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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

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.

As Ferrari’s Director Stefano Domenicali has pointed out, the rules regarding replacement engines have changed for 2009. Whereas previously “Each driver may use no more than one engine for two consecutive Events in which his team competes. “, the new rules specify only a limit on the number of engines a team may using during the entire season and mention nothing about consective races. So, as James Allen notes, teams will be able to use their engines as they see fit this year. For example, they could make sure that the same engine is not used for those circuits that are hard on engines like Monza and Spa and even use a different engine in the race from the one they used for qualifying.

Specifically, the 2009 FIA F1 Sporting Regulations say:

28.4 a) Each driver may use no more than eight engines during a Championship season. Should a driver use more than eight engines he will drop ten places on the starting grid at any Event during which an additional engine is used.

Last year a driver could find himself at the back of the grid even though he set a fast time if he suffered an engine failure and while sometimes this provided the chance for overtaking other times it meant he was just stuck behind slower cars. Whether these new rules will make it better or worse remains to be seen. At least with the consecutive race rules the damage was limited to one race. In 2009 we may get the situation where a driver has used all his eight engines and is then faced with the prospect of being stuck permanently at the back of the grid for the rest of the season.

It will be interesting to see what strategies the teams come up with to exploit this change in the regulations.

FIA president Max Mosley has written a letter to FOTA chairman Luca di Montezemolo outlining his thoughts on the “really big changes” required in 2010 to ensure the survival of the Formula One Championship. The full letter is here and it makes for some interesting reading.

A standard gearbox and underbody is proposed for 2010 and the FIA will shortly produce a list of chassis parts and systems which will be the only elements of the chassis which can be developed. All remaining chassis elements will be either standard or frozen.

Mosley also wants to discuss the use of KERS and how it can be developed without incurring significant costs for the teams. KERS has been a controversial addition to the 2009 regulations with teams spending huge sums developing the devices and it is not known how many teams will acutally use the device when the championship begins in two months. There are two different kinds of KERS devices: one that stores electrical energy using batteries and capacitors and one that uses a flywheel to store kinetic energy. Most teams have opted to develop an electrical device but in the letter Mosley suggests that these will be banned in future:

We are increasingly of the view that the use of chemical storage (in particular batteries) should be prohibited in Formula One owing to the unsuitability of the batteries currently available. There are at least two mechanical or electro-mechanical systems under development for Formula One and there may be others as well as hydraulic systems. Formula One would benefit from systems with more capacity than the present 400KJ, 60KW, (for example maxima of: 2MJ stored, 150KW in, 100KW out) but still very small and very light, as is essential in Formula One. These figures are theoretically possible with mechanical devices, but not feasible in the foreseeable future using batteries and/or capacitors. Such non-chemical devices, if successfully developed, would have a very significant impact on road transport and other applications.

Mosley also mentions such radical ideas as reversed grids, allocating leading grid places by lot, giving the World Championship to the driver with most wins and so on but rightly points out that once a faster car gets in front it tends to drive away.

In the letter he also says:

there is no rational argument to support the continued use in Formula One of expensive technologies which have no relevance outside the sport and are unknown (and thus of no interest) to the general public.

I think he makes some good points. Standardising components that most people don’t care about (or may not even be aware of) makes sense but F1 should be the pinacle of motor racing. It should showcase not just the best drivers but also the best engineers and technology. While reducing the engine rev limt to 17,000 should provide cost savings and I doubt we will notice the drop in revs care must be taken when messing with such a vital part of a racing car as the engine. I don’t care if all the cars have the same underbody and I don’t really mind if they all use the same gearbox but there still needs to be some scope for the engineers to make a difference. It’s not just the drivers that are competing on Sunday it’s also the pit crew, the team managers and the car designers.

What can you buy for a pound? Half a cup of coffee? 8 million Zimbabwe Dollars? Woolworths tried (unsuccessfully) to sell itself for £1 and now Honda is suggesting that its whole Formula One operation could be sold for as little as a pound if it would mean the team could keep racing.

I hope they find a buyer. I was really looking forward to seeing what Jenson Button and Ross Brawn could do next year after the 2009 regulations reboot. It will be a shame to see Honda disappear from Formula One so soon again after such a distinguished history in the sport. From their first win at the 1965 Mexican Grand Prix in the RA272 (the first for a Japanese car in Formula One) to providing the power for Senna’s McLaren MP4/6 Honda have always achieved what they set out to do – win. Which is why I guess I’m a bit surprised they didn’t stick it out a bit longer this time.