On the day yesterday, August 29, 2021, Formula 1 achieved something very rarely produced in its 71-year history: that each and every person who witnessed the Belgian Grand Prix, either in person or remotely, they felt cheated for the management of events. Even those who defend (with non-invalid arguments) that there were never safe green flag conditions are outraged by an unnecessary 225-minute wait, almost four hours wasted in the trash, or by the utter nonsense in aspects as essential as the interpretation of the regulation. But they are lousy excuses and lack of self-criticism what takes the cake.
Michael Masi can say mass. He has done it and he will do it, he has no choice but to protect his job and the senior officials above him who watch over the monetary aspects, but disguising the three laps after yesterday’s Safety Car as “a legitimate attempt to contest the race” is an insult to intelligence of spectators, drivers and teams. Things don’t just happen: it took three rounds to comply with the regulation line that prevented the ‘ebb’ of tens of millions of dollars, and those three rounds were made, without further ado. What was known and feared for hours. Chance, of course.
As of this writing, no one within Formula 1 or the FIA has sung the ‘mea culpa’. No one in F1 or the FIA has taken any responsibility. Nobody in F1 or FIA has gone beyond commiserating with the fans who keep the show alive, and who paid hundreds or thousands of euros to witness the rain in the open for four hours in a Belgian forest. No one in F1 or the FIA has accepted that procedural mistakes were made yesterday. No one in F1 or FIA has called from within for review the rules that conditioned some of those decisions, and nobody, absolutely nobody, has questioned that the handling of what was seen yesterday was not correct. The end justifies the means: the surplus over sport.
So since no one else, apart from several pilots or prominent members of the teams who also do not stray much from the company line, is going to be able to contribute self-criticism, It is up to the press to give Formula 1 its particular ‘intervention’. You know, those trap meetings in a certain place to which a person is deceived so that, there, family and / or friends expose their concern and support to an extreme situation with the aim of changing the situation. Of course, some will just pick up a glass from the kitchen and listen; not going to be that the protagonist withdraws the word. Or the accreditations to the Grand Prizes.
The closest thing that was seen in Spa to a duel between Red Bull and Mercedes / @ Red Bull Content Pool
I assume that no one has the absolute truth about what the exact steps to follow were with the current regulations at hand, which already lends itself to draconian interpretations and official results with a single round whose validity is not even clear. I also assume that what happened yesterday cannot happen again. Never more. Events such as Spain 1975 and 1980, San Marino 1982, Belgium 1985, Australia 1991 and the United States 2005 had set the bar very high, but Belgium 2021 has surpassed them all as the greatest nonsense in the history of this sport. A race without a race, never seen before at the highest level.
You could do a lot of things to avoid repeating something like this. Several of them would need agreements and lengthy multi-band negotiations with televisions and promoters that would probably condition each case to the duration of the specific contracts of each one of them. But there is a simple solution, which can be implemented tomorrow, that would cascade on everything else: modify article 6.5 of the Formula 1 sports regulations which allows a three-lap event to be considered as a valid race.
Omitting the redundancy of sprint races, the first paragraph of the aforementioned rule specifies the following, letter by letter “If a race is suspended and cannot be resumed, no points will be awarded if the leader has completed two laps or less; half points will be awarded if the leader has completed more than two laps, but less than 75% of the original race distance, and all points will be awarded if the leader has completed more than 75% of the original race distance. This same rule, by the way, is the one that regulates just after the three-hour race clock starts counting from the expected start time, even if there is more than one formation lap or the start is not given. The same clock that they stopped with a ‘deus ex machina’ decision so that nothing would change, but that is another story.
I am fully convinced that the reasoning behind this wording was to limit the officiality of an event to its own beginning, but yesterday’s situation was the equivalent of the Brabham fan in the 70s, the double chassis of the Lotus in the 80, the active suspension of the Williams in the 90 or the double diffuser of Brawn GP in the 2000: a massive leak of water through a hole that the regulations enabled, which significantly damages the competition, and which must be sealed as soon as possible. In this case, it was a rainy front that remained for hours on the track while other storms passed from time to time in the area to make things worse. Spa-Francorchamps was the victim of the perfect stormAnd the regulations should already be in place for such situations after the various Asian typhoon scares in recent years.
