But I wasn’t feeling it quite as much as many others were. I thought the Chinese Grand Prix was okay. But the reaction of others left me perplexed. All kinds of platitudes were bandied about. “The best dry race in decades!” “The best since Japan 2005!” Really? I wasn’t feeling that at all.

But I couldn’t quite put my finger on what was leaving me cold about F1 in 2011. There have been a lot of changes for this season, which has led to a very different style of racing. But what was it about the new F1 that was leaving me less thrilled than others?

It took me some time to work it out. But once I hit on it, the worse it seemed — and it has left me feeling a bit pessimistic about the prospects for truly good racing in 2011.

A pain in DRS?

A lot of attention has been focused on the brand new drag reduction system. Results of the DRS have been patchy.

At some races — particularly Australia — the DRS has been just enough to allow a driver behind to catch up. At the opposite extreme, in Turkey it was obvious that the DRS zone was far too long, and drivers were making easy passes that were not pleasing to watch.

The core problem is that it gives one driver and advantage over another — a significant deviation from the purity of racing. Comparisons to turbo boosts in the 1980s are no good. It may be a button that drivers can press, but there the similarity ends.

Back then, all of the options were open to everyone. You could choose to have a turbo or not, and you could use it whenever you wanted. But to say who can use a device and when they can use it is not on.

To artificially give the trailing driver a speed advantage is taking us into Mario Kart territory. As a friend said to me, “It’s like they have allowed cheating”. It is fundamentally wrong and does not belong in any event that calls itself a sport.

I love the idea of moveable rear wings, but the implementation is all wrong. I don’t even understand why it can only be used in one part of the circuit. As Niki Lauda said, why is it the FIA’s job to say where drivers can pass each other?

Moreover, the hit and miss nature of the DRS zone is leading to different sorts of results in different races. The zones change size, and sometimes the FIA have got it wrong. They have even changed the position of the DRS activation point during a race weekend. What other word is there for this apart from ‘manipulation‘?

This may be a device designed to “fix” the “problems” with overtaking. Instead, we have come one step away from fixing the results.

F1 has sold its rubber soul

But I am more concerned about the situation with the new Pirelli tyres. While the DRS is widely criticised, people have been much kinder about the tyre situation. Indeed, one of the more popular refrains this year has been “thank you Pirelli”. But I am in no mood to thank them.

They are designed to degrade artificially quickly. This is a significant deviation from the concept of F1. Formula 1 is now no longer about the best drivers in the best cars. It’s about the best drivers in the best cars — with the worst tyres.

While technical regulations have always restricted cars (it is the “formula” in Formula 1, after all), the tradition has always been to maximise the performance to create the fastest car possible that adheres to the formula of the day. That is what brings us radical ideas like the double diffuser and the F-duct, that many F1 fans love to talk about.

With the tyres, Pirelli have deliberately made them perform badly. Come on, this is supposed to be elite motorsport.

Moreover, these dodgy tyres have now become the central issue of a grand prix weekend. I have long bemoaned the dominance of tyres in F1. If a car has better aerodynamics, you can see it. If an engine is faster, you can hear it. But the tyres? They are just black boxes that sit in the four corners.

But there is no getting away from it — tyres are hugely important to the performance of a car. What I don’t understand is why you would want to accentuate that.

Critics of F1 often complain that the drivers of the best cars always win. What these people misunderstand is that F1 is all about engineering excellence, just as much as it is about great driving.

But now we have now reached a stage where the deciding factor is neither the driver nor the car. It is now all about strategy — driven by deliberately dodgy tyres — above all else.

They are now so important that the situation is now threatening to make qualifying a complete non-event. After all those years spent tweaking the format of qualifying in the name of “the show”, you have to laugh when further changes totally break a format they finally got right.

The reason? Because you need as many fresh sets of tyres as possible to last the whole race. This means less track action on Saturday, as teams are fearful of using too many sets of tyres. What is this, Formula 1 bean counting, or Formula 1 motor racing?

Divergent strategies reduce real racing

In addition to spearing Saturday action, it is my view that the tyres situation is making Sundays less exciting too.

Take the experience of Mark Webber. He climbed from 18th on the grid to finish 3rd in China. You’d think if anyone would be excited about the wheel-to-wheel action in 2011, it would be him. Not so much.

After the race he told the BBC, “Sometimes the overtaking moves aren’t that genuine because the guys really have nothing to fight back with. It’s more tactical now, and a bit less racing.” During the BBC’s broadcast from Turkey, Martin Brundle revealed that Webber had told him privately that he got no satisfaction out of the progress through the field in China. James Allen further hinted at Webber’s distinct unhappiness at the situation.

Following Turkey, Jenson Button lay the blame for his poor result squarely on his strategy. Asked about what happens when his tyres go off, Button said, “You’re not racing any more. You’re trying your best to get the best out of the car, but you’re not racing anyone around you because you are a sitting duck… They just come past you and you can’t do anything.”

Overtaking has looked like it’s too easy this year, and it is not just because of DRS. The situation with the tyres means that drivers are dealing with such radically different levels of grip that the slower driver does not even bother to defend any more.

Many celebrated Lewis Hamilton’s pass on Sebastian Vettel for the lead of the Chinese Grand Prix. But for me, it killed the race as soon as it happened. I was hoping for Vettel to be able to defend, but he simply couldn’t. As it was, the pass was inevitable for laps in advance.

In the laps between Hamilton’s pitstop and his pass on Vettel, the McLaren driver was an average of 0.9s a lap faster than the Red Bull. (At one point he set a lap time 1.6 seconds up on Vettel.) To put this into perspective, during Q1 in China, a 0.9s gap to the fastest driver would have earned 18th on the grid.

Is it really exciting to watch a car that’s got an advantage of around one second a lap breeze on by? Not for me. This isn’t overtaking — it’s merely passing. It’s hardly Dijon 1979, is it? Today René Arnoux would flip his flap, press his boost button and head off into the distance on his superior tyres — race over.

