Comments re-enabled. Expect some more posts soon

04 May 2006 - 18:21

The Pivot team have released a new version of Pivot (the blogging software the powers this site). After virtually every Pivot user saw a massive influx of comment and trackback spam, they've rolled the spam protection features that were previously add-ons into the main package. I don't know how well it will work but we'll soon see as I've re-enabled comments and trackbacks for all the blogs on exaflop.org.

As a consequence of the spam-protection measures, commenters will need to have Javascript enabled on their browsers in order to leave comments. If you don't know what this means, you're probably OK - Javascript is enabled by default on most computers. 

Also, put off by the spam situation and also distracted by a 'heavy to industrial-strength' World of Warcraft addiction, I haven't posted for a while. Don't worry, I still have plenty to say! Expect more posts soon, meanwhile please accept my thanks for reading this site if you are subscribed to my RSS feed and haven't given up by now :)

/ three comments / § ¶

My take on Schumi-gate

27 May 2006 - 19:42

As I'm sure the whole world knows by now, Michael Schumacher was stripped of his pole-setting time (and all his other times) at the Monaco Grand Prix by the stewards after they found that he had deliberately impeeded other drivers by stopping on the circuit. It took the stewards eight hours to come to that conclusion even though most everyone outside of Ferrari was thinking it as soon Alonso passed Schumacher's stricken car and then the chequred flag and failed to beat his time.

The first question is: Was Schumacher's incident at Rascasse a deliberate attempt to stop Alonso beating his pole time, or just an accident that couldn't have happened at a worse time for both parties? If it's deliberate and goes unpunished Alonso loses out on what was almost certainly going to be a pole setting lap. If it was a genuine accident and is punished (as it now has been), Schumacher has not only been sent to the back of the grid (which at Monaco is as good as disqualifying him), but he also has the stigma of being found guilty of cheating by the race authorities, possibly unfairly.

The second question is: If Schumacher is guilty, what is a suitable punishment? For not paying enough attention during the crowded qualifying sessions of 2006, several drivers have been penalised by losing one or more of their times. That's a fine punishment for not paying attention or even for being a bit stubborn about letting another driver past. But to know you are on pole and then block the track so nobody can better your time? If it was premeditated, that's got to be worth at least a one race ban, possibly more. Remember that Schumacher himself was found guilty of trying to end Jacques Villeneuve's race in the 1997 season finalé and as a punishment was essentially disqualified from the whole season by having all his points removed. Shouldn't Michael Schumacher have at least some of his points removed, or be prevented from scoring points via a one-or-more race ban if he really did what he's been accused of? 

To me the punishment by the stewards smacks of: we think he's guilty as hell, but we can't really prove it, so we'll give him the harshest penalty we can without him being able to appeal. [Removal of qualifying times can't be appealed - if it could it would be a useless punishment since any useful appeals procedure would take more time than the period between qualifying and the race]. 

My personal opinion is that the incident wasn't premeditated as some have made out. I think he did make a genuine error in locking up his front brakes going into Rascasse and you could see from the in-car footage that he made several attempts to regain control of the car at all cost to the lap he was on and the lap he was (according to Ferrari) about to start. BUT, realising he'd screwed up, he made a very poor attempt at removing his car from the corner. Another thing you can see from the in-car is that the front suspension isn't damaged in any way - the wheel barely touches the soft barrier there, if at all. As far as I could see there was no need to reverse at all. It was a in-the-heat-of-the-fight decision to do something that he wouldn't have considered doing in advance. That's what I think happened in 1997 as well - there was no master plan to crash into Villeneuve if he tried to pass, but as he saw his first title slipping away he figured he could make it look like an accident. It didn't look like an accident and it didn't have any effect other than making him look like a cheat, but that's easy to see in the cold light of day.

This story is mana from heaven for everyone who comments on Formula 1 of course. Qualifying for the 2006 Monaco Grand Prix will be just the start of a very long saga. Ferrari will almost certainly try and get some justice (as they see it) and the name of their start driver cleared, even though there's no space in the sporting regulations for that to happen. There will likely be calls from the other drivers to have Schumacher removed as the head of the Grand Prix Drivers Association and given his history both proven (Jerez 1997) and unproven (Adelaide 1994), it's a wonder that he got to be head of the predominatly safety and driving standards concern. Still, this was just the spice this season needed :)

/ three comments / § ¶

Fancy an F1 joyride?

