FIAlure

Sorry, another post about car racing.

The FIA (Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile) is the governing body for Formula One car racing, plus the World Rally Championship and a number of other race series. It sets the rules of the championships and awards points for performance; it is the sanctioning body which determines what it takes to become a series champion for both drivers and constructors and awards that title to the winners. Over the last few years I think the organization has moved from stewardship and management of the sport to self-important meddling, to the detriment of the sport itself. And lately they've fallen right off the deep end.

In a previous post, I talked a bit about the really stunning amount of money involved in the F1 championship, and it's no surprise that controversies should erupt with so much money on the line. Under pressure from some of the smaller, privateer teams, the FIA began to rework the sport's rules over the past few years in an effort to put a cap on the runaway costs. To this end, they have specified practically every particular about the cars--the exact size and weight of the cars, the configuration, size and layout of the engines.

The FIA's policies for F1 engines are especially nettlesome to me. They mandated a freeze on engine development at the end of 2005; this freeze--called homologation--is slated to last five years. In addition to specifying everything about the engines from the displacement, number and bore spacing of cylinders, and the V-angle, the homologation restricts engine RPMs to a maximum of 19,000 (at least one manufacturer was spinning their engine to over 20,000 rpms before homologation). Further, individual engines are required to last two full race weekends, and any replacement of an engine before its scheduled cycle results in a penalty in starting position for the following race. Next year, all cars will have their engines controlled by a standard Electronic Control Unit (ECU), so that traction control can be effectively banned.

It's quite debatable whether any of these measures are required or appropriate, or even desirable. Engines in particular are the lifeblood of the sport, and they are a fantastic breed of powerplant found nowhere else. I don't believe any of these rules actually serve to save anyone money, either directly or indirectly. Requiring an engine to last two weekends, for example, saves virtually no money. The costs involved center around the design and development of the engine, not in the expense of any single engine--in these budgets, that latter expense is miniscule. Putting in a standard ECU will only force manufacturers to work overtime to get their engines to work as well as possible with that ECU, while depriving the sport's fans of the development that marks the sport. You can be assured that engine development goes on irrespective of homologation, but the moves forward will just occur in bigger steps now. And the dumbing down of the formula by introducing spec parts (like the ECU, or, very nearly, the engines themselves) serves no good purpose that I can see.

But the FIA is set to go one better: next year the FIA will allow "customer cars" in F1, something that has been banned for the sport's 50-plus years. Under these proposed rules, a team will be allowed to purchase cars from someone else, either one of the existing F1 teams or an established race car manufacturer like Dallara or Lola. This flies squarely in the face of a gigantic part of what brings vitality to the sport. There are two championships in F1: the Driver's Championship, and the Constructor's Championship. The more we dictate what the manufacturers must do, the more we emasculate the very essence of the Constructor's Championship. An F1 car made by someone else is not a valid F1 car: the whole idea is that you have to conceive of, design and construct your own car. A race won in this way is a real achievement. It used to be that different car configurations, and many different engine configurations competed head-to-head. We're chipping away at the essence of the sport in big chunks with these recent decisions. Most people follow the Driver's Championship, because the individual driver puts a human face on a huge endeavor, a personality with which we can identify and sympathize. But many, many F1 fans are technology buffs, and this is squarely the domain of the teams. Take away the Constructor's Championship (or invalidate it) and we will lose Formula One itself.

I hate these cost-saving measures: F1 has from its outset been an expensive and elite endeavor, and (snotty though it may be) I just think we must concede that it's a rich sport which requires rich entrants. Certainly, you need a boat-load of money to actually win in the sport. But that's the sport! That's what we tune in for. If we wanted customer car series, we'd watch Nascar or the IRL. But the audiences for these other race series world-wide are small compared to F1's following (though F1 gets limited play in this country).

The FIA have further embroiled themselves in controversy with their recent censure and gargantuan penalty of the McLaren team for their role in an industrial espionage case. The FIA's interest in this event is unsurprising, but their propriety in levying a hundred million dollar fine to a team seems highly tenuous. Not inclined to lay low while the masses are restless, now they've announced that they will assign a steward specifically to the McLaren team for the final race in Brazil to ensure that both team members are treated equally and fairly in their final push for the Driver's World Championship.

The problem is, McLaren are under no obligation whatsoever, from the FIA's perspective, to treat their drivers equally. The FIA are within their rights to ensure that the teams do not take actions which bring the sport into "disrepute" (though the definition of that term is left to their discretion), but the determination that a team will give preferential treatment to one driver over the other is beyond the FIA's scrutiny. Ferrari can tell the FIA all about a driver being made subordinate to the other driver's aspirations.

In my view, McLaren Principal Ron Dennis should tell the FIA to take their pocket Nazi and go pound sand. In fact, I'm kind of thinking the move of the big manufacturers to start their own race series, unbounded by the FIA's silly strictures, seems a better and better idea.