Attempting to discuss things about Monaco has proved a frustrating experience. I am accustomed to being in discussions and even arguments about contentious bits of the race. I am not accustomed to major events happening in a race with seemingly only me noticing. 

Firstly, the crash that caused the red flag. It has been established that it was a complicated mess, but what sparked it? I've seen blame put on several people, primarily Adrian Sutil. What none of those blaming Adrian seem to have noticed was that he took damage in a collision three laps earlier with Kamui Kobayashi. This is clearly demonstrated in Adrian suddenly falling into the clutches of the midfield pack that was in process of being lapped.

He was one second than usual on lap 65 (the lap of the pass - note that all lap numbers on the graph are transposed by one lap), became 3 seconds slower than usual on lap 66 (the lap after Kamui passed him) and 4 seconds slower than usual on laps 67 and 68. On laps 69 and 70, Adrian is 20 seconds a lap slower than usual - but both include pit stop time for replacing tyres. This indicates progressive damage. Given that Kobayashi hit the right rear tyre and it was this tyre that ended up in need of a replacement, it is perfectly reasonable to consider that a weakness in the tyre (underinflation from a slow puncture would be most likely) contributed to Adrian's crash.

I cannot begrudge Kamui his 5th because he was overdue one, but I do not feel that this exempts him from having his race properly analysed.

Secondly, the whole raft of complaints about being able to change tyres/wings/springs on the grid and Pastor Maldonado's removal from the results by Lewis Hamilton. While I see a point to the complaints about the Lewis/Pastor crash in particular, all three debates have missed the most important point - that Article 18 of the General Prescriptions prevented the restart from happening in the first place.

Article 18 of the General Prescriptions (link in PDF) has three cases concerning red flags. Initially I'd thought this was in the International Sporting Code, but it appears this particular rulebook also applies to every international racing series (Article 1). Article 18 describes mid-race stoppages using Cases A, Case B and Case C. These will be familiar to those who recall the contents of 2003-era F1 Sporting Regulations documents. For the people who haven't done so, the cases refer to when the red flag is flown and determine what happens thereafter.

Case A is for when the red flag flies within the first 2 laps. Basically, the race is treated as if it never began.

Case B is for when the red flag flies between 2 laps and 75%. The race is restarted on a 10-minute procedure when possible and the running resumes from the lap where it ended.

Case C is for when the red flag flies between 75% and the end of the race. The race result is called then and there. No restart is attempted even if it would be easy to do so. The race is deemed to have finished when the red flag flies, though there is a countback rule.

72 laps out of 78 is 92.307% of the race, which is considerably more than 75%. Clearly this is a Case C situation.

The inclusion of the General Prescriptions in the list of regulations applicable to F1 on the FIA's website means that the document must be taken seriously. Nonetheless, the General Prescriptions is overruled by the F1 Sporting Regulatoins and the International Sporting Code if there are contradictory clauses.

However, no such clauses exist in either document on the question of Case C restarts. There is nothing in either the International Sporting Code or the F1 Sporting Regulations that allows for a red flag beyond the 75% mark to be interpreted as anything other than the end of the race.

Even Article 41 of the F1 Sporting Regulations (the regulation most often cited as justifying the restart) doesn't do that because Article 18 of the General Prescriptions says the race ends when the red flag is flown in Case C situations. Article 41 doesn't mention anything about the definition of a red flag or end-of-race signal changing. Therefore a Case C situation falls under Article 43 (the regulations for finishing). The lack of mention of Cases A, B and C in the F1 Sporting Regulations (they was removed in 2005) does not suffice to negate the power of General Prescriptions Article 18. Article 1 of the General Prescriptions specifically says that precedence only applies in the case of contradictory regulations.

So a lot of the arguments of yesterday should have been null and void. There should have been no argument over tyre or wing changes because there shouldn't have been any laps in which to use them. Pastor and Lewis shouldn't have crashed because there shouldn't have been any time for them to crash in.

