The Belgian Grand Prix was frustrating not just because of the stewards’ decision to penalise Lewis Hamilton, but because for almost all of the race the indispensable Live Timing was not working. Live Timing is without doubt the best feature of Bernie’s website. And like many of life’s great things, you never realise how much you depend on it until it’s no longer there.

That is on the back of a number of failures over the past few grands prix where individual transponders have failed, causing drivers to start falling down the order on the screen when in fact they had lost no places at all. But this was a whole lot more serious — the live timing application simply wasn’t loading at all.

I wonder what caused the failure. I spent periods of the race trying whatever I could think of to get live timing to work — using different browsers and so on. I noticed that Formula1.com as a whole was slow. I do wonder if the failure was simply caused by too many people trying to access it. If that is the case, I hope it has sent a message to Bernie Ecclestone. The fans love circuits like Spa-Francorchamps, and we want fewer Tilkedromes!

In addition to the live timing problems of the past few races, there have been a number of incidents involving fuel rigs. There were a number of fires during the Hungarian Grand Prix while drivers were taking on more fuel. Then in Valencia, in addition to at least one more fire, a Ferrari fuel rig became stuck, partially causing the nasty incident when Kimi Räikkönen left his pit box too soon.

Fuel rigs ought not to be having these sorts of problems as they are all standardised and supplied by the FIA. These types incidents of by no means unheard of. But it does seem unusual that there have been so many problems in such a short period of time.

Now Renault have criticised the meteorologists employed by the FIA to provide all of the Formula 1 teams with weather data. All the teams contribute to pay for the service provided by Météo-France. But it seems as though Pat Symonds doesn’t think the system is working well enough. Here is what he said during the post-Belgium Renault podcast:

We use a weather prediction service this year from Météo-France. It’s really not been terribly good at the best of times. But it actually failed for fifteen minutes during the race just before that [the rain shower towards the end of the race] occurred. I think if you were to listen to the recordings of our pit communications, you’ll find a bit that would definitely need to be bleeped out when the radar comes back on and we see what’s on it. So it was very difficult for us to make those decisions at the time.

Oh dear.

One of the more minor talking points of the German Grand Prix was the failure of the live timing system provided by FOM. This is not the first time FOM’s timing systems have failed. In fact, a failure is a relatively common occurrence, and the odd glitch is to be expected in any system as complex as this which has to be hauled around the world.

However, the problems of the German Grand Prix were much more major than usual. And it represents what I consider to be the second large failure of FOM’s infrastructure in the past twelve months.

What happened in Germany

Problems with the live timing system became apparent when commentators across the world exclaimed to their viewers that Heikki Kovalainen was dropping down the order, but they couldn’t explain why. Soon enough commentators realised that this was an error, as Kovalainen was still running in third position with no problems whatsoever.

Each Formula 1 car carries a transponder which uniquely identifies each car. At various points on the circuit there is a beam which receives a signal from the transponder as the car passes through. This is the equipment that enables FOM to measure lap times to a thousandth of a second as well as car speeds. This equipment also records when cars enter the pitlane and how much time they spend in the pitlane.

What apparently happened is that the transponder on Kovalainen’s car failed. This is not the first time that has happened. Seemingly (and this is speculation on my part) once the people at FOM realised what was going on, Kovalainen was manually re-inserted into his actual race position — not before the legend ‘STOPPED’ (meaning “stopped on the circuit”) was displayed. This process seemed to continue for the rest of the race. A few times I spotted him slipping down the order a couple of places before magically re-appearing in his original position.

Apart from the initial scare of watching Kovalainen tumble down the order for the first time, this was a bearable issue. However, it was not the only problem to afflict live timing that day.

During the first round of pitstops, only three drivers were recorded as having entered the pitlane when in fact almost every driver had made a stop. This wreaked havoc as it was impossible to tell who had taken a pitstop and who had not. To make matters worse, the pitstops were subsequently manually added over a period of several laps. Cars were shown in the red text with the words ‘IN PIT’ which normally signify that a driver is taking a pitstop. However, they were not in the pitlane.

