Philosophy

Post here all non technical related topics about Formula One. This includes race results, discussions, testing analysis etc. TV coverage and other personal questions should be in Off topic chat.
Post Reply
Mikey_s
8
Joined: 21 Dec 2005, 11:06

Philosophy

Post

I thought I'd start a new topic, and didn't want to call it Espionage, or flame wars, but it seems to me that there are several polarised opinions about when teams are cheating and when they are exploiting weak regulations, and overall the philosophy behind technology development - whether it is good for the sport or not...

Let's face it the sport we love is not only a sport, its business, BIG business and the stakes are high. The old adage about power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely holds true for many of us , but the teams are forced to try and gain advantage in a world where victory is based on optimising the last fractions of a percent to be better than the second placed guy.

Technology.
I love it and I hate it; I love to see the fantastically elegant solutions the engineers dream up and implement... but then this leaves the sport open to the criticism that a 19, or 20 year old kid can get into a car and post competitive lap times against an experienced pilot. However, this is risk reduction... and the teams are forced down that road by needing to win;

Take traction control; I'll be interested to see how they cope next year when it's banned (although I fully expect some 'work arounds' to appear early on). As a team boss would you develop a TC system, or leave it to the skill of your driver to wring the best performance out of the car without spinning at least once during a race...? it's a no brainer.

The same applies to semi-automatic gear shifts; why would you risk the driver screwing it up when you can design a nearly foolproof system to avoid the possibility of driver error?

So that days of race outcomes being decided by who makes the fewest mistakes are almost gone; as a team boss you'll try and design out the possibility for your driver to throw the race away for you and the consequence is that most of the drivers are kids who are good at console games. I'm completely undecided about whether F1 should effectively become a single make series, so we could see who the best driver is, or whether we keep pushing the technology boundaries. In my view we are a kind of halfway house at the moment. Max is trying to standardise this and that, pushing it towards a spec series. I wuld prefer the push to either go all the way, or to relax the rules so that the small teams (and the big ones for that matter) can really innovate instead of it becoming a race of who has the most powerful computers, or the most wind tunnels to wring out that last fraction of a percent from the CFD - On this basis the B teams will always be last and the biggest budget will always win (except Toyota of course :lol: )

Bending the rules;
At what point does a rule bend become cheating? My €0.02 is that it's when there is a clear breach of the regulations. That means that a flexible floor is good design whilst it passes the tests, and it's down to the regulator (FIA) to come up with another rule to force me to stop. Same goes for bendy rear wing mounts, bendy front wing elements, bridge wings, etc... Thise who bellyache that something is not in the spirit of the regulations are bound to lose because the winner will be the one who interprets the rule book in the most effective way and challenges the regulator to prove he's transgressed.

Business principles;
I think the Stepneygate sage is very sad. I work in an industry that has had some extremely large antitrust settlements recently (hundreds of million Euro fines levied against the cheats - and rightly so IMO).

This is big business, not just a sport. People should know the rules of the game and if this sport were regulated by the European Commission rather than the FIA I think the fine would have been much higher. In my industry if someone came to me with another company's R&D I'd be running to the lawyers office so fast you wouldn't see me for dust...

I think McLaren will suffer next year even more heavily; I think some of the headline sponsors must be thinking very hard about whether they wish their company to be associated with an organisation that has demonstrated very poor judgement on the issue of fundamental busness principles. Looking at other peoples cars is gathering competior information, being handed an R&D dossier and, more importantly, using it, is just plain illegal - it's theft! My company spends millions of dollars per annum on R&D; why? it's an investment - they do it because it earns more than it costs. If someone takes that investment and hands it to the competition then that competitor knows my philosophy, they know my strategy and they have a significant (and unfair) competitive advantage. Whether, or not McLaren used the knowedge to build parts into their car is almost academic. Knowing how Ferrari operate is invaluable in being able to compete against them.

