I was hoping — as was everyone else who loves sport — that the World Championship would be decided on the track. I was hoping that there would be no irregularities found after the race. After the year Formula 1 has had, to have the World Champion decided in a private room between three men was the last thing we needed.

Unfortunately, the nature of the sport means that it is not always that way. Sometimes the scrutineers find something on the cars that causes a result to be changed after the fans have left the circuit. It happens a few times a year. This is a regrettable reality of Formula 1, but it is the reality. It was just unfortunate that it had to happen on this of all days.

Once it was announced that the Williams and BMW cars were being investigated for fuel irregularities, it was clear to me that the FIA were stuck between a rock and a hard place. If they disqualified the four drivers, they would be accused of handing the Championship to Hamilton. If they didn’t (as they haven’t), then they would have been accused of stealing the Championship from Hamilton.

Surprise, surprise, now that the decision — that the drivers will not be disqualified — has been confirmed, sure enough I can hear Stephen Nolan on BBC Radio 5 Live doing his nut about it (luckily David Croft is rather more balanced). There is no doubt in my mind that the reaction from some other people would have been equally angry had the decision gone the other way.

Earlier on this evening I was listening to the 606 phone-in, and everyone seemed to have a different conspiracy theory about the race. Depending on who you listen to, the FIA are pro-Ferrari, pro-Hamilton, anti-Hamilton, anti-McLaren. McLaren are pro-Alonso, anti-Alonso, anti-Hamilton, pro-Hamilton.

It is a sign of the bad management at the FIA that this could happen. Here we were in a situation where the stewards’ decision, whichever way it went, would have been criticised. And whenever anything slightly abnormal happens there is somebody out there ready with a conspiracy theory about it.

Murray Walker always used to say, “Anything can happen in Formula 1 — and it usually does.” Today it would be better to say, “Anything can happen in Formula 1 — and when it does, point the finger at the FIA.”

This has come about because Max Mosley has politicised the sport to a poisonous degree. The FIA has created far too many ridiculous rules, making the sport more convoluted than it should be. And Max Mosley does business on the basis of personal grudges rather than what is good for the sport.

It is sad — but understandable — that people can not have confidence in the decisions made by the FIA. It is yet another sign for me that the sooner Max Mosley is removed from his post as President of the FIA the better.

It seems to me as though the FIA is increasingly determined to stick its nose in everything, constantly bossing the teams and bosses around for no good reason, and ruining the sporting spectacle for the fans at home. All too often the race result is changed hours after the chequered flag is waved. And with the multitude of almost-random grid penalties being handed out race-in race-out they really might as well draw lots to determine the grid order.

There is no need for McLaren to be given a special scrutineer to ensure that Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso are given equal treatment throughout the weekend. Even Fernando Alonso — whose complaints set off the chain of events that led to McLaren getting the extra scrutineer — says that it is completely unnecessary.

There is surely no-one who seriously considers that McLaren would do anything but offer their drivers complete equality — as far as they possibly can — this weekend. For a start, if anything goes wrong with Alonso’s car, there will be no shortage of people ready to suspect the worst and waiting to throw stones at Ron Dennis for it.

But even if McLaren were to ditch their long-standing (and contractually-binding) policy of equality between their two drivers, what business is it of the FIA’s? None whatsoever. McLaren are a private team, and they should be allowed to run their team in whatever way they see fit. Of course, Max Mosley sees it differently.

How interesting, though, that the FIA turned a blind eye to Ferrari’s policy of explicitly favouring one driver over another during the years that Michael Schumacher drove for them. Not only was this Ferrari’s well-known policy, but Ferrari were proud of it. Many today see it as the model by which all modern F1 teams should be run. If the FIA are so worried about equality, why are they not intervene when Michael Schumacher was competing for any of the five World Championships that he won for Ferrari, or for Ferrari’s own six Constructors’ Championships?

As if that wasn’t bad enough, on Friday at Interlagos came news that three drivers had broken a rule that nobody had heard of. Why on earth is there a rule concerning the number of sets of wet tyres a team can use during a practice session?