Pity the powers-that-be didn't care about their own regulations - again. Double pity that even people like Ted Kravitz (in BBC TV's coverage of the race (iPlayer link; expires 5 June 2011)) and Joe Saward presented Article 41 as if it was the only relevant item, even though it proved not to be especially relevant. When none of the people at the circuit appear to care, how can anyone else be expected to do so (other than stubborn people like me)?

Today's blog entry was inspired by a ;remark by Andy Hone at Sidepodcast's   F1 photographers versus the democratisation of media

Do you honestly think that if the gates are open to anyone they  will go to obscure places on the circuit? No not a chance they will all want to be at the prime locations and it will just be even more uncomfortable for everyone.

I have deliberately not clarified "they" in the quote as this itself appears to be a point of disagreement. Suffice to say for the purposes of this entry, it's photographers wanting to take photos of F1-related things who don't currently get trackside access to do their photography.

The broader problem sparking this comment can be separated into separate pieces (links below go to specific comments so you don't have to wade through what at times was a very heated argument):

1. There  aren't enough photographers in place to record every important events at Grands Prix
2. There are sufficient photographers for the idea of extra ones to cause tension bordering on fear  
3. The main thing that causes 2), other than potential loss of livelihoods, is doubt over the quality of the incomers
4. The market for blog photography is heavily underserved
5. The situation described in 4) applies despite the likes of Paul-Henri Cahier making inroads into the sector  
6. The market is starting to use other methods to bridge the market gap alluded to in 4).

What we have here is a classic disruptive market opportunity. There's an information gap (1), a demonstrated resistance to the most obvious remedy from current providers (2), a barrier that could be removed to lower that resistance that the current system doesn't help remove (3), customers for those who exploit the information gap even if they aren't 100% successful (4), proof that it doesn't have to be an outsider who serves the market (5) and signals that the window of opportunity will close by itself if not appropriately exploited (6).

That last point is important. Without it, the resistance to the idea of providing for the bloggers' market would make provision there a niche at best. There's a reason why point (5) mentions only Paul-Henri Cahier. With it, the needs have to be served - by the current providers of photos if they're willing (with the potential for suitable recompense), by newcomers (or by piracy) if not. 

The experiences of other intellectual media (music, writing, movies) has shown that underserved markets will find ways of satisfying their needs. What F1 photography needs is a method of serving those needs in an economically satisfying way that respects the list of limitations and conditions given previously?

Wonder if tiered passes would work? The photographers with a excellent and extensive track record would get a particular level of pass (call it gold for the sake of this discussion) that would allow them to access all areas and have priority in any location.

Less experienced photographers who'd nonetheless demonstrated their skill could have a different pass (silver, maybe) that would allow them into any photographer-suitable trackside area (though perhaps not the paddock, which invariably seems to be full) but only if nobody with a gold pass was there at the time. If anyone with a gold pass decided to go there afterwards, the silver pass people would be asked to leave (extra marshals may be required to help, but at Grands Prix that shouldn't be too much of a problem). 

Newcomers could get a further different pass (bronze) and be assigned a spot in a place where past experience showed neither gold nor silver pass-holders went. Allowance would be made for the occasional gold or silver photographer who wanted to take photos from there. It would be especially useful for those photographers who are only able to reach one or two circuits in a given calender, because these would be the ones getting the least practise at shooting F1 and having them in set places would enable better scrutiny - not just of quality but of behaviour. 

Photographers would move up and down the scales based on what they were producing and the audience they were getting. I would anticipate the bronze-silver transition to be primarily done on quality and the silver-gold one to be mainly based on how many people and from how wide a range of sources were looking at their content.

The system would give newcomers a chance to prove themselves and perhaps to experiment with the photography model for bloggers and other places that need low-quality images, allow the experienced people to get "the shots" and go where they see fit, and also provide a method for transitioning between the two states as people get more confident in their skills and perhaps want to have a go at getting the big time.

