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FIA Formula One Race Director, Charlie Whiting has confirmed the safety car rules will change in 2009.  Last year the pit lane was closed at the start of any safety car period.  This was intended to remove the incentive for a driver to speed back to the pits in dangerous conditions.

But since the rule was introduced in 2007 a number of drivers have suffered penalties by having to pit while the pit lane entrance was closed as they had run out of fuel.  Under the new rules, the pit lane entrance will remain open and all the car’s standard Engine Control Unit (ECU), built by McLaren Electronic Systems, will calculate a minimum safe time for the driver to get back to the pits.

Whiting said:

The rule introduced in 2007 was a bad one, and we’ve gone back to the 2006 regulations. The only difference is we intend to implement a minimum time back to the pits. When we deploy the safety car, the message will go to all the cars, which will then have a “safety car” mode on their ECUs. As soon as that message gets to the car, it’ll know where it is on the circuit, and it’ll calculate a minimum time for the driver to get back to the pits. The driver will have to respect this and the information will be displayed on his dashboard.

It’s not clear what information will be displayed on the dashboard.  Will it be a maximum speed or will it be some kind of count-down timer?

Whatever it is this is a welcome change in the rules.  A number of drivers have had promising races wrecked by the old rule through no real fault of their own and while random events will always be an important factor in F1 racing the closure of the pit lane always seemed a rather obtuse way of enforcing safe driving.

Image: ph-stop

Honda’s end of January deadline to find a buyer is getting awfully close.  Or is it?

When Japan’s second biggest car manufacturer unexpectedly announced its decision to leave Formula One, team bosses Ross Brawn and Nick Fry said they had a month to find a buyer otherwise the team would have to close down.

But with only a few days until February the team is playing down the importance of the end of January deadline and are still optimistic a buyer can be found.

A team spokeswoman said on Tuesday:

Don’t focus too much on any speculation regarding time frames and deadlines. Work on our race car is progressing well.

There have been rumours of several possible buyers for the team including Prodrive’s David Richards and the Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim but both have denied they are interested.  Earlier this month Nick Fry said they had a shortlist of about twelve possible buyers for the team with Fry himself rumoured to be planning a management buyout.  While the team itself would probably be sold for a nominal sum (perhaps £1), it would take at least £40 million to run the team in 2009.

While Mercedes-Benz, who supply engines to McLaren and Force India,  has said it could supply the Brackley-based team with engines for 2009, Norbert Haug, the Mercedes motor sport vice-president warns that the team must have a solid financial future first:

If there is a feasible solution with an investor for that team, we would be prepared to discuss it, but the financial background needs to be there. You cannot give any presents at this time and in this climate, but we would like to help for the sake of formula one.

If a buyer can be found soon it would take six weeks to fit an engine to the chassis.

Honda have already missed the first group test in January although so did Red Bull and Force India and those teams that did test got limited track time due to the weather.

Of all the changes made to the Formula One regulations for 2009, one of the most controversial has been the Kinetic Energy Recovery System or KERS.  These devices store energy created under braking which can then be converted into power at the touch of a button, giving a power boost of up to 80hp.

All the teams have spent vast sums of money developing KERS but it is still not clear which of them, if any, will deploy the device when the season begins at Melbourne in March.

This expenditure also seems to be at odds with the current cost-cutting drive in Formula One.  In fact it’s hard to find many people with a good thing to say about KERS.

Renault’s Flavio Briatore:

We know already that for 2010, with the option of the standard KERS, whatever money we spend this year is for one year only. And in this kind of environment I think it’s completely unnecessary.

Ferrari’s Luca di Montezemolo:

I’m not against the principle of KERS – it’s very important to put in front of the teams research that benefits the environment – but the way it is at the moment is a mistake.

And now it seems  Bernie Ecclestone has never wanted it:

I have always been against KERS. Whatever they use in F1 they won’t use in a road car, but if that is to be the idea then why not develop it in touring cars. It costs a lot of money when we are trying to save it.

About the only person who seems to want KERS is BMW’s Mario Theissen:

KERS is important for Formula One because it will put F1 into the role of a new technology pioneer. Obviously, we think KERS is important to BMW because we have put a lot of effort on it.  We agreed that the cost of KERS was quite significant, but the real thing is that when we discussed it a month ago the money had been spent already on development, so it would be the worst thing to spend money on something you don’t use.

There is something in economics called a sunk cost; a cost that cannot be recovered once it has been incurred.  The money spent on KERS development so far is a sunk cost and Theissen argues that it would be the “worst thing” to have spent money developing KERS if it was not used.  But there is also something called the ‘sunk cost fallacy’ or the “Concorde Effect” named for the fact that the British and French governments continued to pour money into the Concorde project long after it was clear there was no real economic case for the aircraft.

This is also known as “throwing good money after bad”.

It will be interesting to see what effect the use of KERS will have in F1 racing in general and overtaking in particular but just because you have already spent money on something doesn’t mean you should continue spending money on it.  Concorde was a stunningly beautiful piece of engineering but if KERS doesn’t end up contributing to F1 in any meaningful way the FIA shouldn’t be afraid to drop it.