At this stage of the race Radio 5 Live’s pitlane reporter Holly Samos said that the teams were finding the failure of the live timing system very frustrating. It was very possible that the failure of this extremely important source of information could potentially have affected the race itself.

Captions on the television also went a bit awry for a short while at this stage, with the classification being displayed without the time or pitstop strategy information that normally accompanies it. For a few laps every driver except for Hamilton was shown as a being a lap down until this too was (seemingly) manually rectified.

The lap chart — which can still be accessed by clicking on the live timing link on this page — is a bit of a mess. Here, not only was Kovalainen largely missing from the chart, so too was Kimi Räikkönen.

The positions of the two Finnish drivers were not updated lap-by-lap as they should be. Instead, they jump about with their position updated at seemingly arbitrary points of the race. Gaps are left in the chart where they were supposed to be.

All-in-all, it was a bit of a shambles on the timing front during the German Grand Prix.

The other major failure

This comes off the back of the problems experienced in the 2007 Brazilian Grand Prix. Here, the timing systems were fine (as far as I am aware at least), but the weather equipment was playing up.

I and others had pointed out that the temperature was extraordinarily high at Interlagos. At its peak, the track temperature was recorded at 65 °C. Looking back, it seemed a bit fishy. Ted Kravitz pointed out, “That would’ve melted even my trusty Dr Martens boots.”

The track temperature is often of interest, but it is not usually a vital aspect of FOM’s offering. However, this time the temperature measurements were later to have a pivotal bearing on the race result in this, the final race of the championship. The Drivers Championship was almost decided by FOM’s temperature gauge.

In what became known as the ‘cool fuel’ saga, the BMW and Williams teams were deemed to have breached article 6.5.5 of the technical regulations which states that “no fuel on board the car may be more than 10 degrees centigrade below ambient temperature”.

A cooler temperature in the fuel would allow teams to refuel cars more quickly — and, indeed, fit more fuel into the car. The BMW and Williams teams were both accused (by FIA technical delegate Jo Bauer) of filling their cars with fuel which was more than 10 degrees cooler than the ambient temperature which was recorded at 35 °C.

There then followed the revelation that the rules do not state how the ambient temperature should be recorded. Should the fuel temperature be measured against the ambient temperature recorded by FOM’s equipment? Or should it be measured against the information supplied by the FIA’s meteorologists, Météo-France?

Météo-France recorded the ambient temperature as being “a few degrees lower” than FOM’s measurement. Meanwhile, Bridgestone recorded the track temperature as being 48 °C as opposed to FOM’s 65 °C.

Clearly, FOM’s temperatures were way off. Ted Kravitz speculated that their temperature sensor may have been placed in the sun — a mega no-no in meteorology. Williams technical director Sam Michael furthermore pointed out that the equipment had not been calibrated for a full seven years and that it had been clear to all the teams that FOM’s weather information was not to be trusted as early as 2005!

That just strikes me as complete laziness on FOM’s part. Coupled with the woes we saw in Germany which frustrated the teams, it is clear that, unless things change, FOM’s faulty equipment could one day alter the direction of a race or even a championship in a big way. Here’s hoping FOM look into the technical issues and try to avoid a repeat of what happened at Hockenheim and Interlagos.

Here is The Scotsman in full scaremongering mode.

METEOROLOGISTS last night said Scots will need to learn to live with the extreme weather and the chaos it has brought to the country over the past few days, as the unpredictable effects of climate change begin to bite.

A bit of wind? Can anyone seriously look at yesterday’s weather events and describe it as an outlier; some kind of new-fangled mystical event?

For once, the (initial) comments in the Scotsman.com thread are sensible.

Clan-destine:

Has Scotland ever had anything else but bad weather?{especially in winter} I think after a few thousand years of bad weather we’re pretty much resigned to it by now and very much used to it….is this news? It’s a bit like a headline that says “Jings!Ice found in Iceland!!”