The performance differences are huge, and it is all down to decisions that are made by computers far in advance. It is out of the driver’s hands. What is this, the Excel Grand Prix of Spreadsheet?

It is right that strategy plays a part in a race. But this year the balance has been tipped way over the edge, to the point where the driver’s influence on the outcome of the race has been severely diminished. You almost may as well hold the grand prix on a computer where all of the strategies have been put in.

To open up strategy options for this season without resorting to crap tyres that create crap pseudo-racing, they could simply have ditched the rule whereby drivers are forced to run on both compounds. This would have opened up the possibilities of running a 0, 1 or 2 stop strategy.

Instead, we are now seeing record-breaking levels of pitstops — upwards of 80 pitstops a race — for no good reason. This has taken away the emphasis from the on-track action, and has made huge amounts of the “racing” totally irrelevant.

It wasn’t broke, so why “fix” it?

The most disturbing thing about all the changes this season is the fact that there was very little wrong with Formula 1 in the first place. I didn’t complain that Formula 1 is dull. And while there was room for improvement, I have long bemoned the gimmicky thinking that has come about through efforts to “improve the show”. Now it is in danger of jumping the shark.

I love Formula 1 motor racing. I have done since the mid-1990s. There were lots of other people who claimed they also loved F1 — but at the same time complained about “processional races”. They said that F1 was too dull. Yet, for some reason, they still watched it anyway, and demanded changes. Huh?

I feel like the sport I love has been hijacked.

I also believe that the criticisms of the new format have been misunderstood by some insiders. It is not “too much overtaking” or “too much of a good thing”.

James Allen said, “it’s a bit like going into a sweet shop and eating half the stock, when you’ve only been used to getting a packet of Polos at best.” That’s not how I feel. It’s actually more like going into a nice restaurant expecting a good meal and being served a Big Mac instead.

Time to end the fixation with “the show”

Don’t get me wrong. I am still deriving satisfaction from Formula 1 this season. But the wheel-to-wheel action has become a lot more insipid this year, and bland passing has become so prevalent that overtaking has become devalued.

Kers is great for Formula 1. But the tyres situation, combined with DRS, is threatening to spoil the party. It wasn’t broke, but they fixed it anyway. But in “fixing” the racing, we have come just one step away from fixed races. The positioning of the DRS zone, determined by an FIA mandarin, could potentially make the difference between who wins and who loses.

Somewhere along the line, F1 has become so fixated on “the show” that it has forgotten about the race. There are now too many gimmicks and complications that deviate from the core concept that has served motorsport well for over a century: put a bunch of cars on a track and discover which is the fastest.

Of course, motorsport must always seek to entertain the audience. It wouldn’t exist otherwise. But you also need to remember why fans of motorsport tune in. Clue: it’s because they want to see a motor race. There are plenty of other places where you can be entertained by contrived or fictitious means.

But sport is supposed to be based on merit. It needs to be real.

When Renault’s James Allison said “We are an entertainment business,” it showed how wrong this whole approach is. We are dangerously striding towards WWE territory. If James Allison wants to work in an entertainment business, he can go to work in Hollywood. I want to watch a race.

The toxic focus on “the show” needs to stop.

This is a show:

This is a race:

Now, let’s go racing.

For one thing, he had to get used to the car, which he had never driven at racing speeds before. According to Ted Kravitz:

Evidently the Ferrari F60 is a very complicated car to operate. There are many buttons and dials to turn and twist: Kers harvest and usage settings, brake balance and bias levers, fuel and oil pumps, front flap adjusts and the usual revs, throttle and mixture settings.

I’m not sure if he is implying that the F60 is more difficult to get used to than other current F1 cars. But whatever, it is certainly new territory for Badoer who is used to driving cars in the relatively tranquil environment of the test session rather than the intense spotlight and razzmatazz of a grand prix weekend. To deal with all of this in the first time he’s properly driven the F60 — and in his first race for ten years at that — is undeniably a big ask.

Luca Badoer must have been as shocked as everyone else when it was announced that he was to race in Valencia. It is typical of Badoer’s luck. F1 has shat on this driver for his whole career. I would highly recommend his biography on F1 Rejects for a full overview.

He may not be F1 championship material. But he is the 1992 Formula 3000 champion, having beaten Rubens Barrichello, Olivier Panis and David Coulthard among others in the process. So he is no fool.

But in F1 he never got the proper chance to demonstrate his abilities, being stuck with back-of-the-grid teams Scuderia Italia, Minardi and Forti — and despite usually having the upper-hand over his team mates on the racetrack, politics often meant he found it difficult to move ahead in his career.

You might have thought that signing with Ferrari to become their test driver in 1998 would have seen an upswing in his fortunes. In a lot of ways, Badoer must be the unsung hero of Ferrari’s success since then. He is the test driver who has helped develop cars capable of winning Championship after Championship following a twenty year drought for Ferrari.

Normally a team’s test driver would be the first choice to step in if a driver needs replaced. Inexplicably, when Michael Schumacher broke his legs in 1999, Ferrari opted to look outside the team. They placed Mika Salo in the car, when most observers expected Badoer to get the nod. Subsequently, Badoer stayed on with Ferrari having been promised that he would be the reserve driver.

Since then, Ferrari has had a remarkable period of driver stability. Between 1999 and 2009, Ferrari changed drivers only three times (Irvine replaced by Barrichello, Barrichello replaced by Massa and Schumacher replaced by Räikkönen)! At no point did any driver have to be replaced at short notice. No space for Badoer ever emerged. One must imagine that after twelve years waiting, he would have given up believing.

Then Felipe Massa was injured at Hungary. In the year that there was a radical change in technical regulations which is said to be the biggest in 25 years. In the year that testing is banned. In the one year that Luca Badoer had never driven the Ferrari car. And when the next race was at a brand new circuit which he had never visited.

Of course Luca Badoer didn’t get the call. Michael Schumacher did instead, and the media could barely contain their excitement. Schumacher is a seven times World Champion, but still people openly wondered: is Schumacher up to the task? Can he get used to the new car? Is he fit enough? At 40, will he be too old? In the end, it turned out that Schumacher couldn’t do the job because of the injury he picked up while racing Superbikes in Germany.

