A comment on the three points of the US Grand Prix:
1. Juan Pablo Montoya's Black Flag.
2. Ralf Schumacher's Accident.
3. The General Accident Management.
Quite frankly, I do not care much for bureaucrats, who for some reason their aim in life is to go around life with their forehead stamped with some idiotic purpose of being destructive for the most irrational reasons possible that only people with this particular gene are capable to dream up or imagine.
1. The Black Flag:
At this point I really do not care what the specific rule it is, which apparently, it boils down to a 15 second window of time in which if you cannot start the race with the car you qualified, you must do so then with the spare car (usually -at least when I was involved- it was known as the "T-car") As for the rule, I may be in error, but that is not the point of all this...
Juan Pablo, the ever super competitive man that he is, once he realized he was in trouble with his qualifying car, he had the quickness of mind in those very intense and nerve wrecking moments that waiting for the start is -as they were rolling off for the warm-up lap... his car would not start... so he leaps out of the car and goes for the "T-car"... he successfully fires it and gets ready to start from the pit lane, i.e. last... and so he starts his race....
He brings the car up to third place on lap 58... only to be shown the black flag (i.e. disqualifying him from the race)...
Now...
What f* moron waits almost the entire race to make such a decision?
IF such is the rule.... you simple do not allow him to start right there and then.... BECAUSE he has the option to FIX the original car.... and then join the race...
You DO NOT allow him to start the race... or at worse... stop him with one lap or so...
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
The bastards evidently do not know their rules well enough in the first place... not surprising... since they make the damned things so confusing that not even the people who dream these idiotic things truly understand them...
Amateurish morons at best.
2. Ralf Schumacher's Accident.
Ralf Schumacher escaped serious injury not so much because he hit the wall with the rear end of the car, Therefore, a much stronger part of the chassis which absorbed the majority of the impact...
However, it was an eternity for the safety crews to get to him... I have seen many instances under similar conditions that one of the still competing cars drive into standing still wrecked cars...
What it seems to be incomprehensible is that the professional crews from NASCAR and USAC many times are near the car even BEFORE the damned thing comes to rest...
NO, I am not demanding that this would have been the case, particularly in the location of Ralf's car... but I still think it took forever.... leaving Ralf exposed to serious and unnecessary risk...
This accident truly came to a border line event in which red-flagging the event should have been the route to go...
Even making a case for the accident in turn one being reason enough to red flag the race, given the fact that it was the reason of Ralf's accident (i.e. the puncture of his tire was caused by debris picked up from that accident)
3. General Accident Management.
Once again, the thought of using professional crews, marshals and race stewards following the Formula One Circuits around the world has become of great importance to the sport.
At a time when recent events in terms of questionable decisions, indecision in their executions, and flat out stupidity in management of the races of the most important form of motor-sports around the world leaves one wondering [and questioning] the sanity of the organizers not to see the obvious...
If one takes the example of NASCAR and the USAC events, they have, for the most part, professional crews who handle the flags, accident reaction, medical emergency operations and rule sanctioning functions of the race events.
Why... in Formula One, is it still left to the organizing body to handle all these functions PARTICULARLY when in some countries these functions are handled by amateurish and hobbyists morons, who just because they hold some sort of 'honorary' position in the Local Automobile Club, automatically are given the responsibility to manage these events...
Juan Pablo Montoya has made a firm call for the FIA to require that these functions ought to be taken over by professionals...
It is high time for this to happen, particularly when F-1 is going through a difficult time of attendances and genera interest waning from the public who while interested and keen on the competitiveness of the sport, they are getting dissatisfied by these amateurish decisions....
To put a simple example as proof is the way in which most acidents in the US GP were handled... a simple thing to do such as sweeping the area were the accidents happened was never executed... IN SPITE of the relative safety of having deployed the "safety car" (slowing down the race cars and setting a pace during the cleaning period described)... there were pieces of carbon fibre flying all over the track and indeed these particles caused the accidents of Fernando Alonso on lap 9 and Ralf Schumacher on lap 10... |
