Max Mosley’s U-turns for 2009 and 2010

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Max Mosley has backed down on slick tyres, refuelling and more

You can accuse Max Mosley of many things, but you can’t accuse him of being consistent. The next two years will see at least three reversals of major policy decisions taken by Mosley during his 17-year presidency of the FIA.

Why the U-turns? Is Mosley being forced to take decisions he doesn’t agree with? Is it an admission that past policies have failed?

Grooved tyres

Slick tyres will be back in 2009 for the first time since 1997

Mosley demanded a switch from slick to grooved tyres in 1998 as part of a package of changes aimed at slashing cornering speeds in F1 and improving safety. But next year slick tyres will return to the sport after a 12-year absence.

When he announced the change in 1997 it brought a critical reaction from drivers including champion-elect Jacques Villeneuve. The Canadian criticised Mosley’s decision in the harshest possible terms, for which Mosley had Villeneuve condemned by the World Motor Sports Council.

But events have proven Villeneuve’s suspicions about grooved tyres were well-founded. Aside from their ugly appearance, they demonstrably failed to contain escalating speeds. No other major motor racing series bothered to use them, apart from GP2, which got rid of them after a single season.

The re-introduction of slicks for 2009 has come hand-in-hand with a massive reduction in aerodynamic downforce. At the time grooved tyres were brought in Mosley was urged to reduce the size of car wings. It seems that would have been the better decision to take in the first place.

Banned! Slicks

Kinetic Energy Recovery Systems

A Ferrari testing a KERS almost ten years after Mosley first banned them

Mosley has made an enormous fuss about allowing teams to use Kinetic Energy Recovery Systems (KERS) from next season. He is very keen to tout the role they will play in emphasising Formula 1’s contribution green technologies.

That wasn’t his point of view in 1999, however, when Ilmor produced a KERS for McLaren capable of providing a 45bhp boost. Mosley banned the device from being used.

Having reversed his position he’s now trying to argue that the 80bhp systems to be introduced next year are a case study in how F1 technology benefits ordinary drivers.

But how much more powerful might those systems be if F1 teams had been developing for the last nine years? Then Mosley might really have something to boast about.

KERS not powerful enough for F1?

Refuelling

Refuelling will be banned for the 2010 season

One of the first major decisions taken by Mosley to change the sporting regulations was the legalisation of refuelling in 1994, which had been banned after the 1983 season.

Refuelling was an idea imported from CART (Indy Car) racing, which was enjoying a surge in popularity at the time.

It did create an element of unpredictability in its first few years in F1 as teams grappled with the different strategic options it offered. Michael Schumacher and Benetton were the masters of the new dimension in race management. But after a couple of years the ‘surprise strategic twist’ was largely consigned to the dustbin, with Hungary ’98 a memorable exception.

While the likelihood of fuel strategy to produce interesting races has diminished, the problems it causes have multiplied. Fifteen years since its reintroduction the safety and reliability problems it causes have not been solved, as the multiple fires at the Hungaroring this year proved, along with Ferrari’s dramas at Valencia and Singapore.

Refuelling has also caused difficulty with safety car periods and has led to the creation of one of the most ill-conceived and unfair rules ever brought into F1the ‘pit lane closure’ rule. Its a Sword of Damocles that periodically ruins drivers’ races. Without it, Fernando Alonso might be a three-times world champion.

Despite opposition from Mosley, the Formula One Teams Association has successfully got rid of refuelling from 2010. Mosley said afterwards:

I was against banning them because in my opinion they were part of the show.

Presumably he hasn’t watched ‘the show’ for quite some time. I’m glad he’s been forced to get rid of refuelling.

The cost-cutting plans: refuelling ban

More U-turns ahead

It seems increasingly likely that the next U-turn on the agenda will be the F1 points system. Mosley had it changed in 2003 to give points down to eighth place and reduce the margin of advantage between first and second place from four points to just two.

Although he is not enthusiastic about Ecclestone’s proposed ‘medals’ system, Mosley admits his last change to the points was a mistake:

Extending the points-paying positions to the top eight by reducing the difference between first and second was a mistake, but I’m against changing the points system too often. It disorientates people.

