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Archive: scandal

Singasnore — What makes a good F1 race?

28 September 2010 23:19

Categories: *, Formula 1, Newspapers, Television

What do viewers at home love about F1? It is great wheel-to-wheel racing? Lots of overtaking? Strategy calls? Or the venues? Looking at the polarised reactions to this past weekend’s Singapore Grand Prix got me wondering.

A few of the journalists were pretty effusive about the race. Will Buxton was particularly euphoric:

Epic race. One of the best of the season. Wow.

I saw that this drew a few hoots of derision, including from me! Because from the comments made by other fans watching at home was that… well… it was a bit dull really.

It wasn’t a stinker by any means. There was some good action and a fair few talking points. But large stretches of the race were rather processional. Hardly epic.

The epic race without the racing

Will Buxton justified his comments:

No sarcasm. Epic race. ALO VET lap trading, WEB early stop and brill drive, HAM / WEB moment, GLO driving arse off. KUB amazing.

There is some truth in what he says. While Webber and Kubica provided some entertainment, this was only because they were out of phase with the surrounding cars strategy-wise, so were not on an equal footing with the drivers they were battling with.

As for the battle at the front, the problem was that Alonso’s victory was never truly in doubt. He commanded the track all weekend, and always even looked like he might have a bit extra left in the tank too.

During the first phase of the race, Vettel drifted back to 3.5s behind Alonso. After the pitstops, the gap eventually grew to over 2s before slowly decreasing again. Vettel did get mighty close to the end of the race, but this was typical Alonso driving conservatively.

Renault engineers always talked about how conservative Alonso was as a driver. They never had to tell him to turn the engine down; he had already done it.

So it was in Singapore. Alonso had done just enough to establish himself as the certain winner of the Singapore Grand Prix and had the whole situation under control.

It may have looked good on the timing screens. I did indeed get excited when purple sectors were being set and Vettel started to decrease the gap. But the “lap battle” was partly down to the street circuit becoming cleaner and faster towards the end of the race.

I’m sure they were playing with each other, but neither looked to be pushing particularly hard. Alonso was always in control, and Vettel never looked interested in truly pressurising.

At the start of the race, Vettel had ceded the first corner, setting the tone for his race. It did not look like he was particularly interested in winning — a suspicion confirmed by Vettel’s comments that passing Alonso would have been too risky. And why bother? Alonso is the ultimate defensive driver, as his amazing battle with Michael Schumacher at the 2005 San Marino Grand Prix demonstrated.

The bottom line is that if you hold a race on a street circuit with one overtaking spot — two at a push — then the racing isn’t epic. There might be stuff surrounding the racing — strategy, crashes, pretty buildings… But not much overtaking.

Interesting, yes. Epic, no. The ingredients simply weren’t there.

Epic racing or epic facilities?

There is a trend for certain venues to be talked up a lot by the F1 circus, no matter how good the racing is. I particularly remember Valencia Street Circuit — which has served up three of the most turgid grands prix seen in the last decade — was universally praised by the teams as being a great venue for grand prix racing.

Scratch the surface of the headlines, though, and you see that they are not so interested in the racing itself. Ron Dennis said that the 2008 European Grand Prix at Valencia was so great that it made him “ashamed to be English”. But it left most others ashamed to be F1 fans, it was so bereft of racing.

Of course, Ron Dennis was thinking about the facilities. Facilities are apparently the only thing that matter in F1 these days. Never mind what the viewers at home make of the track. As long as the venue is equipped with a shiny silver throne for the McLaren chief to do his golden business in, who cares about the people at home?

Similarly, the journalists have clear favourite places to visit and places they can’t stand. China? Don’t talk to them about it. And spare a thought for poor, poor Magny-Cours. It was so awful — not because of the circuit, of course, but because it was in the middle of nowhere, as the journalists never missed the chance to remind us!

Meanwhile, Melbourne is always the “great place for a race” — is that code for a booze-up? And Singapore is now “epic”.

Never mind the fact that the Marina Bay Street Circuit is not great for overtaking. Never mind that the 2008 race needed a manufactured crash to pep it up, and that the 2009 race was voted the fourth worst of the season by F1 Fanatic readers.

TV coverage demonstrates skewed priorities

The scenario was not helped by some rather lacklustre television coverage from FOM this weekend. It looked to me like the director was more used to directing pop music videos than motorsport.