So it was down to Badoer to shoulder the responsibility of making something out of the pickle that Ferrari found themselves in. Of course, the media won’t be lining up with the same excuses that were already being served up on Schumacher’s behalf before his comeback. This was despite the fact that there are actually quite legitimate reasons for Badoer to be off the pace. Badoer is not much younger than Schumacher, and is the oldest driver on the grid. But that is not an excuse apparently, despite the fact that it supposedly would have been for Schumacher.

Instead, the media has spent its time openly laughing at Luca Badoer, almost willing him to do badly. The schadenfreude soaked through the reports as the journalists gleefully reported Badoer’s four pitlane speeding offences on Friday, a symptom of the fact that the pitlane speed limit is substantially higher during test sessions and Badoer needed time to adjust to the new braking points required.

All I can say is, Badoer is not the one who parked his car at Rascasse, but never mind. Of course, the journalists were just taking it out on Badoer because he isn’t Princess Schumacher so they lost their “fairytale” story that is so desperately needed to sell a turgid circuit like Valencia.

I found the gulf in opinion between the journalists and the drivers very interesting. While the journalists were busy thinking up oh-so-witty nicknames like “Look-how Bad-you-are”, the drivers in contrast felt sorry for the situation that Badoer found himself in. Jarno Trulli described Badoer’s situation as “impossible”. Lewis Hamilton said that Badoer has “done a good job just to keep it on the track”, while Kovalainen shrugged: “I don’t know what else you could have expected.”

The split was also demonstrated on the Chequered Flag podcast. David Croft mocked, “even Yuji Ide had more promise” (which is totally untrue — Badoer has already achieved much more in his career than Ide could ever hope for). F1 Racing‘s Bradley Lord said, “Badoer approached this race as a test — and he failed this one.” Ha-very-ha. Anthony Davidson had plead to his bloodthirsty journalist colleagues, “give him some space!”

David Coulthard summed up the situation nicely: “Who would be Luca Badoer? You wait 10 years for your chance to race for Ferrari and then, despite having no preparation whatsoever, you get slated for not being Michael Schumacher.”

In Checkpoint 10′s excellent analysis, it is shown that Badoer was not actually half as bad as the journalists would have you believe. His qualifying time was 103.4% of the fastest time, when the 107% rule used to eliminate drivers on a regular basis.

He struggled during the race. After a good start, he was obviously spooked by being surrounded by other cars on lap 1 and spun. He then panicked in the pitlane, seemingly allowing Romain Grosjean to overtake him before he crossed the white line. And he had a worryingly erratic second stint. But overall, Badoer showed improvement as the race progressed, and noticeably caught up with Räikkönen’s pace as the race progressed and Badoer became more comfortable.

In sum, yes, Badoer had a very disappointing weekend. But that is mostly because driving standards are so high these days. You don’t have to go far to find real joke drivers who definitely did not deserve to be racing and did a much worse job than Badoer.

I grew up watching people people who paid to get a race seat trundle around up to a dozen seconds per lap off the pace. Hell, you only have to go back a few years to encounter and Yuji Ide, who suffered the ignominy of being stripped of his super license. The last pay driver went when Sakon Yamamoto lost his seat. Driving standards all the way through the grid are very high compared with ten or even five years ago. This amplifies Badoer’s rustiness.

Badoer’s performance in Valencia is the sort of thing that would have been commonplace at the back of the grid in the mid-1990s. You might say that this is not the mid-1990s, but when you consider everything that is stacked against Luca Badoer — his age, his lack of experience, never having driven the F60 before, never having been to the Valencia Street Circuit before, and having to get used to the modern-day race weekend environment — I think he should be cut a bit more slack.

I feel very sorry for Badoer, who has had a very tough F1 career where he has been given the rough end of the stick at almost every turn. It looks likely that Badoer will be replaced come Monza, which would be fair enough if he doesn’t show a perceptible improvement in Spa.

But now Badoer will probably be remembered for these two difficult races where he was thrown in at the deep end, and everyone decided to point and laugh at this man (who, do not forget, is actually putting his life on the line when he goes out to race). I am not sure whether this is better than being remembered for breaking down in tears at his previous European Grand Prix, in 1999.

Take, for instance, this press release which criticises Fota representatives for not being “prepared to discuss regulation at all”. However, in the following paragraph, the FIA concedes that Fota did bring proposals to the table — just that they weren’t to the FIA’s liking.

the FOTA financial proposals were discussed but it became clear that these would not be capable of limiting the expenditure of a team which had the resources to outspend its competitors.

In other words, because Fota do not want a budget cap (and that surely cannot be news to Max), the FIA are not prepared to countenance any of Fota’s suggestions. That does not seem to me to be Fota who are being inflexible. It is the FIA slamming the door shut on anything that is not a budget cap.

The following day, the FIA released this diatribe which was supposed to outline why Fota were such bad, bad people. But once again it demonstrates the arrogance of the FIA, who appear to be in cloud cuckoo land over what makes the sport attractive to fans:

The FIA and FOM have together spent decades building the FIA Formula One World Championship into the most watched motor sport competition in history.

Axis of Oversteer’s post is bang on:

This statement, which essentially blames di Montezemolo for the whole current mess, is set on the premise that the whole of Formula1′s success is based, in it’s entirety, on the FIA’s work. Apparently the reason people watch sports is not for the stars or the teams, it’s because of the rules. Brilliant!

The FIA goes on to describe Fota as being an organisation “made up of participants who come and go as it suits them”. That seems like quite an odd way to describe an organisation with the stature of Ferrari which is the only participant in any shape to have been involved in Formula 1 from the very start.

The FIA, on the other hand, always delegated the regulation of Formula 1 to Fisa, an organisation which was merged into the FIA by Max Mosley only in 1993. Mosley then set upon moulding it into his dictatorship. Foca (the precursor to FOM) only gained commercial rights to the sport in 1981. Interesting to note that Max and Bernie managed to find their way to positions of power in the governance of the sport following a war in which they both acted as representatives of the teams arguing against the governing body.