If only he felt the same way about qualifying. That’s been a myriad of U-turns over the last two seasons, switching between one, two- and three-part sessions, aggregate timing, single-lap sessions…

What do you think these U-turns say about Mosley’s political position? Are these all just examples of him changing his mind? Or is his hand being forced by the teams because of political weakness – perhaps in the aftermath of the sadomasochism controversy? Have your say in the comments.

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Author information

Keith Collantine
Lifelong motor sport fan Keith set up RaceFans in 2005 - when it was originally called F1 Fanatic. Having previously worked as a motoring...

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53 comments on “Max Mosley’s U-turns for 2009 and 2010”

  1. Great article as usual, Keith!
    I particularly appreciated that someone, finally, mentioned the dismal mistake that Mosley did with grooved tyres.
    What do all these U-turns say about Mosley? Probably that he is just an old, senile man well past his best before date.
    Just like Ecclestone with his ridiculous medals.

  2. Paul, hear hear.

  3. Mussolini's pet cat
    16th December 2008, 11:37

    Did he seriously say “I’m against changing the points system too often. It disorientates people.”??? What ‘people’ is he refering too? The ‘people’ in the sport or the long suffering fan? Good god, it’s not rocket science, just make the gap between 1st & 2nd greater…. The man’s an idiot.

  4. any fans of the game “portal” here?

    the winner should get cake.

  5. keepF1technical
    16th December 2008, 12:01

    why is one man from the FIA so involved in the running of F1? Why does he alone ‘discuss’ with F1 then get the WMSC to rubber stamp the decisions. Are they ever going to disagree like they clearly should’ve sometimes???

    Even ‘his’ safety campaign is afront. I think everyone in the show can take the credit for the safety improvements following Senna’s accident.

    and the handling of KERS, by which i refer to the past 10-15 yrs, is a farce.

    surely there is only one u-turn the FIA needs to make…

  6. I’d vote for cakes as a possible scoring system. An eclair for first, muffin for 2nd and a doughnut for 3rd…. or is this just a medal system again!

    on a serious not I agree with Mussolini’s pet cat, just increase the gap! I’m looking forward to the slick tyres and no re-feuling again definatley.

    Very good article as always Keith, your site is keeping me sane during the off season so many thanks and Merry Christmas!

    Someone needs to take a paddle to Max to smack some sense in to him…

  7. Excellent post, Keith.

    Here’s my professional opinion: Max Mosley is rich and powerful and he shares a number of personality traits often found in other rich and powerful people, particularly successful businesspeople, lawyers and politicians. These traits are what we call ‘psychopathic’. It doesn’t mean these people are all serial killers (although had they grown up in different circumstances there is a greater likelihood of that for them than for the rest of us). What it means is a wanton disregard for other people’s feelings with little concern for the consequences of one’s actions.

    Mosley has no concern whatsoever for any changes he has made to the FIA regulations in the past. Any problems are entirely somebody else’s fault. Take the example of the controversial stewarding decisions this year. Mosley doesn’t consider that an FIA problem at all – despite it being the lack of specific written FIA rules that caused the problem in the first place. He effortlessly places the blame on other people. In F1 Racing magazine this month there’s an article on stewarding which trots out the usual Mosley FIA line – ‘if the teams don’t like the rules, they should suggest different ones, but they don’t’

    Mosley is intelligent and articulate. He is also superficially charming – he must be, or he wouldn’t have persuaded the FIA to back him in his no-confidence vote. But there is no emotional depth to the man. He’s been married with a family for a long time, but has ‘parties’ in apartments in Chelsea without a second thought.

    Most people have very different emotional reactions to a picture of fluffy kittens, and a picture of fluffy kittens being hacked up with a carving knife. People with psychopathic personality traits show no difference, however.

    While we might wonder how someone can make u-turn after u-turn and always blame someone else (lying is second nature to psychopaths), for Mosley there is no problem at all. It doesn’t bother him in the slightest.

    The kind of hypocrisy or bare-faced cheek that make any normal person feel guilty or embarrassed have no such effect on Max.

    If you accept that is Max’s personality, it’s much easier to understand some of his sweeping decisions and how he has twisted the FIA to serve his own purposes.