Coverage at night races is always dominated by shots of the lit-up buildings and the scenery surrounding the circuit. It feels more like the Singapore Grand Prix is more like an advert for Singapore than a motor race. Who was going to bed last weekend without seeing that flashing “Your Singapore” banner in their sleep?

When it comes to races like this, Bernie Ecclestone’s priorities are clear. Why else would the bland coverage of last year’s Abu Dhabi Grand Prix have won an FIA award for best coverage of the season? Much of the race action was missed. Anyone not paying full attention would have thought that the race was won by a hotel that looks like a giant flashing lady-toy, so fixated were the cameras on anything but the cars.

Those in the inner circle in F1 should remember that the fans at home are looking for epic racing — not epic Holywood movies, epic nightlife or epic superloos.

8 comments

F1 2010 mid-season rankings — part 2

22 July 2010 10:09

Categories: Formula 1

You can read part 1 of my mid-season rankings, where I assess the bottom half of the grid.

6. Force India

Force India have come along way in the past couple of years. From being perennial tail-enders, they are now solid midfield runners and can regularly expect to beat the likes of Williams, BMW Sauber and Toro Rosso. Vijay Mallya has succeeded where Alex Schnaider and Spyker failed.

A question mark remains over the driver lineup. I still find Adrian Sutil rather unimpressive. In his fourth season, surely we should be seeing more. And Vitantonio Liuzzi, while showing flashes of excellence, has generally failed to live up to expectations.

Force India also need to be careful that their progress up the grid does not come to a shuddering halt, with a mass exodus of their technical team having occurred this year. James Key has moved to assist in Sauber’s resurrection, while Mike Gascoyne has poached some of his ex-Force India colleagues to join him at Lotus. Looking at the five teams that are ahead of Force India in the Constructors’ Championship, it is difficult to see how they can make much more progress.

5. Mercedes

It hasn’t quite gone to plan for Mercedes. Seemingly fed up with McLaren, the manufacturer opted to buy the Brawn team that was so stunningly successful last season. Then, in a crass marketing stunt, they signed Michael Schumacher with much fanfare. Well, it’s all been a bit of a damp squib.

The car has not met up to expectations, and I have heard rumours that Ross Brawn is not too happy with the way Mercedes run the show (who knows if there is truth in that though).

For my money, Mercedes must have the worst driver line-up with the possible exception of Sauber. Nico Rosberg is relatively well rated. But let us face it — we all know there is still a question mark as to how good he really is. Meanwhile, it was clear to me from the very start that Michael Schumacher would be rusty, and his performances has fully justified my view.

It would have been much better for both Nico Rosberg and Michael Schumacher if a more sensible driver was chosen. Schumacher could have kept his dignity in retirement; Rosberg could have learnt from a genuinely solid and reliable barometer. Someone like Nick Heidfeld, perhaps. Or, you know, Jenson Button or Rubens Barrichello…

4. Ferrari

It has similarly come apart for Ferrari. Although they showed promise at the start of the season, with a win in Bahrain (even if they didn’t quite have the outright pace). But since then the story has been one of a slow but steady decline as the season has progressed, as Ferrari have failed to keep up the pace of development, and as the Championship has increasingly focussed on Red Bull and McLaren whose cars are far superior.

The drivers have to take their fair share of the blame too. Fernando Alonso has been making many more mistakes than usual, and he is not as enjoyable to watch as he used to be. A worrying development for the person I consider to be the best driver of the past decade. Meanwhile, after a relatively bright start in Bahrain, Felipe Massa has seemed off-colour for most of the season.

3. Renault

They may be fifth in the Constructors’ Championship, and, yes, they have the fifth fastest car. But I have elevated Renault in my rankings because it is an astonishing comeback.

It is incredible to think that just a month ago, the Renault F1 Team was mired in the quite unsavoury scandal that became known as ‘crashgate’. Having lost its sponsors and its star driver in addition to its team principal and technical director, you would expect 2010 to be a rebuilding year for Renault.

But the rebuild was swift. The team has rebranded to focus on its racing heritage, feeling less like the team that descended from Benetton. It has a steady new boss in the shape of Eric Boullier, who I think is doing a fantastic job. And its new star driver, Robert Kubica, looks set to become the team’s long-term centrepiece.

Kubica is doing really well just now and seems happy — by his standards at least! Vitaly Petrov is a fair bit off his pace, but he has not disgraced himself in my view. It should be remembered that Petrov is the only rookie among even the midfield teams, never mind front-running teams — so he should be given a bit of room to breathe and develop.

