Hutnicks
Headphoneus Supremus
- Joined
- Jun 16, 2012
- Posts
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Good questions. I know that Gene Haas couldn't express enough just how complicated these power units are. You'd think that Honda would just figure one thing out and catch right up but obviously it's not so simple somehow. As to the cost of F1, you need it to not be an open checkbook. Our US commentators were lamenting the 30 spot grid penalty on Alonso and how "ridiculous" it is, but if you just give them free reign, there will be 2 teams in F1 and everyone else will leave. It almost happened in Moto GP and it wasn't pretty. I don't want to watch a race with a grid of less than 10 cars.
I think letting Honda/McLaren spend and break token rules at the cost of basically forfeiting every race is fair. Let them spend their way back to being competitive and all the private teams can score points and make/save $ in the meantime. It's kind of a self policing system, if you think you can score points you wont sacrifice a race to break an engine rule for the mid teams, and for sure the top teams wont put a championship in danger just to gain 0.1 second at the cost of grid penalties when they can gain that in aero development or something. The only danger is a team leaving one of their 2 drivers to whither and test new stuff while another goes for a championship, but if you keep the reward for placement in constructor's championship high enough they wont do that either.
The penalties to the driver are ridiculous, until, as you point out you take the overall tableau into consideration. There is really no other way of penalizing a team fairly. If you say we will dock constructors points then you give teams like Mac carte blanc to do whatever they want as they know there will be no points to be docked anyway. There should be a limit on the maximum grid places to be set back though as penalizing more places than their are on the grid makes the show look like clowns are running it.
When Mac first decided to partner with Honda I figured that it might be a fairly brilliant strategic move. If Honda had come out swinging it might have been a great end run to a high perf motor without suffering through the development Renault and Ferrari were having to do. After all Merc got it right on the first go. It could have been a very different story alltogether. As it turned out it was not to be and we have the mess now in progress. I still wonder if in fact there were FIA regs in effect in the initial development that hampered Honda or if in fact they just underestimated the task, made harder by Ronbo's insistence on size 0.
I really hope some employee writes a book about this fiasco. It would be a fascinating read.
Oh yeah. The FIA asserting its presence by forcing the Halo through. Come on guys. The best engineers in the world and you come up with something that hideous and obstructive?
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