Furthermore, the development pipeline to implement the technology arising from the R&D division in F1 is very short and immensely high pressure. Any interruption is damaging to the team as we all know that cars are continuously developed throughout the season. It's a great shame that a couple of individuals have stuffed up a great season and tainted the efforts of two great teams. I only hope that they, and others, learn a lesson.

well, I could rant on for much longer, but that'll do for a start...
Mike

User avatar
Spencifer_Murphy
0
Joined: 11 Apr 2004, 23:29
Location: London, England, UK

Post

Good post, very thoughtul. One point that I really liked was about rule breaking / bending:
At what point does a rule bend become cheating? My €0.02 is that it's when there is a clear breach of the regulations. That means that a flexible floor is good design whilst it passes the tests, and it's down to the regulator (FIA) to come up with another rule to force me to stop. Same goes for bendy rear wing mounts, bendy front wing elements, bridge wings, etc... Thise who bellyache that something is not in the spirit of the regulations are bound to lose because the winner will be the one who interprets the rule book in the most effective way and challenges the regulator to prove he's transgressed.
I totally agree with you, as much as I disliked the bendy wings that Ferrari allegedly had last year at Malaysia, being totally honest about it I only disliked it because Ferrari had pulled a master stroke and I personally didn't wanna see Schumi get an 8th title. Think of it as a sort of jealous "Why didn't I think of that" moment - the exact kind of thought that prompts teams to complain about it (before hastily designing their won equivalents!)

Bending the rules is a must have in our sport, kinda like the Brabham Fan-Car, how ingenius! Nobody really looks back at it as a black time in our sport like the rules had been broken and Lauda got a win he didn't deserve, people tend to look at it a bit tongue in cheek, like "Erm, yeh the fan car, well...lol...tht was an...erm...interesting design" whilst trying to hold back a fit og the giggles, kinda like when you get caught talking in class as a little kid, you know you've pushed the rules to the limit, so you kinda laugh about it.

I'd hate a one-spec series, F1 is kinda like the Premier League in football, if you wanna win the title you dont wanna be playing for say, Reading. You wanna be playing for Man Utd, Arsenal, Chelsea or Liverpool. Likewise in F1 if you wanna win the title you dont wanna be driving for Spyker, you wanna be driving for Ferrari, Mclaren, BMW or Renault (and hopefully one day soonish Williams again!) What's wrong with that? To drive well and earn yourself a good seat.

Also we need underdogs, like when stewart team won at Nurburgring in '99, everyone loved it because it was such a David & Goliath situation. Leave it JUST to the drivers and you risk nothing but the same results time and time again with say Lewis, Alonso, and Kimi finishing on the podium time and time again.

I think f1's getting it right again, let the teams go a bit wild with development, but if they curcumvent a rule you dont like for safety or sporting reasons, ban it. Its always been the case that the designers try to bend the rules on the FIA, who inturn try to limit the designers. And that leads to interesting designs and features on cars. Also remove driver aids, as far as I'm concerened F1 should be about man & machine, so yes have padal-shift gearboxes (sure it makes a task - changing gears - easir for the driver) but bann auto boxes (which remove the task completely)

ergo, keep wings and big slick tyres, but bann TC & LC which remove the task completely. What I'm getting at is, making individual tasks for the driver easier isn't a problem, it just makes the cars quicker and keeps them at the pinacle of motorsport, bt driver aids which removes jobs from a drivers to-do list is just plain stupid.

That's my philosophy anyway.
Silence is golden when you don't know a good answer.

nae
nae
0
Joined: 29 Mar 2006, 00:56

Post

good comments and a good idea for a thread

look at other sports, football, rugby, hockey, tennis to name but a few
all allow a certain amount of rule breakage and even have fouls and penalty
plays to cover the minor infringements. there not technical sports but still its the princeable. ice hockey even allows fights, witch in the eyes of criminal law could be construed as straight up assualt

look at rugby where many a professional foul is committed in defence as its deemed fair to give away 3 points rather than 7, up untill a point.

its the inconsistency that is the most annoying. nobody knows if the same crime gets the same punishment and nobody generally gets to hear the reasons around the decisions much either.

i dont have a philosophy

User avatar
Rob W
0
Joined: 18 Aug 2006, 03:28

Post

Spencifer_Murphy wrote:Good post, very thoughtul. One point that I really liked was about rule breaking / bending:
At what point does a rule bend become cheating? My €0.02 is that it's when there is a clear breach of the regulations. That means that a flexible floor is good design whilst it passes the tests, and it's down to the regulator (FIA) to come up with another rule to force me to stop....
I agree Spencifer. Very nicely put by Mikey_s.