2. Red Bull

Red Bull should be number 1 on this list. This ought to be their year. They came out this season with easily the fastest car. Their car is still easily the fastest car. They have two of the best drivers on the grid.

Unfortunately, the last little bit — professionalism, cohesion, restraint — that takes all these ingredients and turns an operation into a championship winning Formula 1 team is missing. If it isn’t some kind of reliability problem, it is a strategy goof, or the mother of all mismanagements.

Just now, Red Bull remind me of where McLaren were at a few years ago. Unable to control team mates. Bizarre strategy calls. Constantly walking into traps that they set up for themselves. Somehow conspiring to hoof it over the bar in the face of an open goal.

The statistics illustrate it well. Out of ten races, Red Bull have had nine pole positions, but have had just five wins. They lag behind McLaren in both championships. For a team that has what is probably comfortably the quickest car, Red Bull have managed to immensely stuff it up so far.

1. McLaren

McLaren have not been without their troubles this season. At the start of the season, it was clear that their car was not as quick as they would have liked. But the way they are dealing with it is the opposite to Red Bull, and that signals to me that they have learnt a lot from their difficult period in the mid-2000s.

As with Ferrari, they were scuppered by poor tactics during qualifying for the Malaysian Grand Prix, severely compromising their race. Yet they still salvaged a fair points haul. Jenson Button did the same again at Silverstone a couple of weeks ago. Even when it goes wrong, McLaren sort it and get it right. McLaren is now more agile and astute in its strategy calls than it was two or three years ago.

Martin Whitmarsh has done an outstanding job to plug the few gaps in McLaren’s abilities that Ron Dennis left behind. Now McLaren are a formidable force that should never be underestimated.

McLaren’s pace of development alone makes them stand head and shoulders above the rest. The high-profile failure of their new blown diffuser at Silverstone is only really notable because it is so unusual for a new McLaren part to go wrong. Other teams have this sort of difficulty all the time. Witness the various botched attempts to adopt the F-duct, another part of the McLaren package that makes it the best of 2010 so far.

Then there are the drivers, who are both on song. Despite various figures constantly trying to goad them into a bloody deathmatch, they appear to get on like a house on fire.

Witness the difference between the McLaren team mates and their Red Bull counterparts at Turkey. McLaren’s drivers had a misunderstanding, but instead of blabbing to the media or making silly hand gestures, the drivers sorted it out with a quick chat after the race. Very professional. Lewis Hamilton’s and Jenson Button’s approach is a very healthy approach to racing all round.

That is what makes them championship winners, and today’s championship leaders. That is why McLaren are still the best team, even when they don’t necessarily have the best car.

Comments closed

Is it time to tear up the FIA rule book?

29 June 2010 23:04

Categories: *, Formula 1

In terms of racing, this year’s race at the Valencia Street Circuit was easily the most successful of the three that have been held so far. Although arguably it was mostly as a result of the shake-up that occurred after Mark Webber’s horrendous accident with Heikki Kovalainen — which we really do not like to see — the fact is that the spectacle was quite good. The start and the first few laps certainly had a lot going on, even before Webber’s crash.

Unfortunately, as often happens in Formula 1, the on-track events have been overshadowed by the inept management of the sport behind the scenes. The stewarding in Valencia was a complete shambles, making a mockery of the sport.

As if the shambolic nature of the stewarding wasn’t enough, the issue has been compounded by Ferrari’s over-the-top reaction. Yes, they have a point. They were hard done by. The FIA systems should have worked better. But, in the words of a former Scottish First Minister, it was more of a cock-up than a conspiracy.

It is unusual for Ferrari to jump up and down and complain about unfair treatment at the hands of the FIA. This is the team that brought us farcical events like Austria 2002 and the “manufactured dead heat” at Indianapolis the same year — yet now they complain about manipulated race results. Never mind, I suppose eight years have passed…

The stewarding problem wasn’t solved after all

Of course, one of the biggest changes in the way the sport is run this year (apart from the change of FIA President) has been the introduction of an ex-driver to advise the stewards. At first it seemed to be working — the stewards were staying quiet, keeping out of matters they didn’t need to be involved in, and generally doing a good job.

Unfortunately, it must just have been a run of good luck, because the past few races have seen a return to the bad old days of shambolic stewarding and controversial conclusions. They still need to be doing a better job.