  8. Keith…

    “Mosley had it changed in 2003 to give points down to eighth place and reduce the margin of advantage between first and second place from four points to just four.”

    I believe it was 4 points to 2 points….hehe, we all make mistakes

    great articles nonetheless though, extremely enlightening!

  9. Good article Keith. Moseley has meddled for too long with F1. Thankfully a lot of these u-turns are finally righting some of the wrongs.

    But here’s a suggestion for an alternative scoring system: first place gets one point, second place gets two points, all the way down to how ever many cars finish (bet it 6 or 18). The world champion is the driver with the fewest points.

  10. #4 Sush,

    We all know that the cake is a lie.

    I think all this shows that Mosley doesn’t seem to have a clue where he is or what he’s doing. They need to sort some good, decent and fair rules out, and then stick to them for a long long time.

    Even with all these proposals in place, they’re still talking about adding further changes in 2010, 2011, 2012, and so on…

    Thats still not good enough. Come up with a set of proposals, ALL of them, and then stick with them. Quit adding bits on and taking them off.

    At least with football the only thing that change each year are the kits.

  11. The man is a horrible individual but this is no surprise considering he’s Oswald Mosley’s son.

    But putting this aside (difficult as this may be) and just thinking about his Presidency, most would agree that it’s been a failure.

    I will give him credit for the work he’s done around safety, not just in F1 – he has revolutionised safety for all sports governed by the FIA, when I was younger it was a regular thing to hear about drivers, marshals & fans being killed & those days are happily behind us with injury & death a very rare thing in the sport.
    He has also been involved with the Euro NCAP safety regulations for production cars too and for this I applaud him.

    He’s ruined F1 though.

    From his & Bernie’s decision to allow manufacturers to dominate the sport, effectively killing off most independent teams, to the constant regulation changes in F1 over the past 15 years.

    He has ensured that many technical innovations by the teams have been banned.
    As Keith says, if KERS hadn’t been banned it’d now be a major part of the sport that would benefit production cars. The same could be said for active suspension and many other things that the teams have come up with.

    Grooved tyres were always seen as a stupid decision, anyone who likes racing knows that you get better racing when the cars have more mechanical grip rather than aerodynamic grip as the cars are able to follow each other more closely without suffering from lost grip. Every former racer, journalist & fan said at the time they should reduce the wings but Max was determined to play with the tyres so grooves we got.

    The ever tightening of F1 regulations has caused costs to grow exponentially in the last decade.
    When you have freedom to innovate within the rules you can try a whole new design philosophy to find an advantage, clever engineers & designers can do this with a limited budget as Lotus et al proved.
    By tightening the rules you’re forced to constantly improve the same thing and this means going to extremes on every detail of every part and this costs a fortune.

  12. John Spencer: Superb assessment of our boy Spanky, couldn’t have stated it any better.

    The true source of Mosley’s power has been the vacuum of unanimity amongst the teams. Until FOTA they could never agree on anything. Now that they have shown some unity Max has no choice but to back down.

    Like any bully, once you show some back bone they usually slink off into the sunset. Now if we can only get him to slink off the scene permanently.

  13. I think Max and Bernie between them are living in that twilight zone that the super-rich inherit, where they just expect everyone else to bow down and agree with everything they say (Prince Charles has the same problem). It might finally be dawning on them that maybe they aren’t quite in tune with the harsh realities of racing – some of which are of their own making.
    Max and the FIA are doing a good job on safety, thats well said, but why is the regulator getting involved with the nitty-gritty of how the cars should behave on the track? Isn’t that down to the teams? And the same goes for Bernie, why is the main promoter bothered about the points system? Shouldn’t he be more concerned about the lack of available circuits and the decreasing number of teams in ‘the show’?
    I really do think that the fans, teams and drivers have been sold down the river well and truly by these comedians. The sooner they retire the sooner we will have real racing again!

  14. Interesting article. In my book consistency is a much lauded but not always desirable quality. When the newly fashionable again economist John Maynard Keynes was challenged about inconsistency he replied “when the facts change I change my mind – what do you do?” The key test is whether a decision appeared to be the right one at the time, based on the facts as they were known at the time. Looking back with hindsight is easy, anyone can do that, but making key decisions without knowing what’s around the corner is more difficult.

