Oct 2, 2006

Excursions & Chicanery

Some drivers find it very difficult to stick to the road these days. Here in the real world for example it's clearly too much like hard work for arrogant, slappable oafs who don't like boring things like pavements or zebra crossings to get in the way of a good mobile phone conversation.

Still you'd have thought that clever, talented, experienced and focussed F1 drivers would better understand the difference between 'road' and 'not road' wouldn't you...
Yep. And you would of course be wrong.

Tyre bosses complaining about the surface of kerbs at Monza hit a slightly surreal note: surely they should be concerned at how their tyres perform on the track itself, not off it - and hopefully that's where their drivers will be planning on keeping their car.
This isn't to belittle safety matters of course, but the best way of avoiding a meeting with a barrier is to actually drive on the circuit itself and not on kerbs, gravel or run-offs.

Concrete run-off areas may well be safer than gravel, but they are also something of a 'get out of jail free' card for drivers these days. You don't want harm to come to them, but at the same time you can't help feeling a price ought to be paid for going off track. Like not being able to get back onto it, for example.

Whereas once you would be bogged down in gravel and unable to continue, now there is no penalty from huge run-off aprons and you can just take a nice comfy excursion and pootle back on a few seconds later.

Beyond the matter of run-off areas, Michael Schumacher has been spearheading a campaign to make chicanes a thing of the past too, prompting a novel FIA "clarification" following the Hungarian GP that appeared to fly in the face of decades of perfectly understood, observed and upheld rules.

Actually it wasn't just Hungary: a lot of people seem to have forgotten that Schumi also left out any bits of circuit that didn't appeal to him in Canada earlier in the year, where he appeared to decide that he really just couldn't be arsed with the final chicane at all on a number of occasions.
You have to wonder why circuits actually bother with chicanes or white lines or kerbs - or basically a track - when all and sundry can drive wherever appeals to them with apparent impunity.

Having said that, now that all the grid have basically been told that, contrary to popular belief (and indeed rules) that you can block others by cutting chicanes, it will be interesting to see if any resulting lawlessness backfires on Charlie Whiting and the FIA...
Let's hope so.