Getting the involvement of former drivers is a welcome move. But it is only a sticking plaster when the problems with the way the sport is run are so deep. For the time being, the drivers are a piece of decorative tinsel.

It is unfortunate for them that, due to their high profile, the spotlight is unfairly focussed on the drivers. We have often seen, during the race coverage produced by FOM, pictures of the driver in the stewards’ room. In Valencia it was Heinz-Harald Frentzen. But no-one is interested in the other three stewards.

That is a shame because it would be useful to know more. I happened to recognise the name of one of the other stewards at Valencia. Radovan Novak was the controversial person who, in 2008, claimed that McLaren were “responsible” for the Max Mosley sex scandal.

Mr Novak was also reported to have spoken against the prospect of Jean Todt becoming FIA President. On paper, he doesn’t seem like the sort of person who might like to be part of a Jean Todt-led conspiracy in favour of McLaren. Then again, maybe things change easily when the new boss enters his office.

The real problem: The rules are too complex

Mike Gascoyne hit the nail bang on the head:

I think since we started changing the safety car rules, every time you change something you get all these scenarios thrown up, and I think it is just that.

Charlie [Whiting, FIA race director] is trying to do the job as he sees it, calls it as he sees it, and he has as difficult a job as everyone. I think it is just one of those things.

The real issue is that the rules of Formula 1 are too complex. As such, the regulations are filled with loopholes within grey areas. This makes the sport difficult to follow and impossible to fairly officiate.

In recent years, the Safety Car rules have become particularly complex. The FIA has struggled to get this quite right, with the result being ad-hoc changes tacked on to amendments. It reminds me a lot of the constant tinkering the FIA made to the qualifying format in the mid-noughties until it finally settled on the current knockout system.

Already this year, following the farcical finish to the Monaco Grand Prix, a badly written rule has been hastily re-written. It looks like more clarifications will have to come after nine drivers were ended up unintentionally breaking the letter of the law after the Safety Car was deployed towards the end of the lap for many drivers.

On this week’s Radio 5 Live Chequered Flag podcast, Lewis Hamilton described the confusion that the current Safety Car rules create. You can hear it from around 9:40 in:

When the Safety Car comes out, you get all these beeps in your ear, and you get all this different information on your dashboard and lights flashing at you. And you’ve got to have a certain time between the Safety Car 1 line and the Safety Car 2 line. Then between the two Safety Car lines you can go fast. It’s just all so confusing.

In Valencia, the stewards had to make sure they made the right decision. But this meant taking the time to find the evidence and come to a decision in the proper way, which lessened the impact of the penalty. Exactly the same thing happened quite memorably to Nico Rosberg during the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix.

While it’s understandable that the stewards would want to get their decision right, Formula 1 now needs to look urgently at ways of making these decisions more quickly and more efficiently. Formula 1 is a sport with a lot of technology at its finger tips.

There are lots of cameras (the FIA has access to more than we ever see on television), and GPS data, team radio recordings, telemetry and timing systems. Not all of this can be analysed on the spot, but a lot of it can. This ought to be utilised much more.

The words “will be investigated after the race” — which used to be almost unheard of but is now a regular occurrence — should only be used in extreme circumstances. Television viewers and fans at the racetrack need to have confidence that what they have seen play out on the track is the real result.

Most of all, there needs to be a mass simplification of the F1 rules in order to avoid as much this as much as possible. F1 is a complex sport, and it is clearly not easy to regulate. But action needs to be taken, because right now the FIA rule book is more useful as a doorstop than a way to effectively run a motor race.

I also recommend the following posts on this topic:

4 comments

2009 driver rankings: #25-#11

30 December 2009 21:51

Categories: Opinion, Report

25. Nelsinho Piquet

I don’t think there is much need to justify why I have placed Piquet at the bottom of the list. Suffice it to say that I hope he never races competitively again.

24. Sébastien Bourdais

Sébastien Bourdais spent the 2008 season explaining that we should wait to judge him until the return of slicks in 2009. Slicks came in 2009. He has been duly judged.

23. Romain Grosjean

I feel a little bit sorry for Romain Grosjean. He was thrown into as difficult a situation as it is possible to imagine. Having done no testing whatsoever, he became Renault’s second driver just in time for a massive scandal involving Renault’s previous second driver to envelop the team. He didn’t perform very well, but they were exceptionally difficult circumstances in my view.

