The F1 circus going to Bahrain on the FIA's orders despite this contravening the FIA's own Statutes (more detail in the "UniFacepalm" entry) for those who are interested) and then being further in breach due to one of Force India's hire cars being attacked despite safety reassurances from the FIA. This means the event technically doesn't meet Article 17 of the International Sporting Code any more. This in turn means that F1 cars can no longer partake of the race, if Article 5.2 of the Sporting Regulations is anything to go by. As such, there are two very good regulatory reasons why F1 cannot race in Bahrain.

In light of the above, the F1 race, by the FIA's own regulations, should not be happening at all. Therefore I intend to ignore all sporting aspects of the Bahrain weekend. There will be no live-commenting on Twitter or the Fisichella Forum (as I normally provide), nor will I comment on any aspect of any driver's on-track performance.

Discussions of non-sporting aspects of F1, and of non-F1 events, will continue as normal and appropriate.

I hope this is OK with everyone and apologise to anyone who is inconvenienced by this service interruption/boycott. Non-F1 items are unaffected by this boycott, and I intend to resume live-commenting F1 events in Spain and (possibly) the Mugello test beforehand, subject to the FIA not breaking any regulations in the course of going there.

First of all, sorry for the long absence. I've had a lengthy spell where everything I've wanted to write has been either live-commenting or small enough to fit in a tweet or two. Neither fits my blogging style. I'll try not to let 10-week absences happen again.

Fury ignited this entry. It's the ongoing situation in Bahrain. Up until now, it's been a matter of ethics and safety whether F1 goes or not. Thanks to the Bahrain organiser's actions, it's become a matter of regulations.

I speak of the "UniF1ed" campaign - something which apparently has been happening for a while but only came to my attention last night.  The organisers of the race may or may not have originated the campaign, but they are enthusiastically participating in it. Little do they appear to realise that they have endangered their race by doing so.

I draw your attention to the tagline "One Nation in Celebration". The pedants among you will deem this false - F1 is a worldwide event so, barring disaster, "Many Nations In Celebration" would be more accurate. The font used for it on the poster is difficult to read, but that's even more nit-picky. The big problem, however, is that it expresses a link between F1 and national unity. 

Linking F1 and national unity probably doesn't seem that big a problem. It may even seem close enough to pro-social and "sport is good" themes to be helpful. I can only assume that was what the organisers thought when they decided to go down that path. Unfortunately for them, Article 1 of the FIA Statutes (PDF), in wording combined with its application and the reason for its existence, indicates otherwise.

Article 1 of the FIA Statutes says, among other things:

"The FIA shall refrain from manifesting racial, political or religious discrimination in the course of its activities and from taking any action in this respect."

Many thanks to the Midweek Motorsports Listener Collective on Facebook, particularly with regard to finding an ad in the campaign that further demonstrates the link the organisers are making between F1 and politics.

You may be wondering why I am using "linking F1 and politics" as synonymous with the "racial, political and religious discrimination" actually mentioned in Article 1 of the FIA Statutes. This is down to two things: the way Article 1 has been implemented and the reason Article 1 is required to exist.

The most recent use of Article 1  was to convict the Turkish GP organisers (TOSFED) of using the 2006 podium ceremony for political gain. Mehmet Ali Talat presented one of the trophies. This in and of itself wasn't a breach of Article 1. Had he been described as the regional governor of Turkish Cyprus, everything would have been fine (except for possible grumblings within Cyprus and Turkey). However, he was described as the head of state of the Republic of Cyprus, a state not recognised by the UN but is recognised by Turkey. That was deemed a breach of Article 1 of the FIA Statutes and of Article 151c of the International Sporting Code. This was for a one-off incident that was relatively subtle in its political aims and, importantly, did not connote political discrimination, only express a controversial political point. 

Yes, part of the fine was for Article 151c, but a more significant breach of Article 1 would be sufficient for any penalty the FIA has to be levied. The "UniF1ed" campaign is clearly not a casual breach, nor is it a question of tick-boxing. Article 35 b) specifically mentions that any club not acting according to the expectations of the FIA (including by breaking any of the Statutes) can be struck off the roll. That is to say, the entire club and all associated activities can be dissolved. Obviously, this would include the very Grand Prix Bahrain was attempting to protect.

There is nothing in the Statute that requires a political statement to be true or demonstrable in order for it to be usable. Technically speaking, even explicit FIA approval wouldn't work, unless the message was specifically against racial, political or religious discrimination. "UniF1ed" isn't. Instead it is a message suggesting political unity already exists, which doesn't meet the exemption requirement. 

