vcs316
28th July 2010, 06:28
by Hannah Potter on 27 July 2010
I wish I had a pound for every time I had read an article like Graham Smith's yesterday.
He suggests that the events of Sunday, where Ferrari effectively ordered Felippe Massa to gift Fernando Alonso the win has "brought the sport of F1 into disrepute", "left a very sour taste in the mouth of everyone watching" and "goes against the spirit of F1".
Come off it.
Doing everything possible to exploit every single loophole and technicality to worm your way past the rules is the spirit of F1.
The examples are endless.
Brawn's double diffuser,
McLaren's F-Duct,
Red Bull's rumoured suspension system, the exhaust driven diffuser and
Renault's mass damper were all designed - cleverly and cheekily - to wriggle out of the suffocating restrictions the FIA place on car design.
I mean this as no criticism. This is what makes F1 so great - the incredible things which happen when you restrict sportsmen and engineers to such a degree that they are forced to go to extraordinary lengths and create ingenious designs just to survive as a team.
This "Team order" ruling is different, however. The teams don't try and work round it as they do the others, they just ignore it completely.
The rule was introduced in 2002 after Ferrari had Rubens Barichello move aside and allow Michael Schumacher the win in the Austrian Grand prix. At the time, Schumacher was on his way to his third of five concecutive world championships and had almost double the amount of points of his nearest rival, Juan Pablo Montoya.
He won 11 races out of the 17 in the calendar that year and public interest in the sport was waning. It happened at a time when the FIA were making new rules left, right and centre to try and stop Ferrari's dominance; altering tyre regulations, changing the qualifying format and even redesigning the whole points system.
That's all this rule was, a message from the governing body to the fans at a difficult time in the sports history, that they were doing everything they could to preserve the spectacle. They didn't actually think they were banning team orders. That's just impossible, they are a natural and unavoidable consequence of having two cars racing for the same championship.
Team decisions which affect the outcome of the race happen all the time. You can't have a round of pit stops, assign a race strategy or add a new part without indirectly favouring one driver over the other.
Red Bull gave the new front wing to Sebastian Vettel at Silverstone a fortnight ago and not Mark Webber.
Mercedes changed their wheel base to favour Schumacher's driving style over Nico Rosberg's
Jenson Button was brought in first for dry tyres in Australia.
At McLaren, in the days of refuelling, Ron Dennis would allow his drivers to race each other until the second round of pitstops after which they were instructed to hold position regardless of who was faster.
Doesn't that "affect the outcome of the race"? Doesn't that "rob the spectator of seeing an overtake"? Isn't this exactly what this rule is supposedly designed to prevent?
And if you wanted to swap drivers on the track without the public knowing what you were doing, there are a hundred different ways you could do so.
Tell the lead driver to conserve fuel, as both McLaren and Red Bull did in Turkey this year directly resulting in an attempted overtake in both teams. Or tell him to turn his revs down because of concerns over engine temperatures, as happened in Bahrain where Massa could not challenge Alonso for the win.
Or - here's an idea - maybe the teams are just clever enough to have worked out that a pre-agreed code would stop them from getting caught?
The difference this time was that we know about it. And the only reason we know about it is because of the way that Rob Smedley gave the message.
Did he need to make it so obvious? Of course he didn't. Is he along with Massa in a position to be more annoyed about the switch than anyone else in the sport? I think the body language of the Ferrari pit wall after the incident speaks volumes.
So teams break and bend the rules all the time and we only know about it on this occasion because Rob Smedley wanted us to. Does that really ruin the reputation of the sport? This doesn't happen every race, or even every season. The spectator can still have faith overall in the outcome of a race.
Does it really matter? And even if it did, scandals in sport don't turn people off them, it makes them interested. Harlequin's "bloodgate" in rugby union, Uruguay's handball against Ghana in the recent FIFA World Cup and Bob Woolmer's suspicious death during the Cricket World Cup all brought their sport to the front pages of the newspapers.
Does anyone really stop following a sport or supporting a team because it's "integrity" is called into question? I certainly don't. I watch sport because it's exciting.
Of course, it would have been better if it hadn't happened or if we didn't know about it. No one can really blame Ferrari for wanting to make the switch and I can't see that it's that big of a deal that they did.
