Formula One suffers from having drivers who are constantly thinking of their sponsors and their image and hence not speaking their minds. They are talking in platitudes and trying to stay out of trouble. Actually, the same thing is starting to happen in the way they drive — or it risks happening, with all the penalties that are given for the least little failed overtaking effort.
Mark Webber may have failed to win a race so far this year for his Red Bull team, but he has done some great racing and just this week wrote a column for the BBC F1 Web site in which he called for a gutsier formula on the track. What was appealing about the column were his reflections about his visit to India, which matched my own. (In fact, we both got lost on arrival, although he was in a cab and I was on foot with my two bags and a guitar.)
But what I liked the most about Webber’s column was the badly needed spotlight it placed on the problem of the race stewards dishing out penalties for almost every minor crash resulting from a driver trying to pass. Webber talks about the one between Felipe Massa and Lewis Hamilton, which was, granted, their fifth or sixth of the year. This time Massa got the penalty. Webber judges it 50-50, with both drivers carrying a measure of the responsibility.
What angers me is that F1 has tried for years to figure out how to encourage overtaking. This year they have found the most successful formula yet — with the moveable rear wings and the power boost button — and yet every time there is a failed attempt to overtake, one driver has to pay for the failure with a debilitating penalty.
This should discourage them from even trying. Is racing not all about trying to pass and gain position? As Webber writes, if there is a really flagrant bit of reckless driving, a penalty might be called for. But a small error of judgment, or rather, an effort that simply failed, should not be penalized.
“F1 is getting into a bit of a road-car culture with penalties. The attitude seems to be that someone must be to blame when there is an incident,” Webber writes. “If someone’s had an absolute howler, then fine, give them a penalty but sometimes it might be better just to say it was one of those things — what we call in F1 ‘a racing incident’ — and let it go.”