Friend Allan brings us good news with the open radio channels and some twisted thoughts as we are used by him.James Allan wrote: Some good news for F1 TV viewers
January 29, 2009 by speedmerchants
Yesterday I wrote about some things we will not be seeing on TV, today I’m posting on a couple of things which will be in the show, although I’m not sure about one of them.
Radio conversations between team and driver have been available for a few years, but the team had a button it needed to press to make the channel open to the TV director. Renault were always very good and open about this, even though it used to irritate them that the director kept playing clips of them telling Fisi to push harder. Ferrari and McLaren were useless at opening the line, and would simply open it at the end, after a victory for some stage managed gushing. This season the radios will be open all the time from every team, so you should hear some much more insightful stuff and get a feel for how the big names come across on radio in the heat of battle.
The other thing I’m not so keen on. I’m told that the teams and the FIA are seriously planning to publish the weights of the cars after qualifying. If this is true I think it is mad as it takes away from the suspense of the opening part of the race and might make teams inclined to do more or less the same thing on fuel strategy as each other, which will create more of a procession.
One of the reasons qualifying with fuel has worked was because there was the chance to go short or long and we couldn’t be absolutely sure, because there was always that margin for driver error.
Also it will devalue the pole before the race has even started if say, Kubica has achieved it by running six laps less fuel than Hamilton and Massa. We’ll all stand on the grid saying, “So what?”
I hope that this change does not come about. The new mood of openess in F1 is good, but this is one step too many for me.
What the heck is good about race fuel qualifying anyway? It is a farcial, useless show compared to the real thing they used to do in the past. What people want to see is the fastest man in the fastest machine, pedal to the metal, full stop. Anything else is showboating IMHO.