22. Kazuki Nakajima

I thought Nakajima did a good job in 2008, but 2009 was a huge disappointment. His main achievement of the season was to qualify an admittedly impressive 5th place for the British Grand Prix. However, his race was poor and he finished 11th. Way to hoof it over the bar.

21. Jaime Alguersuari

As with the other drivers who were expected to hit the ground running mid-season, Alguersuari was disadvantaged by the fact that he had done no testing. It may also be said that he was brought into F1 too quickly by the impatient Red Bull driver development juggernaut. While he was British F3 Champion of 2008, he was having a moderate season in World Series by Renault and may have befitted from some extra time to develop his skills away from the intense spotlight of F1. As a result, Alguersuari spent a lot of his time crashing or being rather unspectacular.

20. Adrian Sutil

I do wish Adrian Sutil could show us something — anything — that would once and for all conclude that he fully deserves a place in F1. He does show flashes of potential, but contrives to throw his chances away. He could have had a decent points finish in China if he had been more careful in the worsening weather conditions. And he has gained a reputation for being involved in a lot of needless crashes. His crash with Nick Heidfeld in Singapore following a needless spin was particularly unnecessary. This was made all the worse by the fact that he pulled off a frighteningly similar manoeuvre in Japan at the following race. His performance in Belgium looked poor in comparison with his team mate who battled for the win all race long. The main saving grace was a fourth place in Italy.

19. Luca Badoer

Yes, Luca Badoer was massively disappointing as the substitute for Felipe Massa at Ferrari. However, as I have written before, he had a harder job than anyone else on the grid, being expected to become instantly competitive after 10 years away from racing. Given the circumstances, I think Luca Badoer performed quite admirably. It is not as though Fisichella could do much more in that Ferrari — and he didn’t have the excuse of being out of practice for a decade.

18. Sébastien Buemi

I think Buemi did a decent job overall in 2009, although it’s difficult to remember any real stand-out moments. He should have another year in F1, but ought to show more in 2010 in order to justify his continued presence on the grid.

17. Heikki Kovalainen

2009 was another disappointing year for Heikki Kovalainen. The Finn was totally outclassed by his team mate all season long, and never looked like a driver who deserves to be driving for a team as good as McLaren. He seems competent enough, but clearly lacks the hunger and seems incapable of putting in a truly great performance.

16. Vitantonio Liuzzi

Liuzzi made his long-overdue return to the cockpit in a Force India this year. He did a great job at his first race back in Monza, but was slightly disappointing for the remainder of the season. 2010 will be a very important year for his career — it’s make or break time for Liuzzi.

15. Kamui Kobayashi

Kamui Kobayashi was notable for being the one rookie who grabbed your attention. He had only two races, but he made a huge impression on the F1 world. He was ballsy and aggressive, and provided some hugely entertaining racing, particularly against Jenson Button! The downside to this was that he overstepped the line once or twice, particularly when he caused a crash with Nakajima in Brazil. I also doubt whether the driver that races for Sauber in 2010 will show the same hunger. In these two races, Kobayashi had nothing to lose and so took the necessary risks. In 2010 it might all be very different.

14. Giancarlo Fisichella

At the beginning of the season, Giancarlo Fisichella continued in the trajectory his career has generally taken — downwards. The season began ignominiously when he missed his pit box in Australia. There were even rumours that Force India were less than impressed, and were looking to replace him. Then came the rumours that Ferrari were looking to Fisichella as the replacement for the struggling Luca Badoer. Bang on cue, Fisichella put in one of the drives of his life. With his Force India car on song at Spa, he really should have won the race were it not for the kers of the Ferrari car he was about to step into. Once he’d secured his dream drive for Ferrari, it was back to business as usual as he lurched from disappointment to deeper disappointment.

13. Robert Kubica

Robert Kubica was unable to shine this year in the difficult BMW car. Matters were not helped by his height, which was a major disadvantage when BMW tried to run with kers. He took a while to score his first points of the season, and was behind his team mate in the Drivers’ Championship all year. The main consolation was a superb second place finish in Brazil. I hope that Renault can produce a good car for him next year — he deserves a better chance than this.

12. Nick Heidfeld

It was a difficult year for Nick Heidfeld. The BMW car was a massive disappointment and it must have been quite a demoralising season for Nick Heidfeld. Nevertheless, he managed to grab a handful of points, including a second place in the curtailed Malaysian race. He also did a better job at scoring points than Robert Kubica. I deeply hope Heidfeld gets a drive for next season.

