Poor old Kimi. There are all sorts of recriminations after his crash at Nurburgring when his front suspension broke after 15 laps of battering when running on a tyre, as James Alleninthepits described it, the shape of a 50 pence piece. He flat-spotted it trying to lap that twonk Villeneuve. I suppose strictly speaking to make it like a 50p piece he’d have had to flat-spot it 7 times, but I’m sure it wasn’t far off.

The new regulations this season where one set of tyres have to last each car for qualifying plus the whole race, along with the engine babying brought about by rules requiring them to last two race weekends just mean we’re treated to a two-hour endurance race. Don’t get me wrong, I like endurance racing; Le Mans is still one of the best tests of drivers and teams, but F1 to me should be about going as fast as you can for the two hours. They were billed as bringing down the cost of participation so that it wouldn’t end up as a slugging match between global car makers with no privateers and to promote closer racing by reducing the single-racing-line nature of most circuits. They’ve failed, and I think the F.I.A. knows it. That’s why they have started this survey cobblers. Quite how they couch it in the rules, I don’t know, but to me the key must be in the aerodynamics. When the drivers say that their lap times start to suffer when they’re within half a second or more of the bloke in front, that’s the problem right there.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 30th, 2005 at 10:34 pm and is filed under f1. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.