10 May 2006 - 18:09

Paul Stoddart's Minardi company is offering rides in their two-seater F1 cars to the general public for the first time this August. Previously they rides were generally only available to competition and charity auction winners with the rest going to corporate hospitality clients. Michael Schumacher is known to have hired a Mindardi two-seater to give his friends and family rides around the Ferrari's Fiorano test track (this was before Ferrari built their own three-seater car), but then money is no object to him.

The prices start at 2,000 Euros for a single lap, rising to 4,500 Euros for three laps. That seems a bit steep for a ride in the back seat of a car where you can't even look forwards due to the driver's head-restraint. Consider that for a similar amount you can get a full day of training in various single-seaters, culminating in several laps of driving a real F1 car around a proper race circuit yourself. Granted, not everyone wants to drive an F1 car themselves, but to sell this as the ultimate F1 experience is pushing things a bit. The cars will be piloted by the Hungarian mobile chicane, Zsolt Baumgartner, Patrick "not enough funding for a full season" Friesacher, as well as Chanoch "purchaser of the most expensive track day in history" Nissany and Stoddart himself.

If you've got money to burn more details are available on the Mindardi f1x2 webiste. While I'm on the subject I should mention that while Paul Stoddart did indeed sell the actual company known as Mindardi to Red Bull (to become Scuderia Toro Rosso), he retained the pre-2005 cars and the rights to the Minardi name in the deal. Both of those were superfluous to STR, though I wonder why he didn't also keep the 2005 cars since STR have never run them - always apparently planning to use the ex-Red Bull, ex-Jaguar chassis for 2006.

I should also mention a wonderful quote from Giancarlo Minardi from the end of last season which reveals entirely how he feels about the Stoddart era of ownership. Talking about his sadness that the Minardi name would disappear from Formula 1 with the sale of the team to Red Bull, he said:

"I made one particular error five years ago. I didn't follow the advice I was given by a man with whom I had a relationship in the early seventies, long before getting into F1.

"That man told me: 'Minardi, sell your stock, sell whatever you want, but don't ever sell your name.' That man's name was Enzo Ferrari. Instead [of selling it] I gave the name away for free."

(link to the original news posting for autosport.com subscribers)

/ No comments / § ¶

FIA revoke Ide's superlicence

10 May 2006 - 07:49

I guess everyone's read the news by now: The FIA have revoked Yuji Ide's superlicence and as such he will take no further part in the 2006 Formula 1 season. Former Renault test driver Franck Montagny will replace Ide for this weekend's Spanish Grand Prix as he did at the European Grand Prix last weekend. Super Aguri are looking for a permanent replacement.

There are a range of views on this. Some, most vocally Kimi Raikkonen, will be glad to see the back of Ide. Not only was he slow, but he caused a serious crash in Imola and memorably blocked Rubens Barrichello's qualifying lap in Australia. Others will view this as unduly hash treatment from the FIA - other driver's have been slower than their team mates and caused more accidents without having their licences suspended or revoked before.

Unfortunately for Yuji Ide, he found himself in the unenviable position of being a slow driver in a very slow car. In that situation it makes all your mistakes even more evident. At the same time, the Super Aguri strategy of putting little fuel in the cars at the start of the race in order to try and make up places on the first lap was always going to lead to him being involved in more "drama" than necessary. If you know you're at the back of the grid you put more fuel in at the start, not less.

While it was the team's strategy that got Ide unwanted attention, I think the team's actions have finally cost him his superlicence. It involves a lot of reading between the lines of the news stories surrounding this driver, but let me explain.

• On Sunday, 23rd April, Yuji Ide is repremanded by the stewards for causing the accident that put himself and Christijan Albers out of the San Marino Grand Prix.
• The following Wednesday, Super Aguri announce they have signed Franck Montagny as their 3rd/Friday driver.
• On Thursday, 4th May (one day before the San Marino Grand Prix practice starts), Super Aguri announce that they have replaced Ide with Montagny for the race following "advice offered by the FIA". That I believe is a code for "the FIA threatened to suspend Ide's superlicence if he had another bad race". That may not actually be the case, but I don't believe the FIA is usually involved in advising teams on personel matters - Bernie does occasionally, but not the FIA.
• On the Saturday, a story appears on Autosport.com, stating that Super Aguri would like to put Ide back in the race seat for the Spanish Grand Prix the following weekend, but that they are waiting for "further clarification from the FIA".
  