The Fisa-Foca war was a complex matter. But I think it’s fair to say that “to take over the regulation of Formula One from the FIA” is something that Max Mosley succeeded in doing, “and to expropriate the commercial rights for itself” is what Bernie Ecclestone once did. Strange that “These are not objectives which the FIA can accept” once the boot is on the other foot.

The FIA reject the notion that the governance structures need changed. But they have an odd way of showing it. One paragraph they talk about how important it is that Formula 1 has a “strong and impartial regulator”. Then in literally the next paragraph, they keep a straight face while admitting that Ferrari have been “officially (as well as unofficially)” represented on the WMSC since 1981. This is the “impartiality” of the FIA that is so important?

According to the FIA, the “Background” of the current political war is based on the fact that Honda pulled out of Formula 1 in 2008. This, apparently, was a bad thing, as it showed that teams could exit F1 at a moment’s notice. Quite why this should be a surprise to Max Mosley stumps me, because no fewer than 23 teams — easily enough to fill two healthy sets of grids — have left the sport since Max Mosley became President of the FIA in 1993 (I may have missed some out — this is just the quick count I did).

• Arrows
• BAR
• Benetton
• Footwork
• Forti
• Honda
• Jaguar
• Jordan
• Larrousse
• Ligier
• Lola
• Lotus
• Midland
• Minardi
• Pacific
• Prost
• Sauber
• Scuderia Italia
• Simtek
• Spyker
• Stewart
• Super Aguri
• Tyrrell

Apparently, Max Mosley didn’t notice all of this. Quite why the Honda scenario made him sit up unlike all the others is a mystery to me.

It is even more odd when you consider that the transition from Honda to Brawn has been a massive success. Unlike some of the above teams — which sometimes embarrassingly went to the wall mid-season, leaving gaps on the grid — the sale of the Honda team was a relatively successful pull-out. Yes, it was messy over the winter. But the Brawn team is reaping the rewards, and it’s a great story for F1. Yet, for Max Mosley, it’s a major problem.

There is also, in this statement, a tacit admission that a budget cap system in a single-tier Championship cannot result in a grid full of the best cars that perform to the standard that fans have come to expect from Formula 1:

…the World Motor Sport Council (WMSC) decision of 17 March… introduced a voluntary financial regulation and technical freedoms for the capped teams to enable their cars to achieve Formula One levels of performance.

When the two-tier system was scrapped (as the FIA insist it has been), they decided to retain the budget cap and ditch the technical freedoms. Therefore, in the FIA’s own words, the “pinnacle of motor sport” will no longer contain cars which are “able to achieve Formula One levels of performance”.

Claims that the budget cap would damage the DNA of Formula 1 are rejected by the FIA, who say that the budget cap is a good idea because it evens the playing field. “Isn’t Formula One above all about competition?” I would agree that Formula 1 is about competition. And the budget cap idea is completely antithetical to the principle of meritocratic championship. A budget cap doesn’t “even the playing field”. It rigs the playing field in favour of teams who would not otherwise be in F1 on merit.

There is also no mention of the fact that the one credible new team on the FIA’s entry list, USF1, declared its intention to enter the sport long before the budget cap proposals were announced. USF1 is totally indifferent towards the budget cap, and has dropped a hint that it entered as a non-cost-capped team. It also seems as though the smallest of the current teams, Force India (which split off from Fota for legal reasons), is not interested in the cost cap either.

The FIA claims that “Left to their own devices, at least half the existing teams would have adopted those [budget cap] rules.” This neatly sidesteps the fact that left to their own devices, all of the current Fota teams joined Fota and remain members of Fota as I write.

The FIA says that its actions have been motivated by the need for “new entrants needed to know urgently if they had a place in the Championship.” That is completely contradicted by the way they have treated teams such as Lola like political pawns. Indeed, Lola have decided to withdraw its F1 entry, so incensed were they at the FIA’s behaviour. In the process, Lola have dropped a heavy hint that they will join any potential Fota-led breakaway series (more about that theory can be read on Will Buxton’s blog and at Grandprix.com).

So, what do we want? Top-level grand prix racing? Or Max Mosley’s Formula None?

First of all, there is no doubt that this is an unusual situation, which raises suspicions among many. This is, after all, a team that did not exist a few weeks before the season began. With hardly any meaningful testing, they hit the ground running in Australia and have been dominant ever since. Never has a new team been so successful so quickly.

Of course, those who have studied the situation know that there are good reasons for this. For starters, the car was always going to be mighty. It is the first car which Ross Brawn — one of the smartest men in the business — has overseen the development of. That Ross Brawn, a man who has been responsible for so many World Championships in the past fifteen years, should be able to put together a winning car should not be such a surprise.

The Brawn team is helped by the fact that the team knows how to win races. Ross Brawn himself has the confidence, experience, expertise and management skills to turn an average team into a great one. He was a pivotal influence in the dominance of Michael Schumacher throughout his entire career. You can add Ferrari’s dominance in the late 1990s and early this decade to Ross Brawn’s CV.

The old Honda team and Jenson Button also won a race, which must count for something. It has been noted that often the first race is the most difficult one to win, so Button’s win in 2006 — though some saw it as a bit of a fluke — must count for something, despite the two year long slump the team took afterwards. This is especially the case when you consider Toyota, who seemingly did their best to throw away victory in Bahrain. That was a scenario which some saw as the jitters of a team not used to winning.

There is also the fact that this car was basically developed with Honda’s resources. Honda gave up on the 2008 season pretty much straight away, allowing them to focus fully on 2009 while others had to split their development between two radically different cars.

The fact that Honda have pulled out has also given Brawn the ability to run with Mercedes engines. There seems to be little doubt now that Mercedes has the strongest engine in F1.