    Grooved tyres did reduce cornering speeds for a time, which was the reason for introducing them, but there were better ways of achieving the same end – even during a tyre war. Max’s suggestion about adding another groove when speeds crept back up was also rather shortsighted. The ruling on Michelin’s wider tyres in 2003 was another lowlight and cast all sorts of doubts over the independence of the governing body.

    But the banning of McLaren’s energy recovery system in 1998 was almost certainly the right one at the time. It was done for cost reasons – i.e. if McLaren gained an advantage with it then the other teams would be obliged to follow and spend enormous amounts of money to catch up. The main reason for introducing KERS for 2009 was to demonstrate F1’s contribution to the environment. But while the arguments for lowering emmisions and saving energy have been around for some considerable time, it’s only in the last few years that they’ve really caught hold of the popular imagination. With the benefit of hindsight allowing KERS from 1998 would have been a no brainer, but it would have been a bold and unpopular decision at the time – F1 just wasn’t ready to accept the environmental argument then. It was probably the right decision at the time.

    Banning driver aides from the end of 1993 was the right decision, even if it later proved difficult to enforce. The series of safety improvements that followed Imola in 1994, not always popular at the time, were also good decisions. The availability of a non-manufacturer supply of engines appears to be a good move (as long as it isn’t mandatory) but time will tell.

    Does the new ban on refuelling count as a u-turn if Max argued for it to be retained? And hasn’t it been ditched on cost grounds rather than because of its impact on The Show?

  15. Frankly I’m not averse to Max and the F1 teams trying out new changes to F1 provided it is done with the fans interests at heart. Advances in technology surely must mean that things that work well today will not necessarily work well tomorrow.

    Incidentally does anyone know how much a point is worth in monetary terms in the WDC and WCC individually and separately?

  16. Seb C – thanks for spotting that, sorted it now…

  17. Sush- the cake is just a lie

    im sure Max often sings ‘Still Alive’ to himself tho :P

  18. keepF1technical
    16th December 2008, 14:58

    surely if F1 is to be the pinacle of the sport then the teams should be allowed to develop whatever technologies provide them with an advantage. We can all use safety as a reason NOT to do something but likewise it is also possible to integrate safety into any solution.

    in the old days the teams raced with all sorts of gadgets as improvements. The unwritten rule was if they were too advantageous the OTHER TEAMS got them banned for the next race. Yes, the FIA confirmed the decision to ban them, but it did not interfere BEFORE we had seen them. Is there not a famous story from back in the day when Mosley and Ecclestone jumped on a super new front wing to break it so it couldnt be raced with its big advantage? Then copying it in time for the next race!

    And the commercial market dictated what stayed and what got banned. If the other temas could copy things at an affordable price they kept them, if it was too expensive they got them banned. Therefore governing themselves. Any team with money to burn, could, but for a very short lived advantage.

    At least F1 could showcase some amazing advances in technology. And remember, technology is only hidden if it is not reported. I’m sure even spanking used to be a hidden activity but now we all know about it!

    did the results of the recent major F1 survey ever get published? It would be interesting to see if technology is still seen as one of the most important aspects – as Patrick Head alluded to recently.

  19. Mussolini's pet cat
    16th December 2008, 15:38

    Seb C, smug git ;)

  20. Certainly the easiset and most rational play is to widen the point gap between 1st and 2nd. It’s really a no-brainer. But it seems brains are currently in short supply in the FIA and FOM leadership.

  21. Thank God they have left refueling in place for 2009, which will inevitably prove that these new – hideous in appearance – aero rules will have no effect whatsoever on overtaking or the entertainment value of a race. After this realization, refueling can be re-instated for 2010 and F1 will have some hope of retaining its entertainment.

    For people who think no fuel stops will result in drivers being more aggressive you are wrong. I guarantee you that the drivers out there are all trying as hard as they can to get past. This imagined theory of a driver settling for points is total fabrication and utterly antithetical to a drivers personality.

    Banning fuel will create a status quo in race pace and ordered grids that will provide no scope for excitement. There will be no Alonso on a light load to throw a cat amongst the pigeons.

    To anyone who is rejoicing in the banning of refueling, please bookmark this page so you can tell me how write I was 18 months from now.