• The today, they announce that Ide's licence is revoked and that he will not drive for them again this year.

Now if the FIA wanted to punish Ide for the Albers crash, they took a very long time about it, so I don't think that's the reason, not the direct reason anyway. The FIA's advice of the 4th May was that Ide would sit out races until he'd had some practice in private test sessions. They team stated that clearly and admitted that it wasn't idea that they hadn't been able to offer the driver any significant pre-season testing due to the rush to get the cars ready. Super Aguri have not been able to run any test mileage since then and yet they state in the press that they want to put Ide back in the car the following week.

Maybe they thought the FIA just wanted them to punish Ide by leaving him out for one race instead of taking their "advice" at face value. How beligerant they may have got in their communications with the FIA over the matter might also have come into it. If Super Aguri insisted that they would run Ide in the race this weekend, that could have been enough for the FIA to settle the matter for good by revoking his superlicence.

And that is what I think has happened because the more straightforward explanation (that the FIA revoked Ide's licence as a direct result of the Imola incident) doesn't seem plausible given the delay. And the conspiracy theories, that Super Aguri wanted to get rid of Ide but didn't want to get flamed in the Japanese press and so got the FIA to do their dirty work, don't add up either.

/ No comments / § ¶

Everyone wants to change qualifying. Again.

09 May 2006 - 19:00

I don't want to seem like qualifying is the only subject I'm willing to talk about, but I have to write about something and this seems to be the most controversial subject in F1 now.

In the week before the European Grand Prix threre were stories in the press about how the drivers wanted the final qualifying session changed so that they didn't have to tour round mindlessly burning fuel because of the stupid rules. In an interview on ITV before the start of the race, his Bernieness initially declared that he was delighted with the new qualifying system (he did have the decency to point out this was because it was his idea). When questioned about the fuel burnoff drudgery of the final session, he did then admit that he hated that part and that it wasn't his idea to do that. Bernie also declared that qualifying on race fuel had been an experiment to try and jumble the grid a bit and that with the knockout system it was no longer necessary to do that.

I've always been against all completely artificial "jumbling" of the grid - if it's so important for it to be random, why not dispose of qualifying altogether and draw positions from a hat or start in a different order at each race on a rota system? That would save even more money, just like setting up the rules so teams don't run more than a few laps on Fridays does. It would also have a similarly detrimental effect on attendence at races, but of course I'm not serious. It is at least interesting, if not absolutely important, to know which car/driver combination is fastest outside of the race situation where so many compromises come into effect. Although we still don't necessarilly have the fastest driver start on pole with the current rules, we do at least have all 22 cars going as fast as they can earlier in the qualifying hour.

As far as changing the current qualifying rules within this season - that would require the agreement of all 11 teams - not an easy thing to achieve, although they managed it last year by disposing of the agregate system part way through the season. There are a number of alternative rule changes I can think of that I'll go through in detail:- 

1. Allow all the cars to re-fuel as they see fit, both during and after qualifying.

This is what Bernie originally proposed. I wrote previously about how there is a race-fuel qualifying requirement in the final qualifying session due to objections from team bosses (read: Ron Dennis) that they'd already designed their cars with this in mind.

Pros: This would make the final 20 mins more like the old pre-2003 qualifying system. Cars wouldn't spend the whole time out on track, allowing drivers more of a chance to get a clear run and allowing TV viewers a better chance of seeing the qualifying lap live (something that didn't happen in Australia for example). Drivers would also be able to make more than one qualifying run without penalty as they could go out more than once and still be on an optimal fuel load each time. This would allow drivers to respond to each other's laps or save sets of tyres for the race by not going out in the dying minutes.

Cons:  Would jumble the grid less than both the single-lap system and the current system because drivers have more chances to get things right and find the true ultimate pace of their cars. Would also possibly be unfair on some teams depending on the size of their fuel cells (though I think it's been established in the races so far that most cars are similar).