Many casual observers do not seem to be aware of these factors surrounding Honda’s exit. It rather underlines just what a mess the Honda management made of F1 by letting this massive PR opportunity slip. Not only that, but Honda continues to pay Brawn for the privilege of not entering F1. Their customers, including Force India who used to run Ferrari engines, have been effusive about the Stuttgart company’s lump.

Brawn have also probably been helped by the fact that this year’s World Championship is being run to radically different technical regulations to last year. The cards were thrown in the air by Max Mosley, and Brawn have ended up with all the aces in their hand. You could argue that it was engineering excellence rather than luck that has placed Brawn in this position. But ask Max Mosley’s “man in the pub”, and he thinks it’s all too fishy.

This hasn’t been helped by the fuss that was made over the diffusers earlier this season. In my conversations with more casual fans, I have been left with the distinct impression that there are many out there who believe that the F1 community is also sceptical of Brawn’s success and that there is a full-blown investigation into whether Brawn are cheating. This nasty impression could have been avoided had the FIA simply declared that the diffuser was fully legal before the season started, but petty political interests yet again got in the way of common sense.

I wasn’t sure if I was the only one who was encountering these sceptical views about Brawn’s success. But speaking to other F1 fans, it seems as though the public at large is suspicious of the emergence of Brawn and Jenson Button. I heard something similar on last week’s Formula 1 Blog.com podcast. I have even caught myself being sceptical when I sought to explain just what it was that made Brawn so superior this season.

I think it’s a shame that people should find it so difficult to come to terms with Brawn’s success. There is no real suspicion that Brawn have cheated their way to the top. The car is a beauty, and the real consensus among the F1 community is that engineering excellence has brought Brawn where it is.

What does this situation tell us? Perhaps that the FIA should quit meddling with the rules all the time and bring about stability in the regulations. That would remove much of the doubt that a team that climbs its way to the top does so on merit.

Perhaps it also says that a situation where the sport’s grandees are neutered means that people see a victory by a small team as less legitimate. People would probably believe if Brawn were fighting with the likes of Ferrari and McLaren rather than Red Bull.

It doesn’t bode well for Max Mosley’s future vision for F1, where Ferrari may not exist at all, in favour of smaller teams. Max Mosley’s friend, the man in the pub, wants to see the historic names battling for wins.

Personally, I find that sad. Privateer teams are every bit as important to the history of F1 as names like Ferrari. You only really have to go back fifteen years to see a period where practically every car was entered by a privateer, and Championship after Championship was won by a Williams or a Benetton or a (pre-Mercedes) McLaren.

But the public at large has become used to an F1 dominated by manufacturers. The sport faces a difficult transitional period if the public is supposed to take Max Mosley’s new F1 seriously.

Indeed, Luca di Montezemolo practically made it the defining policy of Fota. It must be disconcerting for him to see that already one Fota member has undermined this.

The Williams team’s explanation is interesting though. Their CEO, Adam Parr, has gone out of his way to point out that Williams is still fully aligned with Fota:

The unity of FOTA is of paramount importance to Williams. Yesterday we joined the other members of FOTA in writing to the FIA (International Automobile Federation) to request a continuing effort to find a compromise concerning the regulations for 2010.

We believe that under the leadership of (Ferrari president Luca) di Montezemolo and (Toyota motorsport president) John Howett, FOTA has extracted some very significant concessions from the FIA.

These include not only the procedural aspects of the budget cap but also other elements that will enable the higher budget teams to participate.

But explaining the team’s decision to enter the 2010 Championship, contrary to Fota policy, Mr Parr has essentially said that Williams felt that it had no option but to enter the 2010 World Championship:

Williams has — and has always maintained — that we have a binding contract with both FOM (Ecclestone’s Formula One Management) and the FIA to participate in the world championship from 2008 to 2010.

Presumably if Williams has a binding contract, so do other teams. I assume the binding contract is the Concorde Agreement. In a way, therefore, it is unsurprising that it is the manufacturer-backed teams who are standing up to the FIA the most. Williams can’t really afford to breach a contract. But manufacturers have enough money — economic downturn or not — to buy their way out, just as Honda essentially did.

But if it is the case that all these F1 teams are contractually obliged to participate in the World Championship in 2010, why is the FIA asking them all to re-enter?

This business with Ferrari taking the FIA to court over a veto is very interesting. Ostensibly the loss of the court case is bad news for Ferrari, but in fact their point has been proven. The court did confirm that Ferrari do have such a veto — just that they have failed to play their card correctly.

What this has conveniently done, though, is proved the point that the FIA simply are not to be trusted in this sort of situation. This technical veto — along with a host of financial and sporting perks — was given to Ferrari as a reward for jumping into bed with the FIA the last time the governing body’s power was put into question. GPWC (later GPMA) was an alliance of some of F1′s biggest names. It was essentially a bargaining tool for the teams not unlike today’s Fota. Ferrari was a major player in it — until the FIA lured them away with bribes. With Ferrari gone, GPMA was toothless and little was heard of it ever again.

This time, Ferrari aren’t for turning. The threat to the FIA’s power is therefore much greater this time round. So the FIA has preoccupied itself with looking for ways to either break up or undermine Fota. That is why they have this sudden obsession with new teams, even though there have been vacancies on the grid for over ten years. I seriously doubt we’d be hearing about how vital it is to attract new teams were it not for Fota. By doing whatever they can to bring in new teams, the FIA can ensure that there will no longer be unanimity among the teams.

After all, the FIA does not really have much else going for it. Participants, fans, media commentators and other onlookers have all completely lost faith in the FIA as it brings in ever-dafter regulations that lack any cohesion. For just one example, they will constantly bang on about cost cutting, then force teams to incur further costs by radically changing the regulations periodically.

Moreover, the FIA constantly fail to meet their own regulations, such as when earlier this year they attempted to change the sporting regulations within days of the season starting without first consulting the teams. Nor can the FIA administrate the sport in an even-handed way, as has been patently demonstrated by countless unfathomable stewards’ decisions over the past few seasons. The FIA is also wholly inadequate at formulating or policing the technical regulations, as is apparent with the completely botched introduction of kers and their inability to simply tell anyone if the double deck diffuser was legal.