Statsman:

We never had bad weather in Scotland when I was a kid. It was all sunshine and magic love pixies. Damn this global warming!

DunCraig:

These meteorolgists must be babes in nappies!

Now, I believe that climate change is happening and is a problem. But some people are clearly in the business of creating fear. If the slightest gust of wind or wee puddle is going to be blamed on climate change, people will stop believing that climate change is a problem or even exists at all.

I have written before about the fact that the slightest abnormal weather event is being blamed on climate change. I am beginning to see this sort of thing with increasing regularity. This has severe implications for the credibility of the “scientists” who lunge in, blaming everything on climate change with no data to prove it. Climate change is damn close to turning into a religion.

People are not bloody idiots. Keep a lid on it and tell us about the icecaps melting, not a pissy wee gale the like of which we see every year!

I now know what they mean when some people say that environmentalism is the new religion.

Thankfully the storm surge predicted at dawn didn’t come to much. It seemed like a different story last night. I was listening to Radio 5 Live overnight, and they were simulcasting with BBC local radio stations. (Incidentally, you can listen to it here — the relevant bits are from about 2 hours in.)

It sounded pretty grim. The high tides hadn’t receded, and a further three feet of water was expected. Hundreds of people evacuated.

One woman was on holiday on a boat in the affected area. She had to wait until it was light until she could make a move and was worried that her boat was going to tip.

Then Radio 5 Live took a telephone call from Chris in Norwich. It is safe to assume that he was Chris Ballance because he said he used to be an MSP for the Scottish Greens. He said is deputy climate change spokesperson for the Green Party, so you can just imagine what he was saying about it all.

It is almost certainly global warming.

The thing that really annoyed me about this was that just about ten minutes earlier an actual meteorologist, Peter Gibbs, was explaining precisely what was going on. It was a one-off meteorological event. An unfortunate combination of low pressure sitting over the North Sea, gales blowing around the north of Scotland and spring tides in the English Channel, and the geographical nature of the area (the narrowness of the North Sea towards the Channel meaning that the water has nowhere else to go). There is a good diagram here.

Presenter Dotun Adebayo asked him just the right question: What about the great storm of 1953, was that global warming too? Bam!

With the listeners having had it explained to them precisely what was causing the rising waters in the south east of England by an actual meteorologist, politician Chris Ballance obviously felt the need to phone up and make sure that some spurious guff about climate change got broadcast. It seemed to me like a crass attempt at making party political gains, exploiting and capitalising on the genuine worry people felt about lives and property.

I am not a climate change sceptic by any means. Funnily enough, I am readier to accept the expertise of qualified physicists, meteorologists and climatologists over the deniers who approach the issue from a political, ideological perspective.

But I can’t help but notice that environmentalists have managed to get themselves into a position where the slightest freakish event is put down to climate change. There is no scope any more for one-off events, meteorological coincidences or freak conditions. It’s all climate change now.

In centuries gone by, before people had enough knowledge to realise otherwise, such events might have been put down to a higher power, a God or something. Having had a brief few centuries of enlightenment, we are almost reverting back to using a catch-all explanation for everything rather than actually analysing what is going on. Climate change is the new God.

Apparently Edinburgh University is bucking the trend, and admissions for its maths courses are up. I was there for one lecture in first year, and it was certainly quite busy (although not nearly as busy as Politics).

Yup, last year I almost took Maths as my outside subject, but just one lecture was enough for me to realise that it was far too difficult for me. This is despite the fact that my original idea was to do Maths and Statistics or something along those lines at university. I had wanted to take Advanced Higher Maths in sixth year at high school, but not enough other people wanted to do it (they only needed seven!). So I had to take a year off without thinking about any maths. It was enough to practically knock it all out of my system entirely. Now I can’t imagine why I ever thought Maths and Stats would be a good idea?!