As for why Article 1 of the FIA Statutes exists, it's mandatory for non-political organisations registered in France. This is because anti-discrimination and apolitical approaches are considered key elements in the sorts of groups France allows to be registered with them. If the FIA overlooks a breach of Article 1, it is under serious risk of being sent to the French civil courts and penalised. Dissolution is entirely possible, as is a large fine and (at least partial) loss of its autonomy over judging its own motorsports events.

That would open the door to everything from pitlane speeders to technical flouters to use the civil courts to challenge every single decision the FIA makes. Motorsport would grind to a halt. That assumes a lack of dissolution - that scenario would obviously have a serious deletrious effect on every branch of motorsport, including ones that never in a million years considered going to Bahrain.

Clearly none of this is in any motorsport fan's interest. It certainly doesn't help Bahrain organisers any! 

There is no longer any need to reference political strife or anyone's safety to justify not going to Bahrain. Regulations now demand refusal to race - and refusal to support the race. Many have suggested this be done in the form of a boycott.

Thanks to the combined efforts of Sky (inaccessible, unaffordable and unethical) and BBC Radio (unintelligible in the races), I won't have a choice about watching the race. The most I'd have been able to do was follow it on Twitter. Having already had the difficult bit taken out of my hands, I am quite happy to boycott the 2012 Bahrain Grand Prix completely. The powers-that-be have already demonstrated they don't care about viewer figures due to sending the UK live rights to Sky, so I doubt the boycott will achieve anything. 

For that matter, I'm not convinced the situation is safe enough to enable a viable attempt to hold the 2012 Bahrain GP. If inviability makes for a race cancellation on force majuere (which incidentally has to be done by the FIA if there is to be a Bahrain 2013), that would be helpful in the short term.

The breach of Statute would make the validity of copyright use of "F1" within "UniF1ed" questionable too. The licence the organisers have to include F1 in their marketing would surely not include uses in materials breaching the regulations, particularly ones underpinned by law. Some of the cases Bernie has lost on the topic mean there is not sufficient evidence for certainty in either direction. Even so, that wouldn't be Bahrain's biggest likely problem.

Its biggest problem in that scenario is that Bahrain would likely lose the race... ...on account of there being no viable authority to contract the race from in the first place. 

For these reasons, it is wrong to support a race that's being used to support political strife in contravention of Article 1 of the FIA Statutes. As in, it's such a big contravention that, at minimum, the FIA will lose its ability to be the first and final place of judgment for matters involving its own series (everything would have to be made subject to the French civil courts). The French courts are rather sensitive about the whole "no politics" thing for non-political organisations. The moment Bahrain's organisers issued the "UniF1ed" ad campaign, it was in contravention of the regulations. That the FIA has (so far) let that campaign go ahead without comment is contemptible and puts the FIA - and every single series it runs, including those who'd never have gone to Bahrain in a million years - in a very vulnerable position.

It's in F1's and the FIA's interest not to wait for force majuere to come into effect, but to protect themselves by cancelling on the grounds of FIA Statute Article 1 breaches.

Until then... ...I don't see why I should have to applaud or condone the FIA's attempted self-destruction.

I spent much of last night live-commenting on the opening round of the Intercontinental Le Mans Cup, the Sebring 12 Hours. It is also the opening round of the American Le Mans Series.

The race proved very exciting but was difficult to follow. To the organisers' credit, there was an attempt to make the series easier to follow than ever and I've heard the ESPN3.com coverage was excellent, at least for some people. However, only viewers in the USA could watch it that way, for international coverage was on a separate stream on americanlemans.com. This was a good idea, except that it appears that interest in the race was severely underestimated.

The official site's video coverage seriously lagged. By halfway through the second hour, it was three minutes behind the action and the stuttering on the audio was so bad I had to mute it. Thankfully two alternative audio streams were available. Not trusting the one hosted at the same site as the stuttering video, I opted for Radio Le Mans.

Radio Le Mans worked well during the afternoon, being smooth and consistent. Then I went to swimming club just before 6 pm GMT (3 1/2 hours into the race). I wasn't around to see it, but apparently there was a point in the action where the only information source available was Twitter. The video, all audio streams and both live timing systems were all down. The audio was back up and running by the time I was home at 7:30 pm GMT (5 1/2 hours into the race) but from then on everything was quite shaky. I had to reset the commentary four times between that point and the end of the race (something which had been unnecessary prior to going out). Even using Twitter was chancy because some people (including some official sources) were following the race using streams of varying timeliness.