No system is going to get everyone who wants to be a F1 photographer through the gates, nor need it do so. What this system does is meet a demonstrated need/desire in the market while still maintaining the quality of F1 photography and also not changing the system so sharply that current practitioners have no chance of competing. Yes, the current brigade will need different skills to thrive, but that's a different blog entry altogether.

This entry has taken me some time to figure out how to write. Something's been bugging me about recent F1, primarily since the Turkish Grand Prix. However, it was only when Duncan Stephen wrote his item on why he was finding 2011-spec F1 not to his taste that I figured out how to write my own objections to what's been going on. My first reaction to the piece was:

Hurrah! Somebody doesn't think that the current F1 is a) the bee's knees or b) only ruined by excess overtaking.

For me the proximate problem (i.e. the one that's directly causing me dissatisfaction with F1) is meaningless overtaking. In Turkey in particular, the method of generation of overtaking caused lots of zero-sum exchanges - lots of passes but most of them were never going to affect anything in a month of Sundays. They were just going to get re-passed later in the corner sequence or else in the DRS zone the following lap.

DRS foreshortens the process of passing even when it's producing a reasonable net increase of overtaking. This makes it less skilful and also less significant in the context of a race. Those comparing Turkey 2011 to Japan 2005 have forgotten, among other things, that many of the overtaking moves in the latter took laps to set up. Yes, it was normal for cars to be innately 1-2 seconds faster or slower than each other that year, making things difficult enough for complaints, but that still shows planning and skill were important.

If pressing buttons is the new hot skill for F1, why aren't all the F1 drivers being sent on evening typing courses? Why aren't fit typists with clean driving licences being considered for F1 testing roles over the heads of those who have toiled in F3 and GP2?

Besides all that, DRS should never have been experimented with in a race weekend. It should have been tested properly prior to use, and then implemented equally and effectively in all races.

Despite the emphasis on changes to the racing, qualifying has now become the be- and end-all of F1. The only reason it's not become the only non-accidental deciding factor is because many teams haven't worked out it's merely a question of getting your single lap per session faster than those around you. It's no longer possible to waste tyres doing two runs. If you're first into the first corner, DRS means you'll be able to pull out a big lead and protect your tyres as you will while everyone battles behind you. I felt like kicking Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button when they did their little duel at the start; by focusing on each other they lost time to Sebastian Vettel and wore out their tyres, which made it impossible for either to do anything about the race leader.

That's right, to get exciting racing for the lead in this system you need a team to qualify both its drivers right behind the lead one (without the pole-sitter's team-mate or any other team being in between) and then execute firm team orders on lap 1 to stop them from attempting to race each other. The "no. 2" would be tasked with staying 1.1 seconds ahead of 4th place and then keeping a consistent pace to remain 1.1 seconds ahead of 4th place, preserving the invisible barrier. "Good" thing systematic team orders are permitted this year, else every race win would be unsalvageable.

If you're not a potential race winner, qualifying is still vital and still has to be done as a single-lap run for each of the three sessions. This would be one set of tyres for Q1 and Q2 and then a second set for whichever session is believed to be the final one. If you get through to Q3 when it wasn't expected, simply sit out the session to preserve your strategy. This is because if you can't look after your tyres, the best strategy is to have as many new ones as possible. If you can do that, it's irrelevant whether you can pass the people around you (with gimmicks or not) because you'll probably gain a pit stop on them - especially if your car is relatively kind to tyres like the Sauber is). Even if you don't, you'll gain considerable amounts of time and flexibility.

It's bizarre that the strategies dictated by fragile tyres and ease of DRS-based tactics mean that the act of passing - DRS-based or otherwise - is almost irrelevant to the results.

The trick is to evenly space out all tyre changes according to when your car will need them, which should be quite straightforward to determine based upon performance in the first stint. It doesn't even need anyone to bother doing a pre-race equation - it's simply a question of chucking tyres at a car when it needs them. Pit strategy outside the options a car may deny has now got so little relevance that the discretionary laps can be deployed whenever the team wishes. All the strategy divergence is down to two factors: a) due to the tyre philosophy being new, different cars treat them very differently and b) many teams do not appear to have figured out what's going on yet, so haven't even taken the obvious step of going single-lap each session up to this point.