2. Stick with the current re-fueling rules but shorten the session to 10 minutes.

I would call this option treating the symptoms instead of the disease. It would cut out most of the useless fuel-burning part of qualifying, but it would further force drivers towards only running one qualifying lap instead of having two attempts as most drivers have so far. In that sense it's an insane idea as we would be back to single-lap qualifying but with everyone attempting their qualifying lap at the same time.

Pros: Would eliminate most of the tedium and waste of the current system.

Cons: Would lead to driver's spending even less time actually trying to set a qualifying time. Would lead to massive track congestion at the end of the session and even less chance of the TV viewers seeing the winning lap live.

3. Qualify on race fuel, but don't give fuel credits.

Currently drivers are allowed to add some amount of fuel to the car after the qualifying session for each lap run in qualifying. I've discussed the reasons of how this convoluted system came to be previously but just to reiterate, there is a minimum time that each lap must be completed in otherwise the driver doesn't get fuel back for that lap. That is to stop dangerously slow driving in the interests of fuel conservation.

This proposal would do away with these so-called "fuel credits". Teams would still have to decide before the session how much fuel to add to the car and they would start the race with whatever is left at the end of the session.

Pros: Driver's wouldn't clog up the track and waste the first 15 mins of the session burning off fuel because they wouldn't be getting any back under this proposal.

Cons: So many...  This is another "back to single lap qualifying" proposal in effect. Although drivers would be able to make a second run if they screwed up, there would be a large incentive to make only one. If they planned to make two runs, the first would always be slower than necessary due to having more fuel on board. If they planned to make one run but needed to make a second they'd be eating into their race fuel (which might already be quite skinny if they were going for "saturday night glory"). This would lead to less on-track action and no head-to-head battles with drivers trading fastest laps. It would also add a powerful incentive to drive very slowly on in and out laps, causing danger to other drivers. It would also remove the current means of sanction against this (the removal of the fuel credit). OK, they could fine drivers for excessively slow speed and blocking, but it would be better if drivers didn't need to drive slowly in the first place.

Conclusion

It should be pretty obvious that I'm in favour of option 1. His original proposal for knock-out qualifying is one thing Bernie got right. The team owner(s) that objected to it first time around should now acknowlege the unpallatable consequences of the rules that were put in place instead and remove those objections. Do I see that actually happening though? Not likely. Options 2 and 3 are far more likely to be voted in, even though they would in many ways be even worse than what we have now.

Lastly I have to point out that there are still some people who actually think qualifying on race fuel is a good idea. I find it hard to understand how they could possibly feel that way, but like people voting Liberal Democrat or buying R&B records, it does happen. It is possible proposal 1 would be ignored because of that rather than because of the vested interests of Mr. Dennis. I do hope not though.

/ two comments / § ¶

My take on Schumi-gate

27 May 2006 - 19:42

As I'm sure the whole world knows by now, Michael Schumacher was stripped of his pole-setting time (and all his other times) at the Monaco Grand Prix by the stewards after they found that he had deliberately impeeded other drivers by stopping on the circuit. It took the stewards eight hours to come to that conclusion even though most everyone outside of Ferrari was thinking it as soon Alonso passed Schumacher's stricken car and then the chequred flag and failed to beat his time.

The first question is: Was Schumacher's incident at Rascasse a deliberate attempt to stop Alonso beating his pole time, or just an accident that couldn't have happened at a worse time for both parties? If it's deliberate and goes unpunished Alonso loses out on what was almost certainly going to be a pole setting lap. If it was a genuine accident and is punished (as it now has been), Schumacher has not only been sent to the back of the grid (which at Monaco is as good as disqualifying him), but he also has the stigma of being found guilty of cheating by the race authorities, possibly unfairly.

The second question is: If Schumacher is guilty, what is a suitable punishment? For not paying enough attention during the crowded qualifying sessions of 2006, several drivers have been penalised by losing one or more of their times. That's a fine punishment for not paying attention or even for being a bit stubborn about letting another driver past. But to know you are on pole and then block the track so nobody can better your time? If it was premeditated, that's got to be worth at least a one race ban, possibly more. Remember that Schumacher himself was found guilty of trying to end Jacques Villeneuve's race in the 1997 season finalé and as a punishment was essentially disqualified from the whole season by having all his points removed. Shouldn't Michael Schumacher have at least some of his points removed, or be prevented from scoring points via a one-or-more race ban if he really did what he's been accused of? 