Quick, fire up the FIA Random Penalty Generator. Because we don’t know where Takuma Sato, Jenson Button or Lewis Hamilton will be on the grid. That’s right, Lewis Hamilton. Given all the criticism the FIA have faced this season, you would think they would be sensible enough to keep their grubby mitts off the championship battle and let the drivers decide the outcome on the track, the way sport should be.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I am not the biggest fan of Lewis Hamilton. But I must sympathise with him and the McLaren team here. Of course, it is fair enough if Lewis Hamilton and the McLaren team have broken a rule. To be frank, it baffles me why Lewis Hamilton needed two sets of tyres when he only did a dozen or so laps. And McLaren (and Honda and Super Aguri) should not be in the sort of situation where they find themselves not knowing the rules.

But this is quite a silly rule that I can’t understand the point of. This probably comes under the FIA’s catch-all “cost cutting” heading, the excuse they give for introducing all of their silliest rules. It is on days like this when I wonder if Formula 1 would not be better just re-writing the rules from scratch.

A good government needs to learn when to leave things alone and treat people as mature adults who can sort things out for themselves. Of course, most governments rather prefer to grab as much power as they can, and the FIA is no different.

The FIA promised that an confidential information would be removed from the documents before being published. Well, they certainly blacked them out. But simply copying and pasting the black areas revealed all! F1Fanatic has the story.

It is utter incompetence. Essentially, to remove the secret information, the FIA used a similar technique that internet users use to hide “spoiler text” when discussing films and the like. Highlight the text below, as they say.

Max Mosley would be hilarious if he wasn’t so pathetic!

So now all of Ferrari’s super secret information has been leaked for all to see. Not only this, but other sensitive information — such as Mike Coughlan’s salary at McLaren — has also been revealed. Who needs any rogue Nigel Stepney-style figure when you can get the FIA to do all the work for you?

The FIA have since fixed their documents, but of course it is too late. The originals are all over the internet now. On websites like major Dutch broadcaster RTL.

Do I envisage Max Mosley being fined $100m dollars for bringing the sport into disrepute because of this? Not a chance — even though he deserves it more than anyone else!

What was that you say? A double-rear master cylinder with spring? Very interesting!…

And then it all came crashing down. The resurgent Ferrari took advantage of Renault’s various mishaps. Infact, until today Alonso hadn’t won a race since Canada. It’s incredible how much this season has turned around. This morning all of the momentum was with Ferrari. That 25 point gap had been whittled down to zero, and Michael Schumacher had won more races than Alonso.

One (admittedly unlikely) possibility was for Schumacher to have actually won the championship today. To do that he needed to win the race and he needed Alonso to retire. But the reverse happened: Michael Schumacher — in the lead, with just 17 laps to go — retired with an engine failure. Alonso went on to win the race.

It’s so unusual. Ferrari’s reliability is usually bullet proof. But today we saw Michael Schumacher’s first engine failure in five years. What a time to have it! And it was truly unbelievable to watch. How many insects flew into my mouth while my jaw was on the floor?

It is difficult to express just how unpredictable the back end of this season has been. At the last race in China it looked as though Renault had it sewn up, but Schumacher was able to drive a fantastic race against all the odds. Today it looked as though Ferrari had all of the momentum — and they did, but only until Schumi’s engine expired.

With just one race to go, it effectively puts the World Championship out of Michael Schumacher’s reach. He can still win the championship, but only if there is another spectacular reversal and Schumacher wins in Brazil while Alonso fails to score. Schumacher has already effectively conceded defeat saying that he doesn’t want to go to Brazil effectively pinning his hopes on an Alonso retirement. But given the way this championship has turned out, it might not be such an unlikely situation!

Unfortunately, not an awful lot else happened during the race. Christijan Albers had one of the scariest car failures I’ve ever seen. And there were a few driver errors — notably from Liuzzi, Speed, Webber and Kubica — but that is to be expected on a circuit as challenging as Suzuka. It’s the last time, for the moment at least, that F1 will be paying a visit to one of the greatest circuits in the world. What an absolute scandal. Somebody needs to give Bernie and Max a clue.

It was a good time for Schumacher to announce his retirement, having just won at Ferrari’s home Grand Prix at the historic Monza circuit. He probably wants to retire “in his prime”, but I always hate it when people do that. Schumacher has a good chance of winning this year’s World Championship, and the Ferrari is going to be a strong car for the next couple of years (with the Bridgestone advantage). Still, there’ll be plenty of time to reflect on Schumacher’s retirement later.