Image: Martin Hartland

In an interview with the Financial Times, Bernie Ecclestone has said that the only team he would really be sorry see to go is Ferrari.

He had previously said that Honda’s recent exit from Formula One was “no great loss” but these latest comments will do little to quell suspicions that Ferrari receive favourable treatment by the sport’s administrators.

Ferrari is the only team to have been in F1 since the inaugural Championship season in 1950 and Ecclestone has previously admitted that Ferrari receive more money than the other teams.

Ecclestone told the FT:

It’s bad for me to say this, but the only team we would really say we would miss is Ferrari.

McLaren’s outgoing team boss, Ron Dennis, seems open to the idea of Bernie Ecclestone’s medal system where gold, silver and bronze medals would be awarded to the top three drivers at each race with the driver with the most golds at the end of the year being crowned champion.

Last year Lewis Hamilton won the Championship by a single point even though he won fewer races than Ferrari’s Felipe Massa.

Ecclestone has since tried to distance himself from the idea of ‘medals’ but still thinks “the guy that wins the most races should win the Championship”.

At the launch of McLaren’s new MP4-24 at the team’s Woking headquarters on Friday Dennis said:

I think his view is that the person that wins the most races should win the World Championship. We don’t disagree with that view, and if that becomes the objective then we’ll make sure we win enough races to win the World Championship.

Perhaps understandably, Hamilton seems less convinced:

It’s got to be the driver and team that’s done the best job over the whole year and not just who’s won the most races.

I agree consistency should be rewarded but would a medals system make for better racing? Ecclestone’s idea is that if the Championship was decided on the number of wins rather than points then drivers would be more inclined to take risks and not settle for second place. It’s true McLaren deliberately targeted 5th place in Brazil last year because that was all they needed but I’m not sure you could really accuse drivers of playing a numbers game and not being aggressive enough. A bigger problem was the difficulty in overtaking, something that will hopefully be improved by the aerodynamic changes introduced this year.

But how many times has the world champion not won the most races in a season?  Quite a few, actually:

The inaugural FIA Formula One World Championship season in 1950 saw Nino Farina and Juan Manuel Fangio win the same number of races (3) but Farina scored more points so he was declared champion. In 1958 Mike Hawthorn only won one race in his Ferrari 246 F1 compared to Tony Brooks’s three and Stirling Moss’s four but his five second places allowed him to become Britain’s first world champion. The following year (1959) Jack Brabham won the Championship with an equal number of wins as Moss and Brooks.

1961 again saw three drivers sharing the same number of wins with Phil Hill becoming the only American-born driver to win the Drivers’ Championship. In 1964, John Surtees won it in a Ferrari 158 even though he had an equal number of wins as Graham Hill and Dan Gurney, and Jim Clark won more races than all of them. 1967 was the next year the Championship was won by a driver who didn’t take the most number of wins; Denny Hulme won two races compared to Jim Clark’s four. Then in 1968 Graham Hill and Jackie Stewart both won three races with Hill declared champion.

That was the sixties. In 1974, Emerson Fittipaldi took the Championship despite having the same number of victories as both Ronnie Peterson and Carlos Reutemann. Three years later in 1977 Niki Lauder scored one less win than Mario Andretti but still became world champion and in 1979 Australian Alan Jones won four races but Jody Scheckter was crowned champion with just three. Even though it would have handed him the title in 1977, Mario Andretti still thinks the idea of a medal system is flawed:

I don’t endorse it at all. That’s going back to the amateur system. Why change something that’s been a part of the profession and sport since the beginning. I don’t think it could add to it. I think it would detract.

The eighties had a string of races where the Drivers’ Champion didn’t win the most number of races. In 1981 Alain Prost and Nelson Piquet both won three races but Piquet took the Championship in his Brabham BT49. 1982 was a tumultuous season. The World Drivers’ Championship was won by Williams driver Keke Rosberg who became the first driver since Mike Hawthorn to win the Championship after winning only one race. Eleven drivers won a race during this season, none of them more than two times. 1983: Piquet won again even though Prost scored one more first place than him. 1984 saw the battle between McLaren team mates Niki Lauda and Alain Prost end with Lauda winning the Championship by just half a point without achieving a single pole position and despite Prost winning two more races than he did. But don’t feel too bad for the Frenchman, in 1986 Prost took the Championship with one less win than Nigel Mansell. Then in 1987 Piquet again won the Championship although Mansell won three more races than he did. In 1989 Alain Prost won the Championship from rival Ayrton Senna although he won two fewer races.

In the 1990’s every champion also won the most races but in 2005 Fernando Alonso was declared the youngest F1 Champion even though he won the same number of races as Kimi Raikkonen. He did it again in 2006 with the same number of wins as Schumacher and then 2008 saw Lewis Hamilton take Alonso’s youngest champion record even though he won one less race than Ferrari’s Felipe Massa.

So would medals make better racing?  I doubt it.  Drivers have been winning the Championship despite not having won the most races since Formula One began.