  22. *right

    What ever happened to the feature that enabled comments to be edited?

  23. “…but I’m against changing the points system too often. It disorientates people.”

    That’s how I felt about the repeated qualifying changes. ;)

    I’m relieved to see that many of Max’s more boneheaded ideas are finally being reversed. Grooved tires and refueling should have been dumped a long time ago.

    For me, though, the most disappointing u-turn is Max’s decision (although not confirmed) to stay on past 2009. :(

  24. The way I understood it, Mosly wants KERS so he can keep a ban on engine development. Or maybe it’s the other way around, that het wants the engines to be frozen so that KERS will be developend.

    Ether way, he has repeatedly stated that he wants the engines not to be developed any further (frozen and/or standard) so that money can be saved there, but KERS should make the difference.

    He also thinks that KERS will be road relevant. Not sure if he really sees it in the way that it will make F1 environmentally friendly, but it would be nice if something developed in F1 would actually filter down into road going cars. Pushing a V8 engine from 750bhp to 825bhp is surely useless in that respect. Not sure if KERS is useful, but since it’s such a new concept it might just help.

    He might have changed his mind on KERS since 1989, but recently he has been pretty straightforward in not wanting a standard KERS solution and that he wants a lot of focus from the teams on KERS.

  25. Is this blog a xmas wind up? Surely we all know teams clawback advantages over time through different methods. eg) they lost mechanical grip when tyres were reduced in size and grooved so they went after better aerodynamics. Wing sizes were reduced so they developed the pod chimmneys etc etc

    Eventually these new measures will be obselete. Will Max be wrong again?

  26. He’s not going to step down at the end of his term as promised, is he?

  27. Keith, to understand Max’s goal behind the move to grooved tyres, we have to go back a few years to 1994 when there was a new regulation to reduce the width of the tyres. The decision to reduce the width of the tyres was not borne out of reducing performance, rather it was for reducing a driver’s control of the car. Max at that time had said F1 was too safe, what was needed was drivers running off the track for some excitement. Unfortunately that move failed because not only were the drivers still able to have a good measure of the cars, there was also the fact that the reduced aerodynamic profile of the tyres was a massive aid to car performance, ie, less drag.

    Not often do u find cars losing control in a straight line. In that light I also believe the move to grooved tyres was not really to reduce cornering speeds, but cornering control. It was felt that, a grooved tyre with its limited patch contact with the track will offer a greater challenge to the drivers and of course a more erratic behaviour in a corner, achieving the aim of having cars run off track and crash providing excitement. Well it did happen a few times, but not often enough because there was plenty of downforce being generated by the wings.

    The same reason also why refueling was introduced. Purely for the odd accident. We all saw the interest generated by the Benneton pitlane fire in 94. Although I do not mind having refueling during the race as it adds an element of randomness to the whole procession until recently.

    As regards KERS, we need to look closely at what formula1 really is. F1 is purely a Business/Advertising ->Entertainment ->Sport ->Research vehicle. Probably not in that order but the business and Advertising arm of F1 takes precedence to most other aspects of the sport. So regarding road research relevance. Is it necessary to have cars going at great speeds to have road relevant technology? Technologies that filter down from F1 to road cars are purely accidental and not the primary objective. Touring cars are much more relevant to developing road technologies than F1.

  28. Matt #21
    “This imagined theory of a driver settling for points is total fabrication and utterly antithetical to a drivers personality.”

    Not true. In just about every race you’ll see drivers turn the revs down and settle for a safe points position rather than risking their race for 1 or 2 more. EG Hamilton in Singapore, he attacked Rosberg for a couple of laps then backed off because he had the championship to think of.

    And Hamilton in Brazil for that matter. I very much doubt he was trying as hard as he could and only finished 5th. He was there because they went conservative and settled for 4th/5th. Incidentally, that was something he wouldn’t have been able to do under a medals system – he would have had to go for the win.

  29. @Owen,

    Don’t start the medal madness again. We’ve been through that several times already and it’s not the subject of this thread. If you’re for or against, go vote on formula1.com. Wouldn’t hold my breath though, a Pitpass poll showed 95% were against medals.

