F1 Most liked posts in thread: F1 - 2013

F1 Indian GP unlikely for 2014, says Bernie Ecclestone (autosport.com)

 

Pirelli considers wider rear tires for 2014 (racer.com)

 

When second-guessing the stewards' actions during a race I like to know who the driver steward is so they have at least one face and personality rather than being just "the stewards." This time it was Allan McNish. He's a really smart guy and that makes it hard for me to imagine this being an uninformed or knee-jerk reaction penalty. But I still disagree with what they did based on the things I saw.

I don't believe penalties are given out based on manipulation of results so I figure either they had access to something we didn't get to see or maybe there's some sort of connection to the first incident. For some reason they decided to study that first incident after the race and delay any potential penalty, then he got into another scuffle not much later. Maybe they figured he was reverting to Crashy Grosjean again and they needed to do something to get his attention?

He was handed a 20 second penalty post-race for the incident with Button but it didn't affect his result.

 

This sort of thing makes me curious to know how the new driver penalty points system for next year will work.

But what infringements equate to how many points and do they replace the other penalties we see now like drive-throughs, etc?

 

The driver steward role rotates with a different pro driver at each race. There are drivers who've repeated though and McNish has done it a few times now, not sure how many races. He's also a member of the BBC F1 commentator team this year and, though I haven't seen/heard any of the BBC coverage, in addition to deferring to him as a current driver and relatively modern F1 driver I suspect he's also expected to be a sporting rules expert.

That doesn't make him omniscient though and there are always a couple other stewards who are FIA fixtures. They're expected to be the true experts and provide consistency race to race and the driver is expected to provide a driver's perspective from both/all sides of any incident. In my mind the non-driver stewards are the ones likely to push for slapping the wrist of someone like Grosjean to remind him how they've told him he needs to act. On the other hand, I've heard McNish talking about young and/or amateur sports car drivers needing to be taught a lesson because of what he sees as reckless or overly aggressive driving when they negatively affect the race of a seasoned pro. Based on what I've known of the situations (admittedly very little) I've agreed with each comment like that I've heard him make, just pointing it out for full disclosure.

 

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CYsqHeylME]Pit Stop Feature by Williams F1 Team - Part 5 - Full feature - YouTube[/ame]

 

I definitely didn't see that.

Don't imagine the networks get different feeds. I think they get multiple feeds simultaneously with some on-boards and maybe others in addition to the main feed. With multiple views available at once they have producers monitoring and deciding what might be relevant and worthy of the broadcast. The broadcasters get to decide when to preempt the primary feed with replays, etc. Maybe the folks at NBC didn't notice that on the Grosjean on-board?

 

Ecclestone confirms no Indian GP in 2014 (GPUpdate.net)