After all, no publicity is bad publicity.
http://www.sportingo.com/motorsport/a13843_ferrari-alonsos-bending-rules-what-makes-great
I wish I had a pound for every time I had read an article like Graham Smith's yesterday.
He suggests that the events of Sunday, where Ferrari effectively ordered Felippe Massa to gift Fernando Alonso the win has "brought the sport of F1 into disrepute", "left a very sour taste in the mouth of everyone watching" and "goes against the spirit of F1".
Come off it.
Doing everything possible to exploit every single loophole and technicality to worm your way past the rules is the spirit of F1.
The examples are endless.
Brawn's double diffuser,
McLaren's F-Duct,
Red Bull's rumoured suspension system, the exhaust driven diffuser and
Renault's mass damper were all designed - cleverly and cheekily - to wriggle out of the suffocating restrictions the FIA place on car design.
I mean this as no criticism. This is what makes F1 so great - the incredible things which happen when you restrict sportsmen and engineers to such a degree that they are forced to go to extraordinary lengths and create ingenious designs just to survive as a team.
This "Team order" ruling is different, however. The teams don't try and work round it as they do the others, they just ignore it completely.
The rule was introduced in 2002 after Ferrari had Rubens Barichello move aside and allow Michael Schumacher the win in the Austrian Grand prix. At the time, Schumacher was on his way to his third of five concecutive world championships and had almost double the amount of points of his nearest rival, Juan Pablo Montoya.
He won 11 races out of the 17 in the calendar that year and public interest in the sport was waning. It happened at a time when the FIA were making new rules left, right and centre to try and stop Ferrari's dominance; altering tyre regulations, changing the qualifying format and even redesigning the whole points system.
That's all this rule was, a message from the governing body to the fans at a difficult time in the sports history, that they were doing everything they could to preserve the spectacle. They didn't actually think they were banning team orders. That's just impossible, they are a natural and unavoidable consequence of having two cars racing for the same championship.
Team decisions which affect the outcome of the race happen all the time. You can't have a round of pit stops, assign a race strategy or add a new part without indirectly favouring one driver over the other.
Red Bull gave the new front wing to Sebastian Vettel at Silverstone a fortnight ago and not Mark Webber.
Mercedes changed their wheel base to favour Schumacher's driving style over Nico Rosberg's
Jenson Button was brought in first for dry tyres in Australia.
At McLaren, in the days of refuelling, Ron Dennis would allow his drivers to race each other until the second round of pitstops after which they were instructed to hold position regardless of who was faster.
Doesn't that "affect the outcome of the race"? Doesn't that "rob the spectator of seeing an overtake"? Isn't this exactly what this rule is supposedly designed to prevent?
And if you wanted to swap drivers on the track without the public knowing what you were doing, there are a hundred different ways you could do so.
Tell the lead driver to conserve fuel, as both McLaren and Red Bull did in Turkey this year directly resulting in an attempted overtake in both teams. Or tell him to turn his revs down because of concerns over engine temperatures, as happened in Bahrain where Massa could not challenge Alonso for the win.
Or - here's an idea - maybe the teams are just clever enough to have worked out that a pre-agreed code would stop them from getting caught?
The difference this time was that we know about it. And the only reason we know about it is because of the way that Rob Smedley gave the message.
Did he need to make it so obvious? Of course he didn't. Is he along with Massa in a position to be more annoyed about the switch than anyone else in the sport? I think the body language of the Ferrari pit wall after the incident speaks volumes.
So teams break and bend the rules all the time and we only know about it on this occasion because Rob Smedley wanted us to. Does that really ruin the reputation of the sport? This doesn't happen every race, or even every season. The spectator can still have faith overall in the outcome of a race.
Does it really matter? And even if it did, scandals in sport don't turn people off them, it makes them interested. Harlequin's "bloodgate" in rugby union, Uruguay's handball against Ghana in the recent FIFA World Cup and Bob Woolmer's suspicious death during the Cricket World Cup all brought their sport to the front pages of the newspapers.
Does anyone really stop following a sport or supporting a team because it's "integrity" is called into question? I certainly don't. I watch sport because it's exciting.
Of course, it would have been better if it hadn't happened or if we didn't know about it. No one can really blame Ferrari for wanting to make the switch and I can't see that it's that big of a deal that they did.
After all, no publicity is bad publicity.
http://www.sportingo.com/motorsport/a13843_ferrari-alonsos-bending-rules-what-makes-great