To me the punishment by the stewards smacks of: we think he's guilty as hell, but we can't really prove it, so we'll give him the harshest penalty we can without him being able to appeal. [Removal of qualifying times can't be appealed - if it could it would be a useless punishment since any useful appeals procedure would take more time than the period between qualifying and the race]. 

My personal opinion is that the incident wasn't premeditated as some have made out. I think he did make a genuine error in locking up his front brakes going into Rascasse and you could see from the in-car footage that he made several attempts to regain control of the car at all cost to the lap he was on and the lap he was (according to Ferrari) about to start. BUT, realising he'd screwed up, he made a very poor attempt at removing his car from the corner. Another thing you can see from the in-car is that the front suspension isn't damaged in any way - the wheel barely touches the soft barrier there, if at all. As far as I could see there was no need to reverse at all. It was a in-the-heat-of-the-fight decision to do something that he wouldn't have considered doing in advance. That's what I think happened in 1997 as well - there was no master plan to crash into Villeneuve if he tried to pass, but as he saw his first title slipping away he figured he could make it look like an accident. It didn't look like an accident and it didn't have any effect other than making him look like a cheat, but that's easy to see in the cold light of day.

This story is mana from heaven for everyone who comments on Formula 1 of course. Qualifying for the 2006 Monaco Grand Prix will be just the start of a very long saga. Ferrari will almost certainly try and get some justice (as they see it) and the name of their start driver cleared, even though there's no space in the sporting regulations for that to happen. There will likely be calls from the other drivers to have Schumacher removed as the head of the Grand Prix Drivers Association and given his history both proven (Jerez 1997) and unproven (Adelaide 1994), it's a wonder that he got to be head of the predominatly safety and driving standards concern. Still, this was just the spice this season needed :)

/ three comments / § ¶

Fancy an F1 joyride?

10 May 2006 - 18:09

Paul Stoddart's Minardi company is offering rides in their two-seater F1 cars to the general public for the first time this August. Previously they rides were generally only available to competition and charity auction winners with the rest going to corporate hospitality clients. Michael Schumacher is known to have hired a Mindardi two-seater to give his friends and family rides around the Ferrari's Fiorano test track (this was before Ferrari built their own three-seater car), but then money is no object to him.

The prices start at 2,000 Euros for a single lap, rising to 4,500 Euros for three laps. That seems a bit steep for a ride in the back seat of a car where you can't even look forwards due to the driver's head-restraint. Consider that for a similar amount you can get a full day of training in various single-seaters, culminating in several laps of driving a real F1 car around a proper race circuit yourself. Granted, not everyone wants to drive an F1 car themselves, but to sell this as the ultimate F1 experience is pushing things a bit. The cars will be piloted by the Hungarian mobile chicane, Zsolt Baumgartner, Patrick "not enough funding for a full season" Friesacher, as well as Chanoch "purchaser of the most expensive track day in history" Nissany and Stoddart himself.

If you've got money to burn more details are available on the Mindardi f1x2 webiste. While I'm on the subject I should mention that while Paul Stoddart did indeed sell the actual company known as Mindardi to Red Bull (to become Scuderia Toro Rosso), he retained the pre-2005 cars and the rights to the Minardi name in the deal. Both of those were superfluous to STR, though I wonder why he didn't also keep the 2005 cars since STR have never run them - always apparently planning to use the ex-Red Bull, ex-Jaguar chassis for 2006.

I should also mention a wonderful quote from Giancarlo Minardi from the end of last season which reveals entirely how he feels about the Stoddart era of ownership. Talking about his sadness that the Minardi name would disappear from Formula 1 with the sale of the team to Red Bull, he said:

"I made one particular error five years ago. I didn't follow the advice I was given by a man with whom I had a relationship in the early seventies, long before getting into F1.

"That man told me: 'Minardi, sell your stock, sell whatever you want, but don't ever sell your name.' That man's name was Enzo Ferrari. Instead [of selling it] I gave the name away for free."

(link to the original news posting for autosport.com subscribers)

/ No comments / § ¶

FIA revoke Ide's superlicence

10 May 2006 - 07:49

I guess everyone's read the news by now: The FIA have revoked Yuji Ide's superlicence and as such he will take no further part in the 2006 Formula 1 season. Former Renault test driver Franck Montagny will replace Ide for this weekend's Spanish Grand Prix as he did at the European Grand Prix last weekend. Super Aguri are looking for a permanent replacement.