A three lap race is a lie, even if those three laps had been given with the green flag. It goes against the history of Formula 1, the Grand Prix and motorsport, as well as its ‘queen class’ status. Putting the sheet over your head, holding a podium celebration, awarding points, and just advancing to the next event is such lousy makeup that if it had been applied to a pig to pass it off as a person, it would have been gobbled up by the two minutes of stepping on the street. And what is worse, it denotes a total disconnection from reality and what really bothers yesterday, which is the feeling of lack of control and improvisation in the direction of an administrative situation that could have been taken much earlier.
But the regulation should never have allowed this prerogative in the first place. So what is the short-term solution? Look at the United States, as so many times has been done. The two quintessential professional categories in the country, NASCAR and IndyCar, have held a common position on the matter for decades: the race must exceed 50% of the programmed distance to be considered official, without halftones and without halftones. This determination has its origin in his greater experience with long periods of waiting in the rain, especially in the ovals, where the liquid element does not directly allow any type of competition.
That same fact, that sometimes there is no choice but not to run on schedule, has also allowed them institutionalize the possibility of running the next day, two days later, or even a week later, as happened in the Indianapolis 500 in 1986, eventually displacing an adjacent race. For them, for practical purposes, an event that has not been able to start and an event in which only 35 of the 90 scheduled laps have been played have the same null value, and must be continued until reaching 50%. Otherwise, that race would be canceled and disappear from the official records. A situation that IndyCar has only gone through on three unfortunate occasions due to non-climatic force majeure that prevented competition (Charlotte 1999, Texas 2001 and Las Vegas 2011).
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From many corners of the world of opinion yesterday it was adduced that running another day, a heretical concept that Formula 1 has never adopted, was not even an option posed by the problem of the commissioners, part-time volunteers who have to return to their jobs during the week. This also exists in the United States and has not prevented postponing multiple careers: a contingency plan is enough to have substitute curators who could also work such an event on a weekday. Or with financially compensating the employees in question, and the companies affected by a possible absence of their employee. What effect would that have on the deep coffers of Formula 1, fueled each year by the multiple zeros contributed by its sponsors, circuits and televisions?
Of course, the american solution is not perfect and it has its loopholes in the urban circuits, where sometimes it is not possible to move the event to the next day. That happened in the very specific circumstance of 2002 at Surfers Paradise, an artificially prolonged event with 30 laps behind the safety car under a universal flood to reach the mid-race and avoid multi-million dollar losses across the Pacific. But in the rest of the cases, prolonged safety car situations had a beneficial effect to dry the track a little more, increase the confidence of the drivers in the difficult conditions and allow some competition, as Formula 1 well knows with the precedents of Japan 2007 and Korea 2010. Was yesterday’s visibility worse than then?
Knowing that it would be necessary to reach a career percentage much higher than that seen yesterday, whatever it was, would eventually lead to the aforementioned provisions to run another day, without having to tackle that aspect today. With this, the circuit gets what it has paid for, the fans get what they paid for, the drivers do what they are paid for, the category does not receive a public relations ‘black-eye’ … A real race , In short. And it only requires a small series of commercial and sporting commitments that are very far from the framework of the impossible.
What is essential is that, once and for all, Formula 1 stop basing its decisions on fear, and let the supposed best drivers in the world carry out their work in the conditions that justify more than ever their high salaries and their status as “ordinary men doing unusual things”, without the need to send them to die or go back to times past when the word ‘security’ was said the same number of times as ‘deoxyribonucleic acid’. Liberty Media has done a great job ridding the sport of many corsets that kept it stagnant in the ’80s, but It will not be enough as long as the FIA does not find out about the century in which we are.
Safety must always come first, but never at the cost of completely sacrificing competition in a sport that constantly lives with risk. And if that means running another day, then it is running another day. Otherwise, they’d better heed those who spit ink against them in 1955, disband, and let car racing join the chariot racing on the Wikipedia page for “sports of antiquity.” What’s more, better to imitate the commissioners who were hanging out in Stavelot yesterday: nothing safer than petanque, millions of retirees can’t be wrong.