The FIA/FOTA split

I've stayed pretty quiet on this issue as there are a number of other motorsport bloggers who are far more knowledgeable and insightful about it than I am. Let me just just share a few of my opinions on it...

• F1 has been pretty entertaining the last couple of seasons, although the novelty of Brawn GP winning everything will ultimately wear off. I worry that one way or another, F1 is going to get boring again.
• Max Mosley disgusts me. Everything he does, and every way he does it, I find offensive. If a shake-up in F1 is what it takes to depose the shrivelled old goat then bring it on, I say.
• A breakaway championship sounds all well and good, but 16 cars maketh not a particularly good race. However, if the championship is able to give a greater share of TV revenue to teams, it might actually be a cheaper option to get into a series with a higher budget cap but higher income than to go to the FIA's tightly-capped F1.
• Does this offer an amazing opportunity to the A1GP blokes to finally get something out of their massive spend? Sell it, with its schedule, contracts, staff and assets, to FOTA and BOOM, instant championship.
  
• I'd love to see more teams involved in F1. Back in 1991 I went to the British Grand Prix on the Friday and there were so many teams that there was a pre-qualifying session involving no-hopers like Fondmetal, Lamborghini and Coloni - 34 cars in total!
  
• The breakaway (which we'll call the "Grand Prix World Championship" for shits and giggles) could potentially run at tracks which have left, are leaving, or are threatened with ejection from F1, such as Montreal, Silverstone, Magny Cours, Indianapolis, Hockenheim, Imola and Fuji, since the GPWC is likely to offer more favourable terms to those track promoters than Ecclestone. It goes without saying that the GPWC would be unable to race at current F1 venues...
  
• However, these tracks face a serious issue - if they sign up to host a GPWC race, the FIA would almost certainly pull other FIA championships from those tracks - WTCC, FIA GT, and Formula 2 for example. This could affect "classic venues" like Silverstone and Imola, as well as GP-ready tracks like Brno, Portimao, Valencia and Oschersleben.
  
• The FIA ultimately sanctions ALL worldwide motorsport, via national ASNs, and if an ASN provides local sanctioning for the GPWC they themselves could face retaliation from the FIA. I see this as being the potential ultimate undoing of the GPWC. I think they'll struggle to find any promoters, tracks or ASNs willing to go against the FIA.
• The FIA is threatening legal action to FOTA teams. Fucking idiots. How about compromising on TV revenues and paying back revenue owed to teams in order to keep the lines of communication open? Any sane person would continue to work on resolving this. It seems to me that Mosley and Ecclestone are consumed by their thirst for power and influence rather than acting like motorsport management professionals. If this situation does anything, I hope it brings these two dickheads down to earth with a bang.
  

Open cockpits - a risk worth taking?

Motorsport is so safe these days. Or so we're led to believe. I believe we may very well be in the same place as we were prior to the tragic weekend at Imola in 1994 in which both Roland Ratzenberger and Ayrton Senna were killed. Prior to their accidents, Formula had had no race weekend fatalities for twelve years, and everyone involved with the sport felt that safety was at a high enough level that there would never again be a death in the sport. Sound familiar? Ask anyone in Formula 1 for example if any major changes could be made to improve safety and you will probably get an answer that goes something like this: "no"...

The accidents of Robert Kubica in Canada and Ernesto Viso in Magny-Cours (and come to think of it, Katherine Legge's Champcar crash at Road America last year) were as much examples of how luck plays a part as how strong the cars are these days. I have little doubt that improvements in safety cell technology saved all three drivers' lives, but there remains one huge risk factor to open-wheel drivers, and that is a situation where the top of the head makes a direct, high-speed impact with something immovable. Viso's crash showed this most visibly: once the car was airborne and upside-down it landed on the top of a concrete wall. Had it made the impact six inches further forward, it would have been his head that took the brunt of the force as opposed to the roll hoop and surrounding safety cell structure.

The collision between Alex Wurz and David Coulthard at the Australian Grand Prix this year is another example of how objects are still able to get into the cockpit and make contact with the driver. The vectors of that impact were such the Wurz was uninjured, but the fact remains that cars without roofs introduce an additional safety risk factor that is not present on those with roofs.