So we now have the single-lap qualifying some people have called for. It's not improving the racing - it's taken it away. Duncan Stephen has called it "one step away from fixing the result". I wish I could be so reserved on the matter. As far as I can see, it is fixing the result to whoever happens to be the fastest one-run driver/car combination in qualifying, and for most of the top 10, stupidity and extreme tyre wear permitting, they are fixed in the positions in which they qualified.

KERS doesn't seem to do anything to help the sport - it just seems to be something tagged on to keep the stupider elements of the environmental movement a little more content. It's in F1 in a form that will never be utilised on the road (road KERS will be a very gentle addition for all accelerations, not a big boost done occasionally), delivering power in a way that makes overtaking more difficult (which may be protecting us from even worse problems with DRS) and with a lack of freedom which places it firmly in "gimmick" rather than the "feature" it is about to become in sportscar racing. That it's not facing a campaign for removal at this time shows just how much of a problem DRS presents.

One of the things which worries me - and I think it's one of the things that's made it difficult for me to blog - is that so many people don't seem to see the medium-sized picture let alone the big one. They see lots of passing, lots of energy, lots of confusion - and start cheering. They do not see that it's causing very predictable strategies, very predictable results and a very samey feel to races. Energy and confusion might have got many into the sport but if it had kept being those things at the expense of everything else - especially the surprise element - they'd have stopped watching within a season because there'd be nothing to grip them with. If I wanted to know the winner 24 hours before the race and the result of a race for most of the field on lap 15, I'd put on a season review DVD. At least then there'd be decent camera direction...

Sport is a form of entertainment. If done properly, it will be entertaining whether or not the "show" is considered (the "show" only affects how many people get entertained and the length of the entertaining). The decade-long trend towards considering "show" over "sport" is nearly complete. But F1 is not reality TV. Reality TV tropes do not necessarily work for sports such as F1, even with extreme tweaking. The cost is that F1 will soon be unable to be called the pinnacle of motor sport, on the grounds that it will not be a sport at all. The sport needs urgent attention in order to save it, to take away the worst of the gimmicks. That way it might be possible to see how to get the enjoyment of racing to run clear again.

Though I'll let the powers-that-be tweak the "show" enough to get a competent TV direction system and crew. The current one hasn't worked since FOM took over the job and 2011 is exposing their weaknesses so much. It's even more frustrating to be watching a predictable race when perfectly competent commentators, used to having at least vaguely usable images to commentate from, find themselves clueless to things you figured out 30 laps before because you, unlike them, could see the little ticker-tape running across the bottom of the screen...

This blog entry was prompted by the Formula 1 Blog entry "Vox Certatus: Playing Favourites", which was about favourite teams and drivers and why we thought them so. Initially I took the question at face value, providing a somewhat lengthy response covering Force India, Hill, Fisichella and... ...Montoya. With stating why I disliked the latter, I inadvertantly kicked over a hornet's nest.

When next I visited, I cleared up a small misunderstanding concerning how I'd worded one particular phrase (or so I thought), but then the discussion drifted in a way I hadn't expected. F1 Kitteh asked me:

So you would rather have ‘scripted **’ than ‘verbal abrasiveness’? 

This is the question which I intend to answer here, since the "essay" proved too long for the comments section of Formula 1 Blog.

In my opinion, there are three kinds of verbal abrasiveness. One of them can be a good thing. Another is generally a somewhat bad thing, but can be very bad depending on the particular circumstances. The third one is always very harmful, and unlike the second one it harms everyone, not just the speaker.

To indicate these, here is my personal sliding scale of verbal abrasiveness and scripting, from best to worst:

Situational, justified verbal abrasiveness <- scripting/situational unjustified verbal abrasiveness <- persistent verbal abrasiveness

 
If someone is liable to be sharp-tongued only in specific situations and there appears to be good reason (e.g. they've just had a really stupid steward's decision against them), that would be better than any form of scripting.