There are a range of views on this. Some, most vocally Kimi Raikkonen, will be glad to see the back of Ide. Not only was he slow, but he caused a serious crash in Imola and memorably blocked Rubens Barrichello's qualifying lap in Australia. Others will view this as unduly hash treatment from the FIA - other driver's have been slower than their team mates and caused more accidents without having their licences suspended or revoked before.

Unfortunately for Yuji Ide, he found himself in the unenviable position of being a slow driver in a very slow car. In that situation it makes all your mistakes even more evident. At the same time, the Super Aguri strategy of putting little fuel in the cars at the start of the race in order to try and make up places on the first lap was always going to lead to him being involved in more "drama" than necessary. If you know you're at the back of the grid you put more fuel in at the start, not less.

While it was the team's strategy that got Ide unwanted attention, I think the team's actions have finally cost him his superlicence. It involves a lot of reading between the lines of the news stories surrounding this driver, but let me explain.

• On Sunday, 23rd April, Yuji Ide is repremanded by the stewards for causing the accident that put himself and Christijan Albers out of the San Marino Grand Prix.
• The following Wednesday, Super Aguri announce they have signed Franck Montagny as their 3rd/Friday driver.
• On Thursday, 4th May (one day before the San Marino Grand Prix practice starts), Super Aguri announce that they have replaced Ide with Montagny for the race following "advice offered by the FIA". That I believe is a code for "the FIA threatened to suspend Ide's superlicence if he had another bad race". That may not actually be the case, but I don't believe the FIA is usually involved in advising teams on personel matters - Bernie does occasionally, but not the FIA.
• On the Saturday, a story appears on Autosport.com, stating that Super Aguri would like to put Ide back in the race seat for the Spanish Grand Prix the following weekend, but that they are waiting for "further clarification from the FIA".
  
• The today, they announce that Ide's licence is revoked and that he will not drive for them again this year.

Now if the FIA wanted to punish Ide for the Albers crash, they took a very long time about it, so I don't think that's the reason, not the direct reason anyway. The FIA's advice of the 4th May was that Ide would sit out races until he'd had some practice in private test sessions. They team stated that clearly and admitted that it wasn't idea that they hadn't been able to offer the driver any significant pre-season testing due to the rush to get the cars ready. Super Aguri have not been able to run any test mileage since then and yet they state in the press that they want to put Ide back in the car the following week.

Maybe they thought the FIA just wanted them to punish Ide by leaving him out for one race instead of taking their "advice" at face value. How beligerant they may have got in their communications with the FIA over the matter might also have come into it. If Super Aguri insisted that they would run Ide in the race this weekend, that could have been enough for the FIA to settle the matter for good by revoking his superlicence.

And that is what I think has happened because the more straightforward explanation (that the FIA revoked Ide's licence as a direct result of the Imola incident) doesn't seem plausible given the delay. And the conspiracy theories, that Super Aguri wanted to get rid of Ide but didn't want to get flamed in the Japanese press and so got the FIA to do their dirty work, don't add up either.

/ No comments / § ¶

Everyone wants to change qualifying. Again.

09 May 2006 - 19:00

I don't want to seem like qualifying is the only subject I'm willing to talk about, but I have to write about something and this seems to be the most controversial subject in F1 now.

In the week before the European Grand Prix threre were stories in the press about how the drivers wanted the final qualifying session changed so that they didn't have to tour round mindlessly burning fuel because of the stupid rules. In an interview on ITV before the start of the race, his Bernieness initially declared that he was delighted with the new qualifying system (he did have the decency to point out this was because it was his idea). When questioned about the fuel burnoff drudgery of the final session, he did then admit that he hated that part and that it wasn't his idea to do that. Bernie also declared that qualifying on race fuel had been an experiment to try and jumble the grid a bit and that with the knockout system it was no longer necessary to do that.

I've always been against all completely artificial "jumbling" of the grid - if it's so important for it to be random, why not dispose of qualifying altogether and draw positions from a hat or start in a different order at each race on a rota system? That would save even more money, just like setting up the rules so teams don't run more than a few laps on Fridays does. It would also have a similarly detrimental effect on attendence at races, but of course I'm not serious. It is at least interesting, if not absolutely important, to know which car/driver combination is fastest outside of the race situation where so many compromises come into effect. Although we still don't necessarilly have the fastest driver start on pole with the current rules, we do at least have all 22 cars going as fast as they can earlier in the qualifying hour.