On to the Grand Prix itself, and yet another nail in F1′s coffin was struck by Max Mosley and the FIA yesterday. It is getting more and more shameless by the race. It really is difficult to say now that the FIA’s prime concern is for Ferrari, not Formula 1. Fernando Alonso had his three fastest times in qualifying taken away for “blocking” Massa. YouTube has the evidence: here is the lap in question.

Did you see any blocking happen? I didn’t, Martin Brundle didn’t, nobody did. The only people who saw it were the race stewards, FIArrari and Max Mosley. It is an utter disgrace. Mosley is turning F1 into a complete laughing stock.

The fact is that Massa made an error in the Parabolica — a remarkably similar error to the one Schumacher made in qualifying at the same corner last year. Drivers are human, and they will make mistakes — and Massa’s incident at the Parabolica was one of them. Why does Mosley think that it must have been caused by Alonso, who was 100 metres ahead of Massa?! Absolutely crazy.

The FIA are tying themselves in knots with their attempts to constantly re-write and re-interpret the rules in favour of Ferrari. If any team makes a technical innovation it gets banned — unless Ferrari happened to be the innovators.

If Michael Schumacher cuts a chicane it goes unpunished and the rules are re-interpreted to allow him to get away with it. With this new interpretation of the rules, Alonso appeared to get away with cutting across a chicane today — so presumably cutting a chicane is now one hundred percent legal. Nice work FIA!

One of the most notable aspects of the actual race was the stunning pace of Robert Kubica. Very impressive. This is only Kubica’s third race, yet a lightning start ensured that he was right up with the front runners. The BMW was clearly an extremely strong car at Monza this year, but Heidfeld dropped an anchor on the first lap while Kubica sped away. He led for six laps and earned himself a fully deserved podium finish. Okay, so he was helped by the retirement of Alonso, but at that point Alonso had only just passed Kubica.

Alonso’s retirement will also be pivotal for the World Championship. The reliability of Renault had been bullet proof up until today when the engine blew up. This is important because it is a new engine, and teams will have to use the same engine for three years from now on. Honda rushed out their new engine, only for it to fail twice very quickly. So we’ll probably be seeing a lot of engine failures next year. Of course, it will be the same engines all the time, ensuring that we get the same result every single race — for three years. Another genius idea from Max Mosley!

For those of you who don’t follow the politics of F1 too closely (and I don’t blame you), the FIA want to ban engine development. Teams will have to use the same engines race after race — not for a few races or a full season, but for years, probably until at least 2009.

This is a completely batshit proposal, even by Max Mosley’s standards. Essentially this means that the winner of every World Championship for the forseable future will be a Ferrari or Renault driver. Unsurprisingly, the teams that were most in favour of the engine freeze proposal were Ferrari (and Ferrari arse-lickers Red Bull, Toro Rosso and Midland) and Renault.

How much notice have the engine manufacturers got to make the only engines they’ll be able to use for years to come? Less than two months. The engine freeze will come into effect before the end of this season. What on earth is happening to the sport?

Given that one of F1′s biggest selling points is its image of being at the forefront of technology, the FIA, worryingly, appears to be becoming opposed to any actual innovation. Any teams that try to do something different are told to stop doing it. Look at how BMW were forced to remove their innovative fins, and how Renault have been scared into removing their mass damper system.

In future it seems as though aspiring F1 teams will be able to buy other teams’ chassis on the cheap. What is this? Formula 1 or Scrapheap Challenge?

A common jibe about F1 is that the cars all look the same. But it seems as though the FIA won’t be happy until the cars actually are all the same.

And of course, because it’s Ferrari, the authorities will turn a blind eye.

Update: “Schumacher takes ignominious pole.”

Schumacher Takes Controversial Monaco Pole:

Schumacher has been guilty of these sort of tactics in the past, and his demeanour in the press conference was a little shakey. Michael didn’t appear to be as confident as normal and made a couple of slip-ups as he gave his account of the qualifying session.

Steve Rider and Mark Blundell on ITV’s coverage described Schumacher’s press conference performance as “sheepish”.

Update: GrandPrix.com’s qualifying report:

There is a restaurant in old Monaco called Pinocchio’s and one can only wonder if Michael Schumacher will be dining there on Saturday evening as there were more than a few people in the Formula 1 paddock who think that Michael’s pole was growing on his face.