Rob W

bizadfar
0
Joined: 03 Jan 2007, 15:51

Post

Yea, it always makes me chuckle when people say Ferrari had an illegal car in Rd1 (hint hint ManChild) :roll:

User avatar
Ciro Pabón
106
Joined: 11 May 2005, 00:31

Re: Philosophy

Post

Mikey_s wrote:Bending the rules;
At what point does a rule bend become cheating? My €0.02 is that it's when there is a clear breach of the regulations...
Image

"Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume, is to do at any time what I think right...

Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well disposed are daily made the agents of injustice."
Mikey_s wrote:Technology.
I love it and I hate it; I love to see the fantastically elegant solutions the engineers dream up and implement...
Image

"To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?

"We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep... It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, as so to make few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, wich morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."
Mikey_s wrote:Business principles...
This is big business, not just a sport... I think some of the headline sponsors must be thinking very hard about whether they wish their company to be associated with an organisation that has demonstrated very poor judgement on the issue of fundamental busness principles.
"To my astonishment I was informed on leaving college that I had studied navigation! - why, if I had taken one turn down the harbor, I should have known more about it. Even the poor student studies only political economy, while tht economy of living, whicbh is synonimous with philosophy is not even sincerely professed in our bussiness. The consequence is, that while he is reading Adam Smith, Ricardo and Say, he runs his father in debt irretrievaby."

Image

"Despite this being back at Spa was a pleasure. Yes, the hotel facilities are from the 1970s. Yes, the traffic management was stupid (as always). But, Hell, this is Spa. This is special. Anyone with a racing soul can put up with a few privations to see the cars hurtling through the forests; to hear the engines pulling revs all the way to the top of the hill. Thank goodness that this beautiful noise was able to drown out the jibber-jabber of the F1 paddock and the sanctimonious tosh spouting forth from those who get more excitement from power plays and intellectual masturbation than they do from watching the cars in action.

Spa is what racing motor cars is all about: fast corners, cars teetering on the brink and a sense of danger in the air.
...
It struck me that to understand what Formula 1 cars are really like, one needs these days to go to strange remote places where the great old circuits struggle to survive. These are the only place where one can see these mechanical animals in the wild."
Last edited by Ciro Pabón on 05 Oct 2007, 18:08, edited 5 times in total.
Ciro

Mikey_s
8
Joined: 21 Dec 2005, 11:06

Post

Ciro,

So where does that put you on a scale of 1 to compliance with the letter vs spirit of the rule book?

In my view the FIA courts trouble by trying to nail the regulations down too tightly - and if they develop a test and the car passes that test does it comply with the rule?

I can quote too (perhaps not as eloquently as you, but anyhow;

Rules are for the guidance of wise men and the obedience of fools...

.. but I'm not sure that makes the picture any clearer.

P.S. I am humble that your command of the english language is better than mine
Mike

User avatar
Ciro Pabón
106
Joined: 11 May 2005, 00:31

Post

Oops. I did not see your post until the very end of editing what I merely transcribed. It puts me at zero: let's say loud and clear we follow the goodness, not the good rules. "Saturday was made for man, not man for Saturday".

Well, thanks for your kind words, but I did not write a letter of what I quoted.

On the other hand, you should see the crappy keyboard I'm fighting with right now... :) Mine expired yesterday... Now that I reread the post, I only made a couple of mistakes: that has some merit.

Thanks again for your nice post. It made me dream for a while. I agree with it and I don't. That's the problem I have (and you too, I imagine).

OK, back to work.

"Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it's home from work we go...
We dig dig dig dig dig dig dig from early morn till night
We dig dig dig dig dig dig dig up everything in sight
We dig up diamonds by the score
A thousand rubies, sometimes more
But we don't know what we dig 'em for" ;)
Ciro

Post Reply