Open wheel motorsport is not the only place where this is an issue. The plans of the ACO, organizers of the Le Mans 24 Hours, call for the elimination of open-topped cars in their top class by 2010. Whilst their reasons for doing so are varied and include responding to the majority opinion of fans who prefer the aesthetics of closed-top prototypes, the safety benefit is worth noting.

There are numerous ways to address this safety issue. Concrete walls played a major role in the crashes of Kubica, Viso and Legge, and repositioning, redesigning or simply removing such walls would be a good start. The addition of a lateral roll hoop to these cars would be a major step forward in risk alleviation, but would be an aesthetic challenge that would no doubt incense fans of F1, Champcar, GP2, IRL or anyone else who might implement the idea.

So I'm not going to advocate for any changes right here. Instead, I'm simply going to suggest that sanctioning bodies are ignoring a major safety concern in just the same way that things were ignored prior to Imola 1994, and that discussion of this topic by the powers-that-be should be happening right now. The clock is ticking before we have another fatality.

Bored

This weekend was probably the first decent weekend of racing of 2007. The Dakar Rally was finishing up, the WRC opened its season and A1GP returned from its break. But none of these events were even remotely exciting.

Seb Loeb and Citroen won again at the Monte Carlo Rally, despite having a new car (this always creates the potential for reliability issues), and to make things worse, his team-mate Dani Sordo came second. The stages were devoid of unpredictable ice and snow, like usual, making it more like watching the old San Remo Rally. The final insult was the third leg which featured one measly stage, a superspecial on the streets of Monaco. They didn't even utilize the whole F1 track, and missed out the best bits (Casino Square, Lowes hairpin and the tunnel). LAME.

The Dakar Rally reached the famed Lac Rose, with no major drama. I'll admit that the final stage around the lake is always a processional humdrum affair so I wasn't surprised. What was surprising was that this Dakar seemed rather short of its own excitement for the whole 17 days. Oh sure, there was the dramatic crash and retirement of motorcycle leader Marc Coma, two days from the end, as well as the woes of Volkswagen after the rest day, but apart from that it was a pretty tame affair, with the robotically reliable Stephane Peterhansel taking a ninth victory, and seventh in a row for Mitsubishi. To be honest, I still think the best Dakar was a few years back where they went across the top of Africa and ended in Sharm El Sheikh in Egypt.

Finally, Germany won in A1GP, again. This time they took both wins at Taupo, New Zealand.

Let's hope that the season starts to throw out some more interesting races and results soon. So, Chip Ganassi, don't you dare win the Rolex 24 Hours of Daytona next weekend.

A1GP is fun

I watched my first A1GP race last Wednesday, the opening round from Zandvoort. I have to admit that I was rather entertained! Typically I'm not a big fan of open-wheel racing, but I got rather caught up in the nationalism of the whole thing, and was saddened when Team GB ran off the track in race 2 and when Team USA finally succumbed to the pressure of the Germans.

Yes, the cars are kind of silly-looking. And yes, the drivers are generally unknowns, pulled from various lower-level national open-wheel series such as Formula BMW or Formula Renault. But that doesn't really matter very much when you've got Canada battling against the USA, Britain up against Germany and India and Pakistan fighting for the same piece of land. Err, I mean track...

It's been said that spec-racing is a growing trend in motorsport. Audiences want close racing, and cars that are equal usually help achieve this goal. Even when cars are unequal, organizers work to address this. Japanese Super GT and the World Touring Car series both have an active ballast-handicapping system, and the American Le Mans Series implemented an unwieldy system of its own to equalize Corvette and Aston Martin in 2006. The result was as expected: close, unpredictable racing.

A1GP goes one step further, by actually removing the importance of who a driver is, and instead making it about the country. It's a rarely-used approach in motorsport (Michelin Race of Champions and the MX de Nations come to mind as other examples), but utterly compelling.

The long-term viability of a series that lost tens of millions of dollars in its first season is certainly questionable, but for now it's still going, and I'm looking forward to watching round two on Speed Channel this Wednesday.