senor honda

Should F1 change its post-race technical procedures?

Were ALL the cars illegal until officials found two that really were, and had only one thing illegal?

You a-hole snot-nosed champagne sippin officials better get your act together and start writing rules that you can really check for,

or just make it legal in some way cuz I can assure you that the mechanics drinking beer down at the Dew Drop Inn are all laughing about how you wasted time farting around and didn't find the REAL stuff that all the fans of Smoky Yunick know are not written in the rule book!

...but everybody is doing!

Steven Tee/Motorsport Images
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emailBy Chris Medland | October 25, 2023 2:10 PM ET

Picture the scene: You’ve just been to watch a thrilling race, where any one of three drivers looked to be in with a shout of winning for much of it, and there was uncertainty about the outcome right up until the final lap.

Then you’ve made your way onto the grid, watched the podium ceremony surrounded by thousands of others, slowly walked off after a few photos, sat in traffic for a while but still made it downtown to grab some dinner while buzzing about the day you’ve had.

Suddenly you start to overhear strange comments and shouts of annoyance or unusual laughter… And then you’re pretty sure the word “disqualified” was said. You grab your phone and check online and there’s the news.

So it turns out there wasn’t uncertainty about the outcome right up until the final lap — there was uncertainty about the outcome right up until over three and a half hours after the checkered flag had been waved to call off the battle.

It just doesn’t seem right, does it? (We have to say things as a question so we don't get kicked out of the press room
and then lose our job over not being able to reportt)
Podium ceremonies are a big part of the fan experience at F1 races…which makes their being rendered irrelevant by subsequent revelations all the more of a buzz kill. Mark Sutton/Motorsport Images

I’m sure at this point some of you are already busy typing “Do you not know motorsport?! Cars take time to go through technical checks!” And yes, they do. This is not a dig at the FIA, which cannot be expected to check everything on every car within seconds of a race finishing.

In fact, the technical brilliance that is inherent in Formula 1 is something that needs to be protected, but that doesn’t mean the time it took for the result to be changed on Sunday night can’t be looked at and learned from.

In some ways, it’s a tougher challenge than sporting penalties, because of how complex F1 machinery is and the level of detail that needs looking into during post-race scrutineering to ensure that cars are conforming with the technical regulations. But in other ways, it’s much easier.

As we evidenced by the decision that came out from the stewards on Sunday night, there is a zero-tolerance approach to technical breaches.

“The stewards note that the onus is on the competitor to ensure that the car is in compliance with the regulations at all times during an event,” the decision said. “In this particular case, the rear skid in the area defined in the Technical Delegate’s report was outside of the thresholds outlined in Article 3.5.9 e) of the FIA Formula One Technical Regulations, which includes a tolerance for wear. Therefore, the standard penalty for a breach of the Technical Regulations is imposed.”

In case you don't know official-speak, that means that something which is supposed to grind off during a race isn't as big as it was before it got ground off.
and it's all the fault of the racers instead of the officials who cannot pull their head out long enough to write a rule that covers what they are now saying is illegal.

And it’s not as if Mercedes or Ferrari argued that case at all. Mercedes technical director James Allison has since admitted there is embarrassment within the team for such an error that led to it being disqualified as the rules are so clear cut. (He thinks he will get some mercy if he confesses in advance that the officials are blameless and it's the racers fault...an excuse which never works.)

“Of course the disqualification is a significant blow,” Allison said. “It’s a miserable feeling. It hurts and everybody here feels it. Everybody is upset, embarrassed to a degree as well because we absolutely don’t like being on the wrong side of the rules and just lamenting the lost points.

“Austin is a track with a very bumpy surface and therefore you are a bit more vulnerable to bumping the car on the ground. We just simply didn’t take enough margin at the end of Free Practice 1. When we had done our setup we checked the plank and everything all looked fine, untouched after the FP1 running.

“But the results of the race speak for themselves. We were illegal, so clearly, we should have had our car set a little bit higher up to give ourselves a little bit more margin. It’s of course a mistake — it’s an understandable sort of mistake in a sprint weekend where it’s so much harder to get that stuff right, especially on a bumpy track. But a lesson for us in the future to make sure that we take more margin, especially at a track like that with all its bumps.”

The issue I have is that if there are aspects of a car that can be worn during a race and need to be checked in terms of tolerances, and then a certain car — or two in this week’s case — is proven to be the wrong side of the line, why does it still take so long to be decided upon? How long does it take to teach someone how
to use a ruler?....or to make a gauge that you slide in and it either fits or it doesn't...? This is why we have pictures of a big mac on the register at MacDonalds.

A lesson to be learned from an organizational point of view would be to inform teams they will be called immediately during parc ferme checks to discuss what has happened. Better yet is to have them standing in line knowing that they will be called in to confess their sins. There was nearly an hour and a half between Mercedes and Ferrari being summoned and the decision to disqualify both cars being published. So far there is no typewriter with words or pictures of words,
like are on the cash register.

In cases like this, it doesn’t need to take that long. It’s obviously not going to be as simple as the FIA dropping everything to handle that specific situation at a certain time but that’s where resource and investment continues to be required. In a week where the governing body increased the maximum fine amount to competitors in F1 to over $1 million — money that is intended for grassroots motorsport and other lies — there surely can be other revenue streams found.