  30. Thanks for the compliments guys :-)

    Rob B – I think the cake system might also work as a kind of success ballast so I’m not keen…

    John Spencer – Interesting thoughts on Mopsley, which had me reaching for the dictionary to see if ‘psychopathic’ meant what I thought it did or not. I get the feeling with Mosley sometimes that he just wants to win the argument – the end isn’t as important as the victory.

    Ajokay –

    They need to sort some good, decent and fair rules out, and then stick to them for a long long time.

    I’d like the FIA to adopt that as a motto.

    Beneboy – I think the ‘success or failure’ argument is a fascinating argument and worth an article of its own. It’s in the notebook…

    Tim –

    The banning of McLaren’s energy recovery system in 1998 was almost certainly the right one at the time. It was done for cost reasons – i.e. if McLaren gained an advantage with it then the other teams would be obliged to follow and spend enormous amounts of money to catch up.

    I agree that green matters are much higher profile now than they were before, but I think the FIA was also pursuing carbon offsetting at the same time Mosley first banned KERS so it must have been an issue then as well.

    Chaz –

    Incidentally does anyone know how much a point is worth in monetary terms in the WDC and WCC individually and separately?

    $4,378,133 – the price of a point in Formula 1 in 2008

    Matt –

    For people who think no fuel stops will result in drivers being more aggressive you are wrong.

    That’s not my main reason for disliking refuelling – I find it a tedious distraction from proper racing that causes more problems than its worth. (Sorry comment editing has briefly gone away why I do some fiddling under the bonnet, it will be restored).

    Antonyob – Sorry I don’t understand your point.

    Bananaman – I wouldn’t hold my breath if I was you.

    Oliver – I find it hard to believe that post-1994 Mosley would have argued in favour of making F1 cars more prone to crashing. Surely there would have been uproar?

  31. Thanks Keith but if I read it correctly those values are in relation to the teams budgets. Do we know how much the point value is in terms of what they get from Bernie?

  32. @Keith
    Oliver – I find it hard to believe that post-1994 Mosley would have argued in favour of making F1 cars more prone to crashing. Surely there would have been uproar?Yeah I think indeed the argument was to make F1 cars more unstable. Not to make them crash more, but to reduce cornering speeds.

  33. oh, that last post went horribly wrong with the quote …

  34. Actually, I find El Gordo’s idea for reverse point system very interesting. Surprised no one commented on that. It would have the effect of rewarding high positions (like the medal system) but also consistency. It would also prevent drivers to settle down after let say, 5 ‘gold’ medals as it would be very punitive to just stop racing or be involved in crashes (although I agree no racer would just stop racing). Maybe the reverse point system can be tweaked to have more difference between 1st and 2nd (like 0 point for 1st and 2 points for 2nd, etc…). Anyway… pretty sure that Max would say that this is too “disorienting”…its like him asking for less spanking!!

  35. On the reverse points system, I think constantly having to explain to people that Lewis Hamilton was leading the championship instead of Adrian Sutil would get annoying.

  36. Its called changing with the times. With hindsight everyone can approve or criticise easily. Some decisions were good, some were bad.
    There seem to be a lot of fruitcakes who think that Mosley/Ecclestone has some sort of agenda to destroy the world.

  37. I am not Mosley’s attorney, but to be a bit fair, F1 is not the only enterprise that after a while makes U-turns on some decisions made in the past.

    F1 is a business, and that is a dynamic environment. It is easy to judge something on somebdoy after we all see how things worked (or did not work) out. But no matter how much theory one knows, sometime you can’t tell how some decisions will affect the results unless you try them.

    So, I would not blame Mosley for making the decisions. I would blame him for often taking decisions and making changes way too quikcly but then waiting for years to make those needed U-turns …

  38. It’s a simple situation- Max is a proud man who puts ego above common sense. Because of that, he values his legacy and place in history very much. In my view, these changes are his way of making sure the ship dosen’t sink on his watch. Even if he’s still president for years, he thinks he’ll always be remembered as a saviour of the sport.

  39. Nitpicky question: is ‘champion-elect’ the most appropriate term to describe Villeneuve’s position at that time? I would have thought elect implies a form of election. Perhaps ‘champion-designate’ would be more appropriate.