An unjustified sharp-tongued incident tends to lead to biologically scripted behaviour, which is about as accurate as behaviour scripted by the powers-that-be (i.e. not very). This is why I rate behavioural and psuedopolitical scripting on the same level. I don't expect those involved to give the explanation for their behaviour as it is frequently obvious in context, but without some reason for being abrasive, one often finds that common sense and logic go out of the window alongside the politeness. I would consider Scott Speed as an example of someone who washed out of F1 partially because there was confusion over whether his situational abrasiveness was justified or not. I thought it was (from what I heard of it) but Franz Tost differed in opinion.

It's the people who are always abrasive, who cannot seem to go five minutes without denigrating someone or pointlessly attacking some slight, who are the least accurate and the most likely to drive me up the wall even reading their words. Most people like that end up putting off their sponsors and mechanics early in the junior formulae and therefore never get seen by the talent scouts, let alone anyone in F1.

Nonetheless, a few do drift into F1. Some people really like such people, possibly because they are so different to those around them or because they can identify better with them. Personally I cannot identify with them at all because I am accustomed to people who have a reasonable (though frequently imperfect) concept of keeping a civil tongue in their heads. People who don't get mad or dismissive at absolutely everything. And it's this which made me dislike Juan Pablo Montoya and Eddie Irvine. However good they may have been as drivers, as people they disappointed me and their ways of talking about others was the primary clue for me to come to this opinion.

(Incidentally, I prefer truthfulness - whether that's Mark Webber's brand of bold statements or Kamui Kobayashi's calmer candour - over any of the above).  

Ultimately, the limitations of particular drivers' attitudes, personalities and methods of thinking have a large influence on their enduring support base. Performance comes and goes but character tends to stay stable - most of the time. Different people tend to resonate with different drivers according to those characters, unless they are the sort of people who support based on performance (be that success or underdog status) or who support more abstract entities such as teams. Even then, teams have group cultures which invoke the general principles discussed here.

Speech is one of several doorways to the revelation of character. It's one of the more accessible ones to the general spectator, especially when spoken in places where journalists have taken the trouble to record the results. Look closely enough and the clues are all there.

Which drivers really think a given way v. those who are claiming it due to conditioning. 

Which drivers really respect - or even like - another v. those who pretend to respect another v. those who have dropped the pretence.

What each driver is hoping for in F1.

Which ones are likely to be around in a strong enough position to achieve those hopes.

Some signals in speech are more obvious indicators of character than others. A habit of persistently abrasive speech is pretty obvious. I just didn't realise it would be so controversial.

Script Frenzy Update:  20 pages of prose, which should become 40 pages of script when formatted. I feel confident about this challenge.

A discussion in Sidepodcast yesterday led to the invention of a new variant of the old classic Monopoly - F1 Monopoly: Deal or No Deal Edition. 

It's just like Monopoly until you land on a Tax space or on someone else's property. Then the owner (or the banker, if it's a tax) makes you an offer. You can either accept the offer or take a card from the pile. The amount on the card is the amount you pay.

Also, instead of houses and hotels, you can buy multiple "boxes" to go on your properties.

And of course it's all themed. Purple for the FIA, light blue for Red Bull, red for Ferrari, light grey for McLaren, dark grey for Mercedes, gold for Renault, green for Force India, dark blue for Williams and white for Sauber. There are also 5 tracks that can be collected in the same way as the stations on the original Monopoly.

Hopefully it will get you through the few hours remaining until the F1 season restarts. Just 2 more things to say:

1) You have until 3 am GMT on March 26 (or the start of Free Practise 3, which is scheduled to start at that time) to put in your entries for the Pre-Season competition. Don't forget delivery to anywhere in the world is included in the prize.

2) It's my birthday on March 26. My fingers are crossed that Force India gives me a good qualifying session for a present.