Earlier this year Fota put forward a measured set of proposals that were based on actual market research which was conducted in an open and transparent manner. By contrast, Max Mosley just plucks new rules out of his freshly spanked arse. The FIA changes the regulations willy-nilly, out of the blue, for no apparent reason, without consulting anyone. The views of the teams, drivers, fans and the wider industry all count for nothing as far as the FIA is concerned.

This is the nub of the matter really. As has now become clear, the budget cap controversy was merely a conduit for a larger battle to begin — a battle over the governance of the sport. Do we want Formula 1 to continue to be driven into the ground by a frustrated politician who has no interest in consulting the people who really matter to the sport? Or would we prefer a future where fans and teams have a say, and where regulation changes can be measured and predictable? Well, I know whose side I’m on.

While people may scoff at the apparent arrogance of Ferrari’s recent statements, they do have a point. As readers will know, I am no Ferrari fan. But there is no doubt that this brand carries a lot of history, a lot of status, a lot of respect, a hell of a lot of fans and money by the bucket load. Arguably, the Ferrari brand is much more famous than the Formula 1 brand.

So Ferrari’s point about the calibre of the supposed new teams is bang on in my view. Make no mistake, the vast majority of these are teams that under normal circumstances would not be able to even consider entering F1, with an F1-standard car at an F1-standard budget. It is feasible only with the FIA promising to skew the rules in their favour — just as they skewed the rules in Ferrari’s favour back in 2005. This sort of crap has no place in a “sport” in the 21st century.

Privateer teams may be romantic, and I would love to see decent private teams to be able to compete at an F1 standard on merit, just as Brawn and Williams do today. But F1 is supposed to be the pinnacle of motorsport. And though some of the proposed new teams are accomplished enough at certain levels, few if any could claim to be on the cusp of being at F1 standard in normal circumstances.

As Joe Saward put it, it beggars belief that Max Mosley would think that it would be worth trading names like Ferrari, Toyota, Renault, BMW and potentially Mercedes for names like Wirth Research, Epsilon Euskadi, RML, Formtech, Campos and so on. Ask Max Mosley’s precious “man in the pub” about any of the names from the first list, and their eyes will light up in recognition. Asking about names from the second list would elicit a nonplussed response.

A grid full of teams like this, and with none of the historic and famous names that mean so much to people, would be an empty F1 indeed. It could be a return to the bad old days of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the grid was full of half-arsed operations which polluted the field and acted as mobile chicanes. The FIA went too far in its efforts to get rid of these teams in the mid-1990s. Now it seems happy enough to go too far back the other way.

Max Mosley’s case seems utterly weak. He should know that too, because the last time he threatened the teams by forcing them to enter at short notice, the list of “new teams” was similarly long. Of these teams, one — Prodrive — was given the nod. It never materialised because the FIA decided to forego the biggest opportunity to cut costs they could ever ask for by making customer cars illegal.

As before, these new teams look like paper tigers. Yet Max Mosley is hinging the future of the sport on them because he finds it more palatable than relinquishing any of his power.

Cutting costs has been the biggest issue in Formula 1 for years, and not just from the FIA’s perspective either. Beforehand, though, the approach was to institute ever more barmy technical restrictions which, it can be argued, have adversely affected the racing. All the while, teams still spent the same amount of money simply trimming off weight and having their CFD systems create increasingly alien aerodynamic tricks.

Ideally, I would think that F1 teams should be free to raise however much money they like and spend it as they see fit. But just now it is clear that this is an untenable situation. So we must make a choice. As an F1 fan, given a choice between strange technical restrictions (18,000 RPM limit on the engine? Why? To prevent faster cars catching slower cars?) and a budget cap, I would opt for the budget cap any time. F1 is, after all, supposed to showcase the best technology. F1 teams can still do this with a limited budget so long as they have the freedom to innovate.

But it is the FIA’s motives behind the budget cap that concern me. Alongside the budget cap comes a raft of other proposals that hint towards a complete U-turn in FIA policy towards new teams.

For the best part of a decade-and-a-half, the FIA have made it difficult for new teams to enter F1. The main form this took was in the entry bond. Following the Mastercard Lola debacle of 1997. Under pressure from the title sponsors, the Lola car was rushed out a year earlier than originally intended. It went to Albert Park having done almost zero testing. The cars were a dozen seconds slower than pole position during qualifying. Before round two in Brazil, Lola went bust.

After that, new teams had to pay a $48 million entry bond in order to demonstrate that they were financially stable. That is why the trend has been for new teams to buy old teams rather than start from scratch (which only Toyota and Super Aguri did while the bond had to be paid). The entry bond was dropped a couple of years ago in recognition of the dwindling grid.

Now the FIA seems determined to welcome back smaller private teams, having spent the past decade driving them out, keen to avoid another Lola. Now, they will welcome any new interest with open arms — including Lola! There is also apparent interest from Prodrive / Aston Martin, not to forget USF1 which launched earlier this year.

A number of GP2 teams are also bound to be eyeing an entry to F1. iSport have dropped a heavy hint, while ART, Campos and Racing Engineering are also said to be interested. In March, Joe Saward believed that five new teams were in the pipeline. That number will have surely increased since then.

It is unusual because there probably haven’t been so many teams seriously considering entering F1 since the early 1990s. And it is not as though the small grid is a new problem. For several years there has been space on the grid for 24 cars. F1 has not seen more than 22 cars enter a race since 1995 (excluding the ill-fated Lola in 1997 for one race). Indeed, for four of the last seven seasons there have been only 20 cars on the grid.

Not only have the FIA introduced budget cap proposals in order to attract new teams, but FOM have agreed to actively make it easier for new teams to enter. This will come in the form of free chassis transportation and free air travel for employees. Plus, far from having to pay a $48 million entry bond, new teams will now be paid $10 million per year to enter! I’ll buy two please!