  40. Mosley was always in favour of banning slicks and introducing narrow-track cars: even in the early 1980’s Mosley proposed grooved tyres and narrow tracks as an alternative for the ban on ground effects and introduction of the flat bottom.

    Although Mosley was responsible for catastrophic rule changes (new point scoring system, post-qualifying parc fermé, grooved tyres, narrow track cars, new aerodynamics), he should be most blamed for turning Formula 1 into a semi-spec series. We already have spec tyres and spec electronics. From next year, we’ll get the aerodynamics to be standardized to some degree and the standard engine is about to be introduced.

  41. You could always tweak the reverse points system the opposite way if “the driver with the least points is leading” is too confusing!

    You have 20 cars – so the winner gets 20 points, second gets 19 and so on counting down the order. DNFs get zero. (Though I personally find that system more confusing than the original reverse points.)

  42. And as for spending your time explaining to people, I’m sure most people would just look at the championship table presented on TV, website or newspaper. I’m not sure how many people follow the exact points result too much.

  43. My point Keithy, and as others have already stated, probably better than me, is that you cannot judge a rule change a failure when there are so many factors affecting it.

    Actually what you have is a few hundred of the brightest engineers in the world whose explicit purpose is to bend the rules to gain advantage. As strictly come dancing has taught us, the unintended consequence of a change can alter the game completely -and sometimes it catches you out.

    No doubt these new rule changes will be the same but that is not the same as failure and i defy anyone to predict where we will be in 5 years time as a result of this current crop of changes.

    I find the anti Max stuff a bit tabloid for my liking and though he has huge flaws, he also carries on his shoulders a huge weight and responsibility and in many areas he has delivered. Many men would’ve crumbled under such scrutiny.

  44. Antonyob, many men would have crumbled eh? How about he tries to listen to others for a change (i.e. the teams and the fans) instead of acting like the dictator he is…. “I’m against changing the points system too often. It disorientates people.” Oh come on.

    And you watch strictly come dancing? Oh dear.

  45. OK then, lets ask the question another way:
    In which other motorsports have Max and the FIA constantly proposed/forced rule changes?

  46. DG, RallySport, although its been almost the same for the last 3 years now, maybe 4. RallyCross, to the point of breakdown although to be fair that was before Mosley.

  47. Chaz – No, sorry, don’t know how much the teams get from Ecclestone. If anyone has data on that, even if it’s from a few years ago, I’d like to see it. I don’t think I ever have though…

    Pingguest – Not sure I’d describe post-qualifying parc fermé as a ‘catastrophic’ change, I think that was one of his better ones.

    Antonyob – I’m not saying “Mosley chooses to do one thing and then he chooses to do the exact opposite” – one of the things I was trying to get at here was how far Mosley is in control of the situation. It seems to me he was against the refuelling ban for 2010, so is this a concession he’s granted, or was it forced out of him?

    In the case of slicks, he’s bringing them back in the hope it will encourage overtaking. There were plenty of people in 1997 that foresaw this problem. He should have listened to them.

    Do you find the tone and style of the article ‘tabloidy’, or just the criticism of Mosley? (Either way I’m bound to disagree with you!)

    DG – The World Rally Championship, which is now down to two manufacturer entrants, is being cut to 12 rounds per year, and last week had to cancel stages on the Rally of Great Britain because tyre rules meant the cars weren’t able to drive on frozen surfaces.

  48. I wouldnt read this if it was tabloidy Keith!

    No i just meant the “lets have a pop at Moseley whatever he does” stuff

    But i agree some of the previous changes have been railroaded through despite reasonable objections. I do,however, think he realises that where f1 is at the moment means the decisions made are crucial for the whole future of the sport. 10 years ago that wasnt the case and then it was really just us lot who cared. Now,it seems, its everybodys business.

  49. john h

    no, i dont watch Strictly, i do watch the news.

    Its easy to have a pop at leaders, everyone does it. I think its fairly tedious. And writing the words “oh come on” is hardly inspired criticism

  50. Slick Tyres!!!

    Thank the Lord!!!!

  51. I thought his reign of Tirane was up for renewal keith can you find out how much longer we have to suffer him for.

  52. Hey thank you , I loved every single word of your post , I bookmarked you and I will come back for much more!

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