11/05/2017
NEWS STORY
As FOM seeks to level the playing field in an attempt to make the sport more competitive and create the means whereby even a minnow outfit might pull off a shock win, technical boss Ross Brawn has admitted that he is looking to NASCAR for inspiration.
Seeking a "change of mind set", the Briton tells Autosport. "In NASCAR, you can go and look at someone else's car, strip it apart and see what's in it.
"That's their way of keeping everyone loosely competitive," he continues. "No one objects, no one has a problem. It's a philosophy that should be thought about."
Brawn is citing the NASCAR practice whereby post-event the cars are taken to NASCAR's R&D facility in Concord, North Carolina, and inspected, with not only rival teams in attendance but the procedure streamed online for fans to access.
"It's an open-door policy," explains Chad Little, Managing Director, Technical Inspection/Officiating at NASCAR. "So any other team can come and observe.
"They're parked right next to each other just like they are in the garage; nobody covers anything up. When the parts come off they're laid there for anybody else to see."
The thought of F1 teams, which go to almost laughable lengths in order to prevent rivals getting the merest glimpse of their cars, allowing rivals such access is hard to imagine, far less having their secrets on show to the watching world.
Allowing rivals such access and therefore giving them the opportunity to copy is surely only another step towards the one-make series that some at the very top of the sport have dreamed of for some time.
While he admits to being a poacher turned gamekeeper, surely this is a concept that would cause Brawn, an admitted purist, to lose sleep at night.
Fact is, such a move would damage the very integrity of Formula One.
In the real world, thanks to the political indoctrination that tells everyone they are winners, people subsequently discover the harsh reality that in fact not everybody can be a winner.
In the same way that there is no room for a sense of entitlement in the real world, so it goes in the F1 paddock.
While one can understand FOM’s reasoning – in wanting to level the playing field – this is not the way to go about it.