So guess what I took in sixth year instead of Maths? Economics. And I found it pretty interesting. In fact, my friend who also took Economics and I both found it incredibly refreshing, because it was a subject that seemed to actually mean something outside the classroom. It was something that we could go home and think about and say, ‘yes, I see that happening in real life.’ Goodness knows what crap I was learning in Maths or Physics and at the time, but I certainly didn’t seem important, and I can’t remember most of it now.

(I can remember that s = ut + ½at², but only because when I got some plants for my bedroom, for some reason that I still don’t understand today, my mother was eager for me to name them. So I called them all stupid names to take the piss. ’s = ut + ½at²’ died quite quickly.)

So after the success of Higher Economics I decided to take Economics (along with Politics) at University as well. Imagine my shock when I ended up having to know calculus inside out! Sometimes I think I almost might as well have pulled a subject out of a hat. Now I wish I took Meteorology instead. I think I’ve been interested in weather all my life, except for those couple of weeks when the Ucas form was in my possession. But the grass is always greener, huh? Who knows what I’d be saying if I actually did do Meteorology…

It’s not that I dislike Economics or anything. Infact I think it’s very interesting. But I find it difficult to be fully convinced by everything that we’re taught, and I do find it the subject difficult as well, which isn’t a help. Nevertheless, I’m quite determined to see Economics through because I feel deep down that it is somehow a better subject than Politics.

I’ve mentioned six or seven subjects so far, and I’ve been somewhat agnostic about all of them for at least part of my life. But sitting here today I feel that so much of what happens in life is down to pure luck, so I guess I should just take what I’m given and be happy with it.

In the past, though, it was a different matter. I think I should tread carefully here, because I got a bit of criticism when I gave up piano lessons. Some people thought that I should have appreciated that I had talent, and that it was a bit selfish of me to just reject it when so many people would give their right arm to be able to play the piano (they obviously haven’t thought about how they would actually play the piano once they had lost said arm). But then again I did get criticised by somebody else who said that I should have quit earlier because I wasn’t interested in it. You can’t win, can you?

Anyway, there are two subjects that everybody thought I was good at in school: English and Computing. But I just have to say no no no.

I have no idea why people thought I was good at English. I hated English with a passion, but for some reason double English was always the most fun subject in fifth year because it was also the one where we were allowed to skive. I can’t remember what we were supposed to be doing, but we weren’t doing it and it must have been something where having loud, jovial conversations and pissing ourselves laughing wouldn’t arouse the teacher’s suspicions.

The only good marks I got in English were for speaking. I don’t know what it was, but something always seemed to click when I had to make a speech about something in front of the whole class. Unfortunately, it was never so when I had to write something. Ironic, given that I now spend so much of my spare time writing for fun. Anyway, I hated writing — especially stories, because I have all the imagination of a sieve (I’m equally bad at similes).

And I know you’re not supposed to admit this if you want people to think you’re really smart or whatever, but I almost never read books for pleasure, and I certainly don’t read novels. In fact, all forms of fiction (films, dramas, plays, whatever) need to be bloody amazing to grab my attention. Don’t ask me why, but I just find it all boring.

Which brings me on to Computing. Zzzzz. Apparently if you do Computing you’re going to make loads of money, but who gives a stuff about that if you’ve got to spend your whole life doing boring shit like programming. Unlike with English, I actually was good at Computing, but I simply could not see myself spending my whole life doing that sort of thing.

Third year, when you start Standard Grades, is when the really boring shit starts. I was sitting at the computer during a lesson, and just as I was actually thinking how incredibly dull programming was, my Computing teacher came up to me wielding a piece of paper with a note scrawled on it: “fourth year and talented third year only”. I was one of those third years singled out. My teacher wanted me to enter this annual programming competition which I think a lot of people actually take quite seriously.

“Errrrrr, I don’t really like competitions,” was my lame excuse.
“But you like programming,” came my teacher’s reply.

AAARGH.

This is nice. I’ve been wanting to get some of those things off my chest for ages! I guess I’ve come to the conclusion that there is no point in finding a dream subject or career. They are all pretty shit, the grass is always greener, and so on. So there’s not much point in worrying about it by, for instance, writing an oversized blog post about it…