All of this is on top of the plan to increase the maximum number of cars that will be allowed to enter the championship. The grid could now potentially increase in size from 20 cars this year to 26 cars next year, the first time in recent years the FIA have countenanced such an idea.

Why does the FIA have a sudden interest in swelling the size of the grid? Could it possibly have something to do with that pesky Fota organisation that is giving the FIA a bit of well-deserved heat just now?

All ten Formula 1 teams are presenting a united front at the moment. Despite their considerable differences, the ten teams have just about managed to put them aside in order to stand up to the FIA and Bernie Ecclestone, who find it difficult to credibly counter such unanimity among the teams.

It is difficult enough for the ten teams to remain so friendly with each other. It would be awfully helpful if the FIA could make it eleven, twelve, thirteen teams that have to get on with each other. To make those extra new teams be teams that are on the same page as the FIA — as the new teams naturally would be — that would be a stroke of genius. All of a sudden, Fota would not be quite so credible.

The new teams are joining specifically because of the new budget cap, and they will be happy enough to plug an FIA-supplied Cosworth engine into their cars. They will be happy to acquiesce to the FIA’s mad plans for years to come.

Most fans like to see larger grids, and many of us love to watch a small team take on the big guns. But Fota is the best chance there is for the future of Formula 1 to be mapped out in a way that is fan-friendly.

The budget cap may ostensibly be a way of securing the future of Formula 1. But the new teams could be the biggest threat to the chance of actually improving it.

There isn’t a lot of information out there about the protest. Grandprix.com suggests that the protests surround aerodynamics around the sidepods. By this, I assume we are talking about the strange structures that have sprouted up just in front of the sidepods. Ferrari use them as an elaborate mirror stand, but it’s clear they serve an aerodynamic purpose.

These strange structures were noted at the time. But it was pointed out that they were perfectly within the rules, even if they went against the “spirit” of the rules, which was to get rid of such weird and wonderful aerodynamic devices. This leads me to wonder if Williams are simply being a bit mischievous in their protest against Ferrari and Red Bull.

The recent fuss kicked up by Ferrari and Red Bull (and Renault and BMW) about the “diffuser three” is similarly contrived. I don’t understand the technical regulations all that well, but everything I have read suggests that the controversial diffusers are perfectly within the letter of the law. What is at question is whether they are within the “spirit” of the law.

Are Williams simply sending out a message to the complaining teams — giving them a taste of their own medicine? “We can play this game as well. Your cars aren’t within the spirit of the law either.”

Update: I had missed that Williams had withdrawn their protest just before midnight. There is still no explanation, but the fact that they have withdrawn the protest make it all the more likely that Williams were just being a bit cheeky.

Update 2: Interesting quote:

Williams recognises the possibility that in this area there could be more than one interpretation of the rules and therefore does not feel it appropriate to continue with the protests.

Of course, to assess where the teams stand we must look back over winter testing. This year’s winter testing action has been fascinating and deserving of a post in its own right. I can’t remember winter testing being so closely followed by so many people on the internet.

Of course, part of that is just with the nature of internet coverage which is expanding, with more contributors getting involved all of the time. But even taking that into account, there has been a lot to chew over.

For one thing, there are the new regulations. This year sees what is by all accounts the biggest change to the rules in at least 25 years. It has been fascinating to see not just the general shape of the new cars, but the different approaches of the teams.

Almost inevitably, this means that there is a new hierarchy, and it is fascinating to watch it emerge. The Honda saga provided a gripping side-story to the on-track action, and the apparent supremacy of the fledgling Brawn team seems too good to be true. At the same time, one of F1′s biggest teams seems to be in big trouble.

This post will outline how I think the teams will measure up throughout the season. Suffice it to say, though, that it is proving very difficult to truly tell which teams have the advantage. It is worth reading Autosport’s analysis of the winter testing times. With kers in the mix, this year we could see cars suiting certain circuits more than others.

But here is my attempt to work out how each team’s overall performance throughout the season will measure up.

10. Force India-Mercedes

Despite Force India’s new partnership with McLaren and Mercedes, I fear that they do not yet have the resources to make much headway up the grid. Matters cannot have been helped by the late change of engine supplier, and the need to integrate various McLaren parts into the car. The car launched late and has had comparatively little testing.

But on paper Force India should have a handy package. As long as the aerodynamic package isn’t a complete dud, the Mercedes lump should give the car plenty of grunt. Vijay Mallya himself says that the team, which seemed slightly ramshackle last year amid reports of infighting, has been improved by the presence of the man from McLaren, Simon Roberts.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see Force India challenging for points from time to time. But I don’t see them establishing themselves even as regular midfield runners. The driver line-up is easily the least exciting on the grid. Meanwhile, the car has not set the world alight during testing. No doubt Force India will spend another year constantly targeting Q2 and never reaching it.

9. Toro Rosso-Ferrari

Toro Rosso amazed the world last year by winning a race and showing its bigger sibling team how it’s done. Sadly, even the most optimistic observer does not expect Toro Rosso to come close to matching its 2008 form. Toro Rosso’s best asset, its star driver Sebastian Vettel, has now graduated to the main Red Bull team.

Sébastien Bourdais is a competent driver, but this year is make or break for his F1 career. One positive is that he will probably prefer the slick tyres. His team-mate Sébastien Buemi is the season’s only rookie, so will be allowed a bit of breathing space by observers. Buemi seems handy, and showed flashes of talent in GP2 this year. He also seems to have impressed the Red Bull guys as a test driver. How he will measure up as an F1 race driver is obviously yet to be seen.

Toro Rosso may be in a position to challenge for a few points here and there. But with the Renault having been the only one to have been improved over winter, it is unlikely that Toro Rosso will so easily make the Red Bull team look silly. All the while, the team will have to ready itself for the probably outlawing of customer cars which may be a distraction.

8. Williams-Toyota

The Williams has looked quite handy in pre-season testing. Autosport’s analysis shows that it has set the second-fastest time at Barcelona this winter, although its long run pace doesn’t seem quite so hot.

