The F1 rules change yet again

This one kinda flew over my head yesterday, but after reflecting a bit, it’s quite a game changer for this F1 season – the teams have agreed that for this year, the tyre they use for their fastest qualifying lap will have to be used at the start of the race as well.

These big black round things are the source of controversy again

Autosport, in the following short snippet, put it well as to how this will affect the racing:

This will open up the possibility of teams gambling on sacrificing the best possible time in Q3 by running a more consistent but less quick tyre so as to have a better chance in the race. Alternatively, teams may choose a tyre that is better over a single lap to secure a good grid position, even if it runs the risk of compromising race performance.

The teams hope that the rule tweak will serve to mix up the tactics throughout the grid and therefore lead to more exciting races.

Mix up the tactics, right… remind me of what was the point when they introduced refuelling back in 94? To mix up the tactics! So why have they banned it back for this season then? And what does this rule do? It “spices up” qualifying, by having teams doing well in qualifying that will afterwards be handicapped in the race, and vice-versa. But hey, wasn’t the point of banning refuelling so that we could see who really is the quickest in qualifying, without handicaps? So they essentially have gone with a rule that pushes racing in one direction, then came up with another rule that does the opposite. What the fuck are they actually trying to do with the regulations?

I’m not particularly bothered by the actual effect of this on the racing – we will have something similar to the last few years, with some slight differences, and that’s alright. As much as I loved the 1980s kind of racing (which we would have without this rule), and would want real, pure qualifying, the races were bound to be really dull with the current cars as they cannot overtake at all, and this helps the entertainment a little bit. What I am concerned about is the identity of the sport. Over the last few years, these are the rule changes ONLY concerning tyres (qualifying rules have been an even bigger mess):

• 2004 – anything goes
• 2005 – forbidden to change tyres in the race
• 2006 – allowed to change tyres in the race again
• 2007 – single supplier of tyres, everyone now forced to use Bridgestone
• 2008 – everyone now forced to use two compounds of tyres in the race
• 2009 – grooved tyres are gone, now they use slicks
• 2010 – everyone forced to use the same tyre at the start of the race, which they used in qualifying
• 2011 – Bridgestone will be gone, and everyone will be forced to use tyres by another supplier

Now imagine the FIFA were like this in handling football. Here’s an half-assed analogy as to what football rules would look like:

• 2004 – normal rules
• 2005 – hey, let’s try a season with no offside rule
• 2006 – normal rules again
• 2007 – single supplier of boots, everyone forced to use Nike boots
• 2008 – everyone now forced to do at least one pass backwards and one forwards before scoring a goal
• 2009 – back-passes to the keeper are allowed again
• 2010 – the team that is ahead in the league will start the game with a 1-0 disadvantage
• 2011 – Nike boots are gone and everyone is forced to use Adidas

That sounds completely insane, doesn’t it? People are getting more and more unsure as to what exactly F1 is all about, with the goalposts of the sport constantly changing. The sport isn’t a sport, it has been reduced to constant experiments in entertainment. What on earth is their long-term plan for the future?

I am really not looking forward to listening the TV commentators doing, yet again, a dreadfully boring 30 minutes explanation of all of these complicated regulations, during the first race of the season. Now, I can sit through it, barely, but what about the casual fan who isn’t a super-F1-nerd? Is this how they’re planning to conquer more fans?

What is this, and where does it come from?

The 1st of January is as good as any day to start a blog. Or to re-start one.

About one year ago, I was unemployed, stuck at home most days, and very, very bored. One of my mates had started a blog recently, posting about all sorts of things that interested him, so I figured: why not do the same? I had four times as much free time to kill, and love writing long-arse walls of texts about irrelevant stuff, such as sport.

So I did, and “Paranoikices” was born. It started off as a weird mix of funny vids, electronic music reviews, motorsport and football news, amongst other things. A “show off random cool things to friends” blog.

However, by then we were at the beginning of the Formula 1 winter season, and as a raving F1 fanatic starving for some action, I started paying more and more attention to it, as the teams unveiled their cars and ran them in test sessions. The fun blog transformed itself into a little more serious motorsport opinion website, which occasionally talked about other stuff. That was alright, but by this point I had lost track of what my target audience would be. Obviously most common people have no interest whatsoever in reading articles overanalyzing F1 test sessions, and if I wanted to go in this direction, I’d have to bring in the more hardcore motorsport fans. There was however one big issue – the blog was in portuguese, and that limited the audience to the hardcore motorsport fans in Portugal and Brazil.

Instead of switching over to english, I decided to try attracting visitors by pimping out the blog. I searched pics or vids for every single article in order for it to be full of bright shiny colors – I even put my ugly mug on the corner of the blog. I covered the news almost daily and extensively. I put links to other blogs and websites, participated in them, and the blog became a part of the annoying attention-whoring circle-jerk that goes on around motorsport fan websites (nothing against the folks involved, some of those websites are genuinely interesting). All of this became more and more tiring, less and less fun, and by the time I finally got a job in April, I had no interest in continuing it. And so the blog died.

What is this then? It’s the revival, in english, and hopefully with less of these issues, now that I have more experience in doing something like this. I do have a job now, but I still have some free time, specially in the winter which is only just starting. Afterwards, who knows? The motivation and inspiration for this sort of thing comes and goes. I give no guarantees on the frequency and quality of the content, and it is why the idea of the blog is appealing. The freedom of it.