When the decisions of the World Motor Sport Council were announced yesterday, I had just posted my (suddenly out-of-date but still relevant) thoughts on the diffuser controversy; I was presented with the choice: do I write a rushed assessment of the changes now or do I let them fester overnight and produce a more thoughtful response today? In the end, I opted for the latter and contented myself with a few impassioned explosions in F1 Fanatic's comments system.
I am glad I did. Yesterday I was consumed with rage and despair, in common with the majority of fans, and anything I wrote would have been a rant against the FIA, Mosley, Ecclestone and everything else that threatens the future of F1; this morning I have realized that it is not the end of the world. Life will go on and there will be motor racing, even if it is not honored with the name of F1. It is even possible that I might set personalities aside for a while and consider the effect of the changes from a dispassionate viewpoint.
The announcement, for those who have not seen it yet, is available for study on the FIA's website. Of all the points, the one that really has the fans in uproar was the first, the decision to keep the existing points system but award the championship to the driver with the most wins. This was an obvious compromise between the FOTA's proposals and Bernie's call for a medal system and, as such, it fails to address the weakness of the existing scoring system.
The comments, currently running at 397, on Keith Collantine's post on the matter contain all the pros and cons together with several hypothetical cases and I am not going to rehash them all here. I detest the idea of reducing the championship to a mere count-up of wins but have nothing to add to the debate or my previous posts; more important is it to consider the likely effect of the system, I think.
And the truth is that it will probably have no influence on the championship or the racing whatsoever. It is rare that the champion is not the man who scores the most wins, even with the present system having so small a points difference between first and second places. The fact that last year's championship was one of those occasions makes us see the change as more far-reaching than it is; the likelihood is that this year's champion will score more points than anyone else as well as having the most wins. In effect, we are getting incensed over something that may not have any effect at all.
And that includes the racing. Bernie is convinced that the new system will force drivers to race harder but this assumes that the drivers have not been trying to win in the past. This is such a load of nonsense that I hardly need to repeat that competition is the very raison d'etre of F1 drivers and the scarcity of overtaking in recent years has been entirely due to the design of the cars and the circuits.
Does anyone recall Alonso's fury at the 2007 Indy GP when he found that his every attempt to pass Hamilton for the lead was frustrated by the rev limit imposed by the regulations? It would not have mattered what scoring system was in place - there was nothing Fernando could have done to defeat the laws of physics and allow him to pass. That is the extent of Bernie's insult to the motivation of the drivers.
Of course, it is entirely possible that there will be more overtaking this season. No doubt Bernie will claim that this is due to the new scoring system but it will really be the result of the technical regulations being changed to make the cars more able to pass each other.
And I see that I have not succeeded in keeping personalities out of this consideration. Ah well, that is the product of my indignation seething in the background and I will try harder to curb it as we continue. Suffice to say that, in all probability, the new system, idiotic as it is, will not change the result of this year's championship at all. There is little point in looking beyond 2009 since the system will almost certainly be changed again at the end of the year.
What will bring about that change is a very minor effect the new system will have; it will produce a champion earlier in the year than previously. I say minor because we have seen championships won early before but the closeness of recent seasons will have raised fans' expectations and there will be an outcry that the last few races are no longer relevant. Even Bernie will be able to see then that his idea was counter-productive and the system will be tweaked and twisted into some configuration even more obviously defective. Such is the nature of life in modern F1.
So the fans are right to be in such an uproar but it is probably all wasted energy. Far more important is the measure that affects the teams - the imposition of a voluntary budget cap for 2010 with inducements for those teams that opt for it. Fears of a two-tier formula immediately surface but, again, I think the effects of this measure will be very different from our present assessments. In fact, it may be that the FIA has unintentionally pointed the way back to a past that we had thought was gone forever.
There have been two-tier formulas in F1 before; the period of changeover from normally-aspirated engines to turbos is an example. And what happens is that one route very quickly proves itself the way to go and everyone opts for it. This will happen with the new formula - indeed, it is very likely that all of the teams will take the budget cap option because it offers technical freedom and the greatly reduced cost will be attractive to their masters, the team owners.
Naturally, the budget cap will prove impossible to police effectively but that will be true for all the teams and there will be all sorts of nefarious things going on under the cover of darkness. So what else is new? F1 has always had a culture of sneaky goings-on in the effort to gain a competitive advantage; stand by for endless speculation over whether this team or that team has found a way to tap into an unnoticed source of invisible income. Expect, too, constant rule changes as the FIA try to stop up the holes in the dyke. Oh, it should be great fun.
The over-riding effect will be much less money spent, regardless of how creative the teams become in their accounting. And this means that we will truly be revisiting history, with innovative design and invention becoming the arbiters of performance, rather than the size of wallets. As someone has already pointed out, engineering genius is not a product of huge amounts of cash (viz. Toyota) - it is something that emerges in an atmosphere of freedom.
Let us not despair over the dubious idea of a budget cap, therefore. Inefficient as it will undoubtedly turn out to be, it will still present the teams with the opportunity to reduce costs spectacularly and compete more effectively in the design field.
The increased restriction on testing is something that should worry the teams a great deal. We have yet to see what effect the ban on in-season testing will have on the development of the cars this year and limiting testing even further will only exacerbate this. It may well be that the top teams' ability to accelerate away from the others through development will no longer be true and we will end the year with grids that look remarkably similar to the ones we started with. Late charges from the midfield will become rare indeed.
Changes to the media regulations are more or less in line with FOTA's suggestions and can only make things more interesting for the F1 fan. They will not affect the quality of the racing, of course, but the measures are at least a step in the direction of improved television coverage.
What is worrying in that section, however, is the note inserted at the end:
A number of further amendments were adopted for the 2009 Technical Regulations. Full details will be available shortly on www.fia.com.
Really? And when will the teams be informed? Time is short (in fact, it has as good as run out) before the first race of the season and I hope we are not going to be presented with amendments that cannot be implemented by the teams before the start of Practice in Melbourne.
To sum up, the WMSC document is a glorious hodgepodge of half-baked ideas that will have effects and consequences that we cannot imagine at this stage. The sport will be changed massively from its present incarnation but has a chance of emerging as a beast not too far removed from its roots. I suppose that I must be philosophical and accept that change was inevitable; the amazing thing is that the unintended consequence of the change may well be a return to the past. And, if that turns out to be the case, I do not care what brought it about, I am happy.
It is rather like a pudding my mother used to make when I was young. When asked what was for pudding, the invariable answer was "Wait and see". The WMSC has served up a wait-and-see pudding and that's what we'll get...