I would also doubt whether Williams will be in a position to develop the car as well as other teams will be able to. Let’s not forget that in 2008 Williams looked like they were going to be the third-best car, and it didn’t turn out that way.

The ace up Williams’s sleeve will be its flywheel kers system, which sounds like quite an impressive system. But with a fair degree of paddock scepticism over the benefits of kers, this could turn out to be a case of something that works better in a brochure than on the racetrack.

7. Red Bull-Renault

I would like to think that Red Bull are in a position to become a front-running team. I do have a soft spot for them, and the car is probably the most beautiful on the grid. Adrian Newey is also usually pretty handy at adapting to new technical regulations.

But their testing form, while not being particularly poor, has not exactly suggested that this is a team on the verge of regularly challenging at the front. The odd win is probably not out of the question though, and in Sebastian Vettel they have one of F1′s hottest properties.

6. Renault

After a troubled start to the testing season, when the car appeared to be beset by aerodynamic problems, Renault appear to have put aside their woes. It seems similar to last year, when Renault started the season with a poor car, but managed to turn it into a double race winner by the end of the season. Except this time Renault have improved the car before the season has begun.

Renault will also have been advantaged by the fact that they have been allowed to improve their engine over winter — the only power-plant to be granted such an upgrade. And you can never underestimate their lead driver Fernando Alonso, whom I consider to be the best driver on the grid.

Part 2 will be published tomorrow

Points

The points system for 2009 has been amended, and the result is a compromise between Bernie Ecclestone’s controversial ‘medals’ proposal and the current points system. Basically, the current 10-8-6-5-4-3-2-1 system will remain in tact, but the Drivers’ Championship will be awarded to the driver with the most wins.

I have long been in favour of a radical change to the points system, and I am quite receptive to a “medals-style” system. But many other fans were not so keen.

This compromise solution isn’t one that I have seen suggested before. But on the face of it, it seems like a fair enough compromise. I would still prefer a more radical change to the points system, rather than having the championship automatically going to the driver who has had the most wins. But this could have been much, much worse.

Testing

From now on, teams will be allowed three young driver training tests between the end of the championship and the end of the year. I believe that such tests were unlimited before (correct me if I’m wrong). This represents yet another barrier to the young drivers that Max Mosley purports to be helping.

Straight-line testing is also facing further restrictions. Between 1 January 2009 and the end of the championship, teams will be allowed only eight days of straight-line or constant-radius testing. As pointed out by @sidepodcast on Twitter, this could leave McLaren in trouble given the amount of straight-line testing they have already done this year.

I’m not opposed to limits on straight-line testing. It seems fair to limit it just as other testing is restricted. However, applying this retrospectively does seem to be rather underhanded, and is especially unfair on those teams that took advantage of straight line testing a lot over the winter. Is it yet another FIA anti-McLaren conspiracy? Don those tin foil hats! Say what you like about Max and Bernie, but they sure know how to stir up a fuss!

Qualifying fuel loads

The weights of all cars after qualifying will now be published. This will give the geeks (like me) a lot of interesting data to analyse on a Saturday evening. But I’m not sure how this will improve the show. Personally, the suspense surrounding a driver’s fuel load is the only good thing about having race fuel loads during qualifying. I quite like not knowing when the leaders are going to take a pitstop.

People talk about F1′s script writers. Well now we will have a “spoiler” long before the race has even begun. This is a shame.

I assume this is a response to those who lament the fact that qualifying no longer shows who the fastest driver is. But the real solution to this would be to get rid of the ridiculous race fuel load idea altogether. It has never worked, and it adds nothing to the show.

Tyres

Just a small one this. Wets are now officially “intermediates” and extreme wets are “wets”. This seems rather uncontroversial to me, because I normally refer to inters and extreme wets. Since inters became such good all-round wet weather tyres, this problem has existed, and it’s good that the FIA has tried to inject a rare bit of clarity into the regulations.

Media

Drivers will now have to make themselves more available to sign autographs. And there will be no running away in a fug of embarrassment after a poor performances. All drivers must make themselves available to the media for interview after the race or after they have retired.

Senior team personnel will also have to make themselves available to TV crews. Fota had proposed a similar idea anyway, and it’s a good idea to ensure that the fans get more out of the sport.

Changes to the 2009 Technical Regulations

You what? Yes, apparently the FIA have changed the 2009 Technical Regulations, details of which will be published later today. Haven’t they left it a bit late?…

The batshit-crazy zone

Mind your step. This is where we enter the realms of nonsense. It wouldn’t be the FIA without a nice dose of nonsense, and they certainly haven’t disappointed this time round.

From 2010 onwards there will be a budget cap of £30 million per season. But it’s a voluntary budget cap. So to give teams an incentive to stick to the magic limit, the FIA will allow these teams to have more technical freedoms. Essentially, there will be not one but two sets of Technical Regulations. Maybe from 2010 onwards the sport will become known as “Formulae Ones”, “Two Formula Ones”, “Formula One.1 and Formula One.2″.

In all seriousness, I think this is a recipe for disaster. For one thing, the FIA reckons it will be able to work out when “the cost-capped cars have neither an advantage nor a disadvantage when compared to cars running to the existing rules.”

Now I don’t know about you, but I quite like the idea that in F1 some cars are better than others. It’s called competition. It’s what sport is made of. And too often motorsports go down the route of trying to equalise performance between the cars by restricting the best cars. Then that series goes down the pan (hello, BTCC). That’s because people watch motorsport for the competition between teams and drivers. The moment you try to neutralise that, you start to alienate the core audience.

Besides, it’s all very well to do what they do in Touring Cars and add extra ballast to race-winning cars. But it’s a different thing altogether to try and work out how to manipulate cars when they are being run to separate sets of regulations. The FIA can’t even create one decent set of unambiguous technical regulations, never mind two of them, and with the aim of having the two types of cars performing equally!

For me, this just stinks. The FIA would be able to penalise cars for very little good reason, other than something vague about equalising performance. Decisions would probably be made in smoke-filled rooms, obscured from the fans’ view.

Believe it or not, F1 just got even more political.