Grid Penalties
Discussion
[quote=VolvoT5]
To be fair most pundits and fans seem to agree re: grid penalties and this discussion usually only comes up when somebody's favourite driver gets shafted.
How would you reverse this rule? How do they penalise a driver for a dangerous error without costing the team points? Do we really want a situation where the championship could potentially be decided after the race because driver A or team B has half a point deducted for a transgression?
The other issue is that deducting a couple of points from Mercedes for a gearbox change would be meaningless given their advantage, but doing the same to a minnow team could absolutely cripple them given that the prize money is distributed partly based on championship position. And surely it is unfair for Redbull, Williams, Manor, etc, to get a constructors points deduction for an engine change when as non-manufacturers they have no control over the engine reliability.....
You can't separate the two in any sensible way. The best drivers usually end up in the best team or building the best team around them; that is a huge advantage but when things go wrong they have to take it on the chin. If you start to penalise the team and driver individually you drive a wedge between them and could create a situation where what is in the best interests of one isn't in the other's.... nightmare IMO.
I would like to see less penalties for technical breaches in general.
On a side note in terms of driving side of things I would also like to see the driver stewards become known names who do the job all year and explain their decisions in public. There is far too much inconsistency in the system - driver A will get away with an incident while driver B will get hammered with drive through + penalty points for an almost identical incident, sometimes even in the same race weekend.
Having read your post I agree with nearly all that you say. One thing though for me is that a minnow team who has drivers that do not suffer grid penalties for mech failures have a better chance of a good finish and surely it is about the drivers? If it isn't then the sport is wrong in some way if the driver is less important than the car?
To be fair most pundits and fans seem to agree re: grid penalties and this discussion usually only comes up when somebody's favourite driver gets shafted.
How would you reverse this rule? How do they penalise a driver for a dangerous error without costing the team points? Do we really want a situation where the championship could potentially be decided after the race because driver A or team B has half a point deducted for a transgression?
The other issue is that deducting a couple of points from Mercedes for a gearbox change would be meaningless given their advantage, but doing the same to a minnow team could absolutely cripple them given that the prize money is distributed partly based on championship position. And surely it is unfair for Redbull, Williams, Manor, etc, to get a constructors points deduction for an engine change when as non-manufacturers they have no control over the engine reliability.....
You can't separate the two in any sensible way. The best drivers usually end up in the best team or building the best team around them; that is a huge advantage but when things go wrong they have to take it on the chin. If you start to penalise the team and driver individually you drive a wedge between them and could create a situation where what is in the best interests of one isn't in the other's.... nightmare IMO.
I would like to see less penalties for technical breaches in general.
On a side note in terms of driving side of things I would also like to see the driver stewards become known names who do the job all year and explain their decisions in public. There is far too much inconsistency in the system - driver A will get away with an incident while driver B will get hammered with drive through + penalty points for an almost identical incident, sometimes even in the same race weekend.
Having read your post I agree with nearly all that you say. One thing though for me is that a minnow team who has drivers that do not suffer grid penalties for mech failures have a better chance of a good finish and surely it is about the drivers? If it isn't then the sport is wrong in some way if the driver is less important than the car?
The Moose said:
I think your mistake is separating the driver from the team. F1 is a team sport and as Lewis said in his interview we win as a team and lose as a team. The driver is just one small cog in the machine that takes that car from the garage at the beginning of the weekend to the garage at the end of the weekend. If the team make a mistake then the team get punished (whether that's Bottas nailing LH on the first lap, the wheel coming off as it's not secured correctly or the wheel coming off due to a failed component).
I don't see Toto Wolf risking his life at 200mph in a car that the brightest people in mechanical and motor engineering develop and design. If I was a driver I'd be hacked off if they got it wrong, which can sometimes be dangerously wrong. They're just one brain, one set of eyes, at crazy speeds with millisecond reactions relying on a collective of hundreds of brains who still manage to get it wrong.I think boxing is analogous to F1. Big team at the back but only one person risking their life. If the team get its wrong......
Is boxing a team sport also?
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