I believe inconsistent punishments act as a better deterrent than consistent ones.

O.o!

At every juncture, they will ask themselves if a track position is worth so many $$$ – sometimes the answer may be yes, and other times no.

Are you now talking gibberish, little maybe?

What is appropriate to say now is:
How can the person making this comment possibly know this? haha..

eat bit of your own soup?.. hehe

anyway im not gonna be an #$% like you were, i think your comments albeit are driven by fuzzy feelings, they are indeed interesting

I believe inconsistent punishments act as a better deterrent than consistent ones.

aha!!! you believe do you!!?? LOL om%g..

& she also asks me whether these are real cars or just photographs of toys.

lol

The fine could have been related to the constructors points in some way. For example, the initial fine could have been that Renault will have part of its constructors points removed for the next race. Renault made a penalty when they allowed Alonso to keep driving the car around the track on 3 wheels. I think something relating to the removal or restriction of points for the next race could have been implemented.

Renault admits their pit stop procedure is unsafe. Their procedure doesn’t allow for problems fitting the wheel nut retaining device. The gun man lifts his hand when he’s done fitting the wheel nut while another mechanic then still needs to finish securing the wheel nut retainer.

How can you say that with such a procedure you do not KNOWINGLY accept the fact that you take this risk?

the mechanic f’d up in saying he’d finished when he hadn’t. the suggestion that FA should’ve stopped when he realised something was wrong will go against every instinct a racing driver has. generally you’ll do whatever you can to nurse the car back to the pits / service to continue the fight. how many people have had miss-fires in their own cars and continued, either hoping it’ll clear or with a thought of “it’s not that far to xyz”? likewise brake fade / broken clutch cable / leaking cooling system etc.

One of the stewards that was on duty when Renault got penalized for losing a wheel, was the infamous Mohammed Bin Sulayem:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrVZTgj5AUk

In reality I think only the head steward Alan Donnelly does most of the stewarding. Every time there is some weird decision his name pops up.

not a bunch of idiots from counbtries that dont even produce cars, much less race cars.

What a stupid thing to say. Just because someone comes from a country that doesn’t produce or race cars doesn’t mean they don’t understand racing.

they paid the ultimate fine when the car had to come back in on 3 wheels. and lost all the time it did.

They were lucky that’s all that happened. The wheel could easily have struck another car, another driver, a marshal etc.
To let them off so easily is to ignore the lessons learnt from the Surtees and Massa accidents.

As it is, no-one really knows where they stand and the FIA can decide what is and isn’t punishable and what is and isn’t an appropriate punishment whenever they want.

If they don’t change this procedure, it could happen again.

Absolutely.
Or at least make sure there’s an easy and quick way for the mechanics to communicate that there was a problem (if one isn’t already in place).

i never like seeing cars being prevented from racing (there are already too few) but he didnt even get a grid penalty.

i’m not one for conspriacies so i assume its a case of cleverly following the (legal) rules as opposed to mclaren who tried hard to follow the sporting rules and got stiched in the legal system.

As far as I know, each circuit provides its own (unpaid) marshals. We will never get consistancy while this continues. We need professional marshalls, paid by the FIA, to travel to each race. Then the marshals reports to the stewards will have a consistant basis and the stewards will be much more likely to hand out consistant punishments.