11. Jarno Trulli

For a long time, I have disliked Jarno Trulli. However, grudgingly, I have to admit that he did a fairly good job in 2009, despite the Toyota team’s best efforts to throw it all away. Two third place finishes near the start of the season reflected the performance of the car. But his second place in Japan was truly impressive.

Come back tomorrow to read my top ten.

4 comments

My name is Duncan, and I am a motorsport fan

23 October 2009 00:19

Categories: *, Current affairs, Sport, Technology, The Pod Delusion

This the accompanying article to my contribution to this week’s edition of The Pod Delusion. Here you can find videos and links if you want to delve further into the topic.

As you may guess from the title, this article is about motorsport. I do not normally write about motorsport on this website. That is reserved for my motorsport website, vee8. However, I have published it here as it is designed to be of interest to people who do not like motorsport.

You can listen to the full podcast below.

My name is Duncan, and I am a motorsport fan. Is it a bad thing? Am I evil? Do I need to join Petrolheads Anonymous?

This year’s Formula 1 World Championship is coming to an end. The Drivers’ and Constructors’ Championships have been wrapped up by Jenson Button and Brawn-Mercedes respectively, and now we have one last race to enjoy before the sport takes a break for the winter.

This has not been an easy year to be an F1 fan. In terms of newsworthy stories, it’s the sport that keeps on giving. But even by F1′s standards, it has been an extraordinary year for scandals.

Bear in mind that in previous years Formula 1 has brought extraordinary enough stories. There was, for instance, the so-called “spying” scandal which led to the sport’s governing body, the FIA, handing the McLaren team a fine of ONE HUNDRED MEELION DOLLARS. Then there was the “German prisoner” sex scandal involving the FIA’s President Max Mosley.

This year cranked up the scandal ever-further. Even in the first race, a major scandal blew up when Lewis Hamilton and his McLaren team were caught lying to the race stewards.

It also emerged this year that the Renault team had colluded with its driver Nelsinho Piquet to deliberately crash his car to hand an advantage to his team mate Fernando Alonso in last year’s Singapore Grand Prix. This endangered the life of Piquet and of other drivers and spectators.

In the past year, two major manufacturers — Honda and BMW — have pulled out of the sport, with persistent rumours surrounding the commitment of the other manufacturers. Moreover, almost all of the teams threatened to break away from F1 to set up a rival championship, in protest at the way the sport is governed by Max Mosley and the FIA.

The governance of the sport may change this week, as Max Mosley is stepping down as FIA President. The election to replace him is taking place today, on Friday. This actually may have more widespread implications than many realise.

Even though during last year’s sex scandal Max Mosley was persistently described by the media as “F1 boss”, the job of FIA President goes much further than that. The FIA has significant sway over road safety issues and effectively represents car users on the world stage. If you are a member of the AA, the RAC or even the Camping and Caravanning Club, you are represented by the FIA.

Clearly, this year there has been a lot going on in the world of motorsport. While cynics point out that, for the sport’s commercial boss Bernie Ecclestone, any publicity is good publicity, this all served to further discredit a sport which isn’t exactly the most popular among some. Formula 1 is seen by many as a sport which is dangerous, environmentally unfriendly, the personification of greed — and perhaps even sexist.

No doubt there is an element of truth to some of these accusations. So, how does this sit with me? I am a massive fan of motorsport, but I have liberal political views and a concern for the environment. Do I lack principles? Is F1 a guilty pleasure for me?

I actually see no reason why it should be. Some motorsport fans are unapologetic about their passion, and they see no reason to dress it up as anything but an extravagant bit of fun. But I see motorsport as a positive force that has a lot to contribute to the world.

Yes, Formula 1 is dangerous. This year, one driver, Felipe Massa, had an horrific accident when he was struck on the head while travelling at 170mph by a spring as heavy as a bag of sugar which had fallen off another car and was bouncing around on the circuit. He was lucky to have suffered no long term damage. The spring destroyed his helmet, but if it had hit him at another point he could have lost his sight or even died.

Sadly, one Formula Two driver was not so lucky. Henry Surtees was killed when he was struck on the head by a tyre which was bouncing around on the circuit after it had detached from another car in another accident.

