DonTirri wrote:... Can we just restrict the designs to a point where the cars look more like late 80's/early 90's cars without all the technical thingamajigs and aerodynamic silliness. To a point where driver skill matters more than design skill and money.
I doubt that you will ever have a formula where raw driver skill is the sole arbiter, as even in spec series a top team is often prepared to spend a lot of money to eke out the tiniest technical advantages.
Just look at NASCAR - a series where the cars are standardised and intended to be relatively simple to drive and operate. A top line team will quite happily throw millions at everything from the finest of fine tunes they can make to the engines through to the shaker rigs for suspension testing - when it comes to trying to find "the unfair advantage", as it used to be called, the largest teams will sink a lot more cask than you might think.
When Haas commented that his initial budget to race in F1 was the same as his NASCAR team, people thought that he must be mistaken - but the team accounts show that his NASCAR team burned through $115 million last year, and his team isn't even in the top 5 when it comes to spending (Hendrick Motorsports, which I believe is the biggest spender in NASCAR, has a budget of around $190 million a year).
When you look at the late 1970's through to the 1990's, raw spending power was just as important as brake horsepower (and often translated into the same thing through the turbo years). When Williams took a leap forward in 1979 and Jones started winning multiple races for the team, kickstarting their golden age in the 1980's, it wasn't just because of his talent - Williams, courtesy of their sponsorship from Saudia and other Middle Eastern investors, had become the richest team in the sport (they were the first team to have a multi-million pound budget), and that money was paying off in the form of extensive wind tunnel testing.
John J. Schmidt was right when he described the world of motorsport in the 1980's as the sport of corporations - with a well filled wallet and a strong car, most other issues were secondary and drivers became something of a plaything for the larger teams, hence Williams's famous quip about drivers being as interchangeable as lightbulbs.
tommykl wrote:The fact of the matter is that the rule is too vague. It says to slow down and be prepared to stop. There is no authority on how much you should slow down. 10km/h? 50? Below 100km/h? A standstill? From the moment Rosberg slowed down noticeably (as confirmed by the telemetry), he was within the letter of the rules.
If the rule in question explicitly defined how slow he should have been going, this would not have been a problem. It wasn't. The logical course of action is allowing it, and subsequently rewriting the rule to prevent this from happening again.
Ostensibly, there is a Technical Directive from Whiting which gave a stronger indication of what drivers were expected to do - it was issued back in March 2014 (i.e. before Bianchi's accident), and that directive stated that, in his opinion, the drivers should show that their sector time was at least 0.2s slower than normal for a single waived yellow and 0.5s for a double waived yellow.
It should be noted that, in this case, a sector isn't one of the three timing sectors that we are used to - race control breaks the lap down into up to 20 sub-sectors, which can be around 10 seconds in length, which is intended to make it easier to pinpoint issues on track (say, a stranded car or a damaged barrier).
It does still leave a fair amount up to the driver, and in some ways it might be better if a harder speed limit was in place (although there might be the question of what happens if, for example, a driver was below that limit but had an accident - say, due to aquaplaning in wet weather).
The problem does seem to be that the decision over Rosberg has encouraged other drivers to take similar liberties - I believe that Vettel has since admitted that he initially approached that corner in a similar way to Rosberg, and Arrivabene appears to have now suggested that, in future, he'll tell his drivers to do what Rosberg did and argue about the consequences with the stewards later.
Rosberg certainly is not the first driver to push his luck under a single or double waived flag - just going back to the Austrian GP, Magnussen and Hulkenberg were investigated for potential yellow flag infringements - although he was probably one of the more high profile drivers to try it on. Still, it feels like the general backsliding on enforcing yellow flags is setting a bad precedent, and one which has the potential to bite quite hard.
