Ok, I'll have a go at your points.
donskar wrote:Same old WB post: wild hysteria and extremist statements speciously "supported" with facile intellectualism. This time the monster in the closet is a grid made up only of Ferraris, and the cause is "unimpeded Darwinism" (as opposed to "impeded Darwinism"?) and of course we find the the old reliable "logically" used to pre-empt any posible criticism.
You could do better than attacking me personally with a claim of wild hysteria and extremism. I will not retaliate in kind but address the point you bring up.
There is no spending cap in American baseball and there has been no cap for several years, so "logically," following "unimpeded Darwinism," there should be just one team, right? Wrong, of course. The Yankees are often -- but not always -- dominant.
We have heard in this thread that there are plenty of salary caps in American professional sports. I'm no expert there. So I leave this point to others to argue with you.
There is no spending cap on oil companies, computer companies, auto makers, etc ,etc. I guess you'd call that "unimpeded Darwinism." Yet there is a lot of competition in every area mentioned. Study the history of the PC. You'll learn something about "Darwinism" in action.
Sport and business are fundamentally different but they share a common interest in not having an oligopoly or a monopoly dominate the market/championship. In business anti trust laws are seeing to it that oligopols are suppressed. In sport it is even more important in my view to maintain a broad range of competitive teams and it is entirely legitimate in my view to force the more successful players to pocket some of their profits in order to keep the playing field half way leveled. It is sufficiently distorted towards the big team anyway as it is, IMO.
A leader is good for any endeavor, because it gives others a goal to shoot at. Certainly, a period of domination (the Schu era at Ferrari, for example) may be temporarily harmful, but look at the result -- did the "unimpeded Darwinism" that allowed Ferrari to dominate lead F1 to "logically end up with Ferraris only on the grid"? Of course not.
You are distorting my comments. I have said that allowing the leading teams to use all their accumulated wealth to compete limitless is Darwinism in my view. Many serious and experienced F1 observers agree with me in that view. I can give you numerous commentaries by Joe Saward for instance who has spoken up over ten years fighting satellite teams or chassis customers. There were plenty of controversies in the McLaren vs Ferrari battle where both sides accused the engine customers to distort the racing result by blocking. It would only become more pronounced if the engine customers were in fact running third and fourth cars. Now if we extrapolate a duopoly - which is entirely plausible with unrestricted use of resources - we would eventually arrive at a situation where one of the last two teams would fight the other one down. It is the logical consequence of unlimited Darwinism. I'm not saying that it would likely happen in F1. I'm saying we should look at the consequences of not limiting resources and that sooner or later one has to do it anyway.
WB, consider carefully your use of "obviously, logically, without question, undoubtedly" etc, etc. Saying something -- no matter how loudly or how often -- does not make it so.
Point taken. I will try to do better there.
I'll leave it to someone else to expose your myth of "satellite teams who are supporting their engine supplier and help them fight their opposition by becoming moving chicanes." Time to return to the real world.
Do a Google search for Joe Saward's essays on the issue would be my advise.