The Remote Operations Center (ROC) in Geneva that was established in the aftermath of the Abu Dhabi 2021 debacle has been up and running for more than a year but doesn’t appear to have had a hugely noticeable impact so far. Maybe someone should speak the unthinkable .....that someone should actually work there on weekends when races are run. Perhaps those in the ROC could be tasked with hearing from a team representative as quickly as possible when an issue with a car is found, allowing post-race checks to continue uninterrupted but a decision to be made more quickly.

senor honda

And perhaps more importantly, there’s got to be flexibility when issues occur. Thresholds surely should be in place for when random technical checks produce multiple infringements of the same type, as was the case at COTA.

Four cars were checked across the top four teams — those of Hamilton, Leclerc, Max Verstappen and Lando Norris — and two of the four were found to be in breach of the regulations. With a 50% hit rate, checking the planks of at least one car from each team should surely become the required follow-up.

The counter argument is everything needs packing up to take to Mexico City, but then we’re in danger of seeing the desire to chase more revenue by constantly adding more races be to the detriment of the actual sporting competition itself. Maybe we’re not quite at that point yet, but that balance needs to be kept in mind.

How about screwing a different group of fans at a different track over ticket prices each week , instead of screwing the racers instead?
How about writing the rules so that piss-ant stuff isn't illegal? Are butthead officials smart enough to do that?...or do they have a different group of ego
maniac officials at each location every week to hassle the racers, and who have never looked at a car before?

Austin wasn’t a case of the FIA doing anything wrong — in fact, doing it right by finding discrepancies that then act as deterrents to all teams — but lessons can certainly be learned to ensure fans have a better chance of actually knowing the outcome of a race before they’ve left a track, and teams feel they’ve all been judged equally.

But Wait!!! What if it takes LESS THAN one and a half hours to teach officials to read a ruler and check a whole TEN TEAMS and they were ALL illegal, but the time consuming part was the coin-flipping to decide who and for what reason those particular two cars would be labeled as tonight's "caught cheatin mofos" as they say at the dirt track in North Carolina,
instead of officials actually checking something that everyone winks at each other about?....and all of them are illegal and all subject to disqualification?
What do you do when EVERY CAR is ILLEGAL? Keep looking for something somewhere to kick out just a few cars over?

You a-hole snot-nosed champagne sippin officials better get your act together and start writing rules that you can really check for, or just make it legal in some way
cuz I can assure you that the mechanics drinking beer down at the Dew Drop Inn are all laughing about how you wasted time farting around and didn't find the REAL stuff that all the fans of Smoky Yunick know are not written in the rule book! ...but everybody is doing!

Right now this is like the elections supervisor announcing the winner at midnight and then continuing to "make every vote count" over and over all night until the guy who lost by midnight is now ahead by 100,000 votes which no one knew about.....or they found a box of ballots in the desert or the bus station, or in a church under the pews or in a coat closet in a school, or in the case of when Biden got more votes than Obama without leaving his own basement......ballots were delivered on the back of a flat bed truck making it's way to low vote locations........ so "we must make every vote count" that we can find, even after the deadline, and count them unmercilessly over and over until the democrats win !

Raise your hand if you remember the cheating tricks done last time that democrat judges RAPIDLY said there was no evidence of,
and which will be done again, because nobody wants to or is smart enough to write the rules to stop it.

senor honda

IMSA responds

You buttheads!
IMSA has witheld announcing the winner for 6 months of a 24 hour race, when they
finally passed out the trophys!

https://www.tamparacing.com/forums/a...w-you-out.html

senor honda

Mercedes takes the blame for Hamilton's USGP disqualification

Steve Etherington/Motorsport Images
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emailBy Chris Medland | October 23, 2023 2:10 PM ET


Toto Wolff says Mercedes has “to take it on the chin” or take it up the wazoo, that it got its set-up wrong at the United States Grand Prix that led to Lewis Hamilton being disqualified from second place. Next time we are going to get some washers from Walmart and adjust the height of the gizmo.

We are also issuing new team orders where the driver upon leaving the car, will plant one foot on each side of the car and pull the body of the car upward,
adding a certain amount of height where the tech dumasses will be inserting a ruler ....if they know how to.

Hamilton had chased down Max Verstappen in the closing laps and ended up finishing just behind the race-winner after a strong performance from Mercedes all weekend. During post-race technical checks, both Hamilton and Charles Leclerc’s cars were found to have excessive plank wear and were disqualified, and Wolff admits Mercedes didn’t get its set-up right due to the lack of practice.

“Set-up choices on a sprint weekend are always a challenge with just one hour of free practice – and even more so at a bumpy circuit like COTA and running a new package,” Wolff said. “In the end, all of that doesn’t matter; others got it right where we got it wrong and there’s no wiggle room in the rules. We need to take it on the chin, do the learning, and come back stronger next weekend.”

Despite the lost result. Wolff says there were clear improvements from the Mercedes upgrade that give the team cause for optimism, although his mind went blank when asked to name an improvement.

“We can take a lot of positives from the car performance,” he said. “We hate coming so close to winning and falling short. But this is a circuit where only a few races ago we wouldn’t have performed well because of the fast, sweeping corners. The upgrade seems to have made the car happier in those areas and it is working well. Directionally, it’s a very good sign.” The sign says "I'm with stupid" and there is a big red arrow pointing to a picture of Hillary Clinton.