While a ticket to a grand prix states in large letters, “motor sport is dangerous”, such accidents are mercifully rare in top-line motorsport these days. Major injuries are rare, and the last fatality in Formula 1 was in 1994. Believe it or not, more than 2½ times as many people have died while competing in the Great North Run than have died in F1 since 1981, when the Great North Run began.

But this year’s events in motorsport show that complacency should never set in, which is why improvements in safety are always being pushed forward. Perhaps the real scandal though is that, despite the increasingly safe environment that professional racing drivers face, 1.3 million people still die on the world’s roads every year.

F1 technology can play a major role in reducing the number of accidents on public roads, and already has done. In 2007, one F1 driver, Robert Kubica, survived a 75g impact with nothing more than light concussion. The materials that make an F1 car so safe are exotic and expensive, meaning that the opportunities to help make road cars safer using F1 research are a bit limited.

But electronics such as ABS and traction control are commonplace on today’s road cars. Such technologies unquestionably save lives all the time, and their development was helped by early applications in racing cars.

The money that flows through F1, and the high-stakes nature of the competition, make it a great test bed for important technologies that improve our daily lives. F1 is an R&D powerhouse.

There is currently an exhibition in the Science Museum in London called Fast Forward, which showcases twenty instances of F1 technology improving the lives of others.

Included on display are high-tech tyre pressure indicators which alert drivers to a developing puncture before it becomes dangerous. Then there are F1 materials being used to help protect troops in Afghanistan from bullets and explosions. Slip-resistant boots based on F1 tyre technology for people who work in slippery environments, thereby reducing injuries in the workplace, are also on display.

A bit more down to earth is the gadget that can stop your central heating system from becoming clogged up with rust and sludge, thereby reducing energy consumption in the home. Hospitals have even analysed mechanics’ behaviour and procedures during pitstops in order to improve the speed and accuracy of medical teams.

But how about the environmental impact of this gas-guzzling sport? I must say that my view is that rather too much is made of this. That is not to say that Formula 1 does not a significant environmental impact — it does. But emissions from the F1 cars themselves are actually a drop in the ocean. The racing itself does little environmental damage.

What is really damaging is all the travelling that teams, the media and fans must do in order to attend the races. The good news on this front is that F1 is carbon neutral, and has been since 1997. The FIA Foundation, the charity arm of the FIA, has taken into account not only emissions from the F1 cars and the travel of the teams, but also the transport of the fans that attend the races.

But any activity that involves being somewhere requires travel. F1 is a global sport, so there is a lot of global travel involved. But otherwise the sport actually seems rather restrained. In just 17-or-so races, a World Champion driver emerges.

Compare this to another competition, say the English Premier League in football. To come up with a mere national league-winning club, 380 football matches must be played, with all the travel this entails too. In comparison, F1 looks positively restrained.

Maybe that is an apples-and-oranges comparsion. It is just as well, then, that F1 technology also looks set to pave the way towards a green future. Formula 1 has the potential to help greatly reduce energy consumption. Refuelling during races will be banned from next year, shifting the balance more towards fuel consumption rather than raw power.

Another major initiative is the Kinetic Energy Recovery System, or kers, which the FIA finally legalised for this season. Kers is a system which harvests the kinetic energy that is dissipated under braking and would otherwise be wasted, and re-deploys that energy into the powertrain.

This technology has had a rather troubled birth in F1. The systems have been too expensive for teams to develop in the current economic climate, and it looks as though kers may take a back seat for a few years. There is also scepticism over whether kers as it is applied in F1 is actually relevant to road cars.

But one team, Williams, is adamant that its flywheel system will find a large variety of applications in the real world. The team says that its energy recovery system could improve road cars, vehicles used in mining, rail systems and “anything that moves”.

(For more on this, I highly recommend the recording of a Q&A with the Technical Director of Williams, Sam Michael. I was lucky enough to be invited along to the Williams F1 factory earlier this year along with a number of other web journalists and bloggers. The excellent Brits on Pole website has fantastic coverage of the visit.)

Plans continue to gather pace on this front. On Wednesday, the FIA outlined its plans for a green future of F1 (PDF). This includes a plan to make motorsport a competition based more on efficiency than raw power, and a stronger focus on energy recovery technologies.

The FIA also plans to introduce its own carbon neutral scheme, including offsetting its regulatory presence. It may also make carbon offsetting a condition of involvement in a championship.

So there you have it. Motorsport is a force for good in the world. Not bad for something that is hugely enjoyable. My halo is in tact.

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