Naturally, this was unsatisfactory to the many people watching. Sidepodcast's hour-by-hour visit recording system (known as Heartbeat) demonstrates this vividly. After steadily increasing in views during the hours between the race starting and 18:00 GMT, there is a sharp fall in viewers in the two hours following, probably due to people getting fed up and leaving. Indeed, by 20:00 GMT, the figures are only about twice as high as for the morning commenting, which is the quietest time of day for the blog. Yes, the figures recovered as the night progressed (though ignore midnight onwards because a second event, the Red Bull Crashed Ice event, was being live-commented there later on) but think how many more viewers would have been there if everything had worked correctly.

This is a very widespread problem in motorsport but rarely is it put in such stark relief. I know it's difficult to cater to the multitudes, especially when you have no idea of the volume of those multitudes (it was the first time ESPN had attempted to provide a visual service to international ALMS supporters and it was only the second race of this level the ALMS had attempted to live-stream internationally). Nonetheless, the message is clear.

Improve reliability and the potential rewards are huge.

Low reliability will carry a heavy price.

Much like endurance racing for the teams themselves, really. Aim for the sorts of reliability the GTC class had. Not those of LMP2*...

* - I do not believe I am offering any spoilers by saying that all 8 GTC cars, even the ones that didn't see the flag, completed more than 70% of the race distance (in other words, enough to be classified had this been an LMS race) and only one of the four LMP2 cars did so.

Today's entry is going to be a relatively short one (cue relief from LCMB's readers ;) )

Before I found out about the F1 blogosphere, or even the F1 fora, I used to use Yahoo! Sport's portal to keep up-to-date with the news. Even afterwards, it was good for brief checks of what the hot topics were before plunging into the detail stuff from sources who were more detailed/closer to the truth/more opinionated [delete/augment as appropriate]. It's been a while since I've done that - Twitter more or less took over the role of telling me what the hot topics were at a given time - but this afternoon I wandered back to Yahoo! Sport for nostalgia's sake.

I was disappointed at what I saw.

The fact that it's a news portal, rather than a direct source of news, meant I was unsurprised with the... ...variable quality of sources used. It was the lack of quality control that truly got to me.

Take this example. The headline indicates it's a rumour, but such efforts to distinguish the type of item are the extent of its strengths. The story is attributed to F1 news site Crash.net in the top-right of the article, Spanish daily sports newspaper Diario AS in the middle of the article and the distinct impression that GMM is involved at some point as a middlesite. The Diario AS article which appears to have started all this is much longer than the versions at Yahoo! and Crash, and the style of abbreviation has all the hallmarks of GMM on it.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the GMM controversy, it is an information-trawling agency that charges money to send metric tonnes of small items of varying levels of veracity, frequently using an online translation service to help make its quota (currently 8-25, but changing every so often). It's the F1 data equivalent of fast food - some like its convenience but many consider the lack of value-added information, rumour quotient, lack of indicated differential between types of item and certain other of its actions unhealthy. Whatever your opinion of GMM, it is proper etiquette for a site to mention a site if used as a middlesite. Proper "breadcrumbing" of information sourcing enables people to find out by what process the information has arrived and what changes may have been made to it along the trail.

Making matters worse is the lack of care in the sentences. This carelessness has been imported from Crash.net, but that is no excuse. Why is "newspaper" abbreviated with an apostrophe when the correct abbreviation doesn't have one? Why have online translator artefacts such as "the Collins" been left? They act merely as symbolic eyesores and serve no useful purpose.

Worse still are such confusing suggestions as "Tonio Liuzzi's management has made contract with Hispania Racing" when the headline itself suggests the two sides are merely in talks. The offending sentence is the very first one in the article. What, exactly, is a reader unaware of the true situation meant to make of this? They might think something's been signed, they might not - but they will think the reportage was rather clueless. Not great for a site that presumably expects people to come back and read more of its articles.

It is a relief to me that the F1 blogosphere and reputable journalists like Joe Saward have taken over as the primary sources of F1 internet information exchange because if they hadn't, computer-using F1 fans would be banging their heads on the wall in frustration every time they logged on.

PS. If I have made any blatent blatant spelling or basic sentence construction mistakes in this entry, feel free to point and laugh at the irony ;) .