So the FIA isn’t letting the teams scrap the new qualifying format and go back to the old one. They must modify the new one.
FUCK YOU Jean Todt. Seriously, Todt has shown an amazing combination of incompetence and impotence in letting the FIA run F1 into the ground. This man needs to go. He won’t, but he needs to. Grow a pair of balls and say no to Bernie Ecclestone for once.
We’ve had two really great races so far, IF you watch anything but the top three positions. And I’m fine with that. Haas F1 and Romain Grosjean have pulled off a miracle. The back markers all seem to have a chance to beat each other, and the midfield is anyones race. But no ones talking about that because qualifying is such a fuck awful mess.
The problems with the new qualifying are numerous. And it pretty much just leads to the last few minutes of each session with no cars on track, as opposed to last year where everyone made a last dash attempt to better their times.
Here are the main reasons.
Not enough tires-Fixable but expensive.
Takes too long to refuel the car-Possibly fixable by even more convoluted rules, but creates other problems.
Not enough time to make an in lap, change tires, and an out lap between eliminations-not really fixable.
Cuts the running time down dramatically for the lesser teams-yea, lets give less on camera time to teams struggling with sponsors, that should help.
Will always end up with just two cars running at the end of Q3-fixable by using the old formate for Q3, but that begs the question why use the new one for Q1 and Q2 at all then?
So why are we even doing this shit anyway? What was wrong with the old format every one liked? With all the other glaring problems within the sport why did they change the one thing no one had a problem with? Oh, apparently we need to mix up the grid now that’s why.
So who hell wants the grid mixed up anyway? Oh that’s right, Bernie Ecclestone does. Every interview I’ve seen or read points to the ‘promoters’ demanding a change in qualifying for why this shit got pushed through. Well’ ‘the promoters’ representative is Bernie Ecclestone. Yes the FIA has blame here, but that blame is mostly not standing up to Bernie and saying no, get this crap idea out of here. Well they somewhat did, that’s why we have this fuck awful format now, because what Bernie demanded was even worse! Bernie wants either a reverse grid, ballast added or some other such bullshit like a lottery drawn grid. The FIA (and the teams) came up with this crap as a ‘compromise’ with Bernie. No matter how much Bernie says in public how he hates it, this shit show lands squarely on his desk.
But a lot of people are bending over backwards to absolve him of responsibility, or at least obfuscate where the blame lies. They’re playing the “the blame lies with everyone’ game and that’s not quite true here for qualifying.
There has been a tendency with some F1 commentators that I greatly respect to defend Bernie from any accusation or criticism throughout his career. Now I understand some of this, Bernie has threatened some of these people before. A couple of years ago several fan run websites got the legal equivalent of a ‘I’m watching you and can shut down your site in a minute letters. Bernie works for CVC, the actual owners of the rights to use the ‘Formula 1’ names (Bernie sold his rights to CVC a while ago but part of the deal kept him in charge). So they threatened several websites with shutdown or at least a name change. So I’m not sure how much of the Bernie pandering comes from a position of having to play nice with the man that can fuck up their sites and communities they care about so deeply.
But I suspect there’s also the tendency of ‘rich person worship’ at play with some of the American commentators here. And Bernie certainly is a rich man. Personally I blame this on those awful Puritans that infused our culture with a belief that god shows his favor by blessing people with wealth, so the rich by definition are moral and ’good’ (while the poor by definition are morally deficient and ‘bad). But that’s a different rant.
Bernie gets much praise for being a great dealmaker (sound like someone else?) but it’s always left out that many of those ‘great deals’ are in fact part of what’s strangling the sport. Sure, the deals with the smaller teams was a ‘great deal’ for Bernie and CVC, but the financial screwing the smaller teams are getting because of that is drowning them in debt, threatening their very existence on the grid, and they are struggling on track because of it. Sure the deals he’s made with the tracks have been ‘great deals’ for him and CVC, but the many of the tracks fans love can’t pay up anymore and get dropped of the calander. Hell we almost lost the US GP after only three years because of how great a deal Bernie made with them. The one consistently is the only party who benefits from these “great deals’ are not the fans, the teams, the tracks or promoters… It’s Bernie and CVC. He’s the only one that wins in these deals. Yet his defenders continually refuse to take that into account when looking at problems in the sport (sound like someone else?).
He also holds extreme and fluid positions on what the sport should be doing, like reverse grids, a lottery grid, a medal system, and other such garbage. But because he says so many more outrageous things like installing sprinklers or calling female drivers appliances, his actual crapy ideas get lost in the noise (sound like someone else?). Ok. fine, I’ll just call him the Trump of F1. And he’s been getting the same media treatment Trump did at his start, that media crush as I call it. He’s a ‘great personality’ so he gets a pass. And like Trump that plays right into his hands.
As I said I respect some of these Bernie Ecclestone defenders greatly, hell I owe one of them a lunch the next time I’m in their town for all they do. And while it certainly is true some fans blame Bernie for everything wrong in the sport (he had noting to do with this terrible engine format or reliance on aero for instance) that isn’t an excuse to free him from blame on anything. Especially when he’s the one that pushed that first domino no one wanted pushed.
