial values are based, are not likely to read an authentic copy of the current Concorde Agreement anytime soon.
When push comes to shove, we fans don't really have any idea who best to address our complaints to. I have a sinister feeling that this suits all the parties. The FIA can shirk responsibility for the tedium of recent years, citing the teams as culprits. Bernie gets to blame the teams. The teams get to mumble about the FIA and Bernie. And the FIA, in theory, could blame Bernie although the FIA never seems to do so; which might be regarded as a bit of a no-brainer from an organisation dopey enough to have signed its commercial rights for a century to him.
So when it comes down to it not much is known about the way F1 is run. Like I said, I have a feeling this suits all the guilty parties. Week to week, month to month and year to year, all concerned can finger-point while nothing ever really changes and, under the present arrangements, probably never will.
I have pointed out many times that duping long suffering fans is one thing, duping sponsors is a whole other game. In simple, commercial terms, F1's current trajectory - a trajectory with dwindling viewers as a harsh harbinger - reaches a logical, commercial conclusion. At present, sponsors can still expect to receive better value for their F1 spend than directly buying television air time in the many territories to which F1 is broadcast. But on present form there will come a time in the near future when F1 is not interesting enough any more to attract television airtime. At that point, sponsors will depart and the sport will implode back into a sporting backwater. No amount of fan-duping or clever deflection of responsibility will offset that fact.
Regard the current controversies of F1. McLaren have a tricky gadget - the so-called F-duct which gives a straight line speed advantage. Red Bull and perhaps others are said to be running systems said to modify ride heights irrespective of fuel loads. Other teams are either bleating or copying depending on budgets.
Were F1 well run, a single, supreme body would declare these things either bad or acceptable. As it is, nebulous nothings have come from the FIA, statements promising a long hard look have been issued by the commercial rights holder and, three races into the season, nothing has been done and nothing has been promised on either front. You can call it what you like but I call it bad administration. Bad administration in a sport that is losing value by the week because it is not interesting to television audiences.
Were I in Bernie's shoes, I'd be forgetting the ruses and doing all I could to hose down the rule-bending and get audiences back. Indeed I'd be doing my best to get rid of the smoke and the mirrors and I'd be flat-out spanking the FIA and the teams into reality. In fact I think that's what his most recent press soundbites were about. Let's hope it's not too little too late and that Bern still has the power to make it work.