As far as changing the current qualifying rules within this season - that would require the agreement of all 11 teams - not an easy thing to achieve, although they managed it last year by disposing of the agregate system part way through the season. There are a number of alternative rule changes I can think of that I'll go through in detail:- 

1. Allow all the cars to re-fuel as they see fit, both during and after qualifying.

This is what Bernie originally proposed. I wrote previously about how there is a race-fuel qualifying requirement in the final qualifying session due to objections from team bosses (read: Ron Dennis) that they'd already designed their cars with this in mind.

Pros: This would make the final 20 mins more like the old pre-2003 qualifying system. Cars wouldn't spend the whole time out on track, allowing drivers more of a chance to get a clear run and allowing TV viewers a better chance of seeing the qualifying lap live (something that didn't happen in Australia for example). Drivers would also be able to make more than one qualifying run without penalty as they could go out more than once and still be on an optimal fuel load each time. This would allow drivers to respond to each other's laps or save sets of tyres for the race by not going out in the dying minutes.

Cons:  Would jumble the grid less than both the single-lap system and the current system because drivers have more chances to get things right and find the true ultimate pace of their cars. Would also possibly be unfair on some teams depending on the size of their fuel cells (though I think it's been established in the races so far that most cars are similar).

2. Stick with the current re-fueling rules but shorten the session to 10 minutes.

I would call this option treating the symptoms instead of the disease. It would cut out most of the useless fuel-burning part of qualifying, but it would further force drivers towards only running one qualifying lap instead of having two attempts as most drivers have so far. In that sense it's an insane idea as we would be back to single-lap qualifying but with everyone attempting their qualifying lap at the same time.

Pros: Would eliminate most of the tedium and waste of the current system.

Cons: Would lead to driver's spending even less time actually trying to set a qualifying time. Would lead to massive track congestion at the end of the session and even less chance of the TV viewers seeing the winning lap live.

3. Qualify on race fuel, but don't give fuel credits.

Currently drivers are allowed to add some amount of fuel to the car after the qualifying session for each lap run in qualifying. I've discussed the reasons of how this convoluted system came to be previously but just to reiterate, there is a minimum time that each lap must be completed in otherwise the driver doesn't get fuel back for that lap. That is to stop dangerously slow driving in the interests of fuel conservation.

This proposal would do away with these so-called "fuel credits". Teams would still have to decide before the session how much fuel to add to the car and they would start the race with whatever is left at the end of the session.

Pros: Driver's wouldn't clog up the track and waste the first 15 mins of the session burning off fuel because they wouldn't be getting any back under this proposal.

Cons: So many...  This is another "back to single lap qualifying" proposal in effect. Although drivers would be able to make a second run if they screwed up, there would be a large incentive to make only one. If they planned to make two runs, the first would always be slower than necessary due to having more fuel on board. If they planned to make one run but needed to make a second they'd be eating into their race fuel (which might already be quite skinny if they were going for "saturday night glory"). This would lead to less on-track action and no head-to-head battles with drivers trading fastest laps. It would also add a powerful incentive to drive very slowly on in and out laps, causing danger to other drivers. It would also remove the current means of sanction against this (the removal of the fuel credit). OK, they could fine drivers for excessively slow speed and blocking, but it would be better if drivers didn't need to drive slowly in the first place.

Conclusion

It should be pretty obvious that I'm in favour of option 1. His original proposal for knock-out qualifying is one thing Bernie got right. The team owner(s) that objected to it first time around should now acknowlege the unpallatable consequences of the rules that were put in place instead and remove those objections. Do I see that actually happening though? Not likely. Options 2 and 3 are far more likely to be voted in, even though they would in many ways be even worse than what we have now.

Lastly I have to point out that there are still some people who actually think qualifying on race fuel is a good idea. I find it hard to understand how they could possibly feel that way, but like people voting Liberal Democrat or buying R&B records, it does happen. It is possible proposal 1 would be ignored because of that rather than because of the vested interests of Mr. Dennis. I do hope not though.

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