Haha! Also, there is this news report:

Within minutes of the end of qualifying for the Monaco Grand Prix, there were rumblings in the paddock that a number of the F1 drivers are so unahppy about what happened to Michael Schumacher that the Grand Prix Drivers’ Association is going to demand Schumacher’s resignation from the board of directors of the organisation because they consider his manoeuvre at Rascasse to have been unsporting and detrimental to the image of the sport.

Update again: Short-sighted Sid compares Michael Schumacher to a true Ferrari great, Gilles Villeneuve, with video evidence to prove it.

Update: News of penalties are coming in now. Fisichella’s been moved back three places. He was deemed to have held up David Coulthard. Now what about Schumacher?…

Update 21:13: None of the other drivers are happy at all.

Meanwhile, the stewards have yet to make a decision. In a sense you can understand this. Whichever way they decide to judge it, the decision will have big repercussions. We probably won’t be hearing the end of this for a while.

Update: Radio Five Live is reporting that Schumacher has been sent to the back of the grid.

So it’s an all-Ferrari back row! Alonso’s on pole, Webber will start in second, and Räikkönen third. What a fantastic position for Webber to be in.

And if any of you haven’t seen the incident yet, here is a video of it on YouTube (via F1Fanatic).

Update: Confusingly, GrandPrix.com have a story headlined, Schumacher dumped to the back of the grid, but report that he will actually start 8^th.

I’ve decided that my categories are a mess, and tomorrow I’m going to attempt to clean them up a bit. I’ll be creating new categories, deleting rubbish old ones, and changing where they go. Some posts might end up in different places. Just a heads up, because it does mean that some feed URLs, and indeed website URLs, will change.

Elsewhere in F1-land, would David Richards really buy Jordan? It seems to be received wisdom that Alex Shnaider is already bored with Formula 1 (or didn’t realise how expensive it would be). But I found the Eddie Irvine thing more likely.

Today’s F1 Racing magazine landed on the doormat today and it has a massive piece on what has become known as ‘Indygate’. I quote some of it below.

Has the FIA president, Max Mosley, been at Indy, rather than “looking forward to a long lunch and an afternoon with a good book” at home in Monte Carlo… a solution might have been found…

One NASCAR journalist said… “We always say, ‘NASCAR rules are writ in pencil.’ It’s true. They are. But it helps us fix things when there’s a cluster-fuck like this.”

By contrast, FIA spokesmen proudly trumpet their claim that they “didn’t change [the FIA's] position…” Perhaps that was the problem…

Was [the proposed chicane] really more dangerous than, say, the Harbour Chicane at Monaco, whose principal run-off area is the Mediterranean Sea?

…At Montreal, the weekend before Indy, large areas of concrete were laid on the apexes of various corners overnight… despite the fact that neither the teams nor the tyre companies had been consulted, nor full FIA simulations carried out…

[Peter Sauber said]: “I never understood [the speed limit] idea. It was very, very dangerous. It was a nonsense, in fact… A crash — a big crash — [would have been] 100 per cent certain. It was an unbelievably dangerous idea.”

We quote Sauber because, of all the Michelin-contracted team principals, he is usually by some margin the least outspoken.

Now here is where Max’s idiocy comes in once again, when he tries to defend his ridiculous speed limit idea.

“During the detailed planning that would have followed any decision to impose a speed limit, no doubt someone would have said there needed to be a point at which the speed limit would have to start… somewhere after Turn 12. So you would have had waved yellow flags [ie, no overtaking] from somewhere after 12 to the end of the speed limit. End of problem.”

I just about had a fit when I read that. Not only did Max Mosley propose a speed limit, but he also proposed that no overtaking would occur on Turn 13. That would have been a much better race!!! Idiot. And of course, if there is no overtaking and one car is going faster than the other, the only place the car could possibly go is into the back of the other, causing a massive crash.

F1 Racing goes on:

Well, Max, no. Not “end of problem”. A car might not overtake, but it might unintentionally be driven straight through the gearbox of the car ahead.

“New evidence” has come up pointing out that the teams were obliged to follow Michelin’s safety advice, and therefore were not at fault. Except everybody knew that all the time, so goodness knows what the FIA are up to.

I’ve given up trying to understand the FIA. I suppose we should just be thankful that this is all over and that the sport can now (hopefully) move on.

Update: The official Formula 1 website is asking for people’s views on two particular proposals for qualifying systems for 2006. I voted for proposal two, although the smaller teams may not be too happy with that as it will not guarantee them television time.