Reduce Costs Not Test Days

I think it was the Monaco Grand Prix in 1999 that saw Michael Schumacher return to Fiorano on the Friday rest day to practice starts. By the time the race rolled around on Sunday, Schumacher, starting second on the grid alongside Mika Hakkinen, got a brilliant start and took the lead and never looked back, going on to score a vital win for his Championship hopes.

This of course was a time when testing was only regulated by the hours of daylight available, and even then Ferrari, it was suggested, wanted to install flood lights around their private test track. It wasn’t uncommon for teams to test throughout the season either, with the two week break between races seen as an ideal opportunity to gain a few valuable tenths over a competitor. Of course, few teams could afford this amount of around the clock testing, and only one had access to a private test track 24/7.

A reduction in testing was always on the cards, if not to even the playing field, at least as a means to curb some of the out of control spending that was going on to achieve ultimate success. Over recent years the rules have reduced the amount of testing Formula One teams can do, and recently these rules were clarified to close a loophole where teams were using film days for advertising as a means to squeeze out a few extra days of testing.

A little closer to home in the V8 Supercars, teams can run their cars outside of allocated test days for shake downs, demonstration days and driver evaluations. In a series where teams are limited to four test days a year, every extra lap you can get out of a car provides valuable data for the team. This then begs the question, is anything gained from a shake down or a driver evaluation? Jason Bright, from Trading Post Racing thinks so. He expressed concerns recently about the current rules, punching out a series of fast tweets that were surprisingly and refreshingly candid.

Bright’s first tweet started off simple enough. ‘Shaking down the new car today at Winton and testing tomorrow! Lots of small improvements in the new car and lots to test.’ My ears pricked up a little when I read his next tweet, ‘I reckon shake down days are a joke and teams are simply a way got richer teams to constantly get more miles as they introduce new cars!’ Not the most eloquent of sentences, it’s hard to type a tweet on an iPhone, least of all when standing in a cold paddock at Winton, but the underlying suggestion is that the better financed teams take advantage of a loophole in the regulations.

I’m not too interested in right or wrong here, it isn’t my place to judge. I can appreciate that testing has significantly reduced costs. I can understand that it was required to increase parity. What I can’t understand is why it has to be so complicated. Testing isn’t testing if a rookie is driving, even if that rookie is, as Garth Tander pointed out in a tweet, ‘a 5x Bathurst & 5x V8SC champ’. Testing isn’t testing if you’re shaking down a new car. Why not keep it simple? If your race car is on a racetrack, and it’s not a race weekend, you’re testing. You have this many days per year to test. If you exceed this you will be fined.

In a perfect world, given the option every team would test as much as possible to increase their chance of winning. The solution shouldn’t be how many days do we need to cut back on to reduce testing costs, but how can we reduce testing costs to limit the number of days we need to cut back. If testing costs so much that it needs to be cut back to four days a year, maybe the sport needs to look at alternatives.

Why not take a page out of MotoGPs book where test days are run at certain tracks on the Monday following a race weekend. Or alternatively, as Bright suggests, ‘Our fans and sponsors want to see us race not test! More friday practice for fans to watch and scrap test days I reckon!’ Either option solves not one, but three problems. First of all, it provides some more opportunities for teams to test. Next it allows the sports governing body to control and limit all testing to a controlled environment, so none of this ambiguity starts to creep in around shake down and demonstration days. But most importantly it allows the fans a chance to see the cars on track a lot more than they currently do.

Sounds good to me.

You can follow Jason Bright and Garth Tander on Twitter.

Posted by Jase in Motorsports, V8 Supercars Tagged , , , , , |

Learnings of Motorsport For Make Benefit of Glorious Traffic Conditions

I was thinking about Sebastian Vettel on my way to work this morning. My initial reaction was to complete my journey as soon as possible and wash myself repeatedly with steel wool and bleach, but my attempts to achieve this were thwarted by a traffic jam. ‘Oh’, I chortled to myself, ‘what irony’. Sure, the drive through penalty that cost Vettel a certain race win seemed a little rough at the time, but when you yourself are stuck in traffic you can’t help but wonder, is Sebastian Vettel at the head of this queue, asleep at the wheel?

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Rest In Peace

For much of the last four months I have operated on autopilot, denying my feelings the opportunity to reach the surface. It’s not as though I haven’t laughed or enjoyed myself in this time, because I have, it’s more that I’ve built a wall around whatever part of the brain it is that gives birth to feelings and done my best to abort anything that even resembled an emotion.

Of course, what I’ve since discovered is that days don’t end when you pretend everything is OK, they blend in to one another and time passes as though a blur. Life is usually rich in detail, but when the detail is false and you’re repeating the same lie each day, I guess you kind of lose track of time.

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10 Things I Hate About Paris

1/ My flight to Paris, which was delayed
2/ The metro ticket machine that only accepted coins.
3/ A one way ticket to Paris costing almost 9 Euros.
4/ No one around to assist tourists.
5/ The train that was so packed I had to sit my luggage on my lap.
6/ The small French child who decided to sit on my knee on the train.
7/ The internet that doesn’t work in my hotel room.
8/ Sharing a bed with my sister, even if it is a super king size.
9/ No roast beef sandwich.
10/ Waking up with a cold.

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Christmas In July

I could never get to sleep on Christmas Eve. And when I finally did doze off, I would always wake moments later, certain I had slept well past the time set by my parents as an appropriate hour to open presents. Last night, my sleep was similarly disrupted. Sure I dozed here and there, but I didn’t really sleep, instead I played a game of hide and seek with the alarm clock. 12:32, 12:51, 2:19, 2:23, 4:03, 4:11. I was unusually relieved when my alarm sounded at 6:30am and I lept out of bed, much like I did back when I was a kid on Christmas morning. The moment had finally arrived and I was going to the British Grand Prix at Silverstone, my Christmas in July.

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Posted by Jase in Motorsports Tagged , , , , , |

It Isn’t Always Black and White

Dear Mum,

When I imagine your childhood the moments are always black and white, mostly because all the photos I have seen have been in monotone, but partly because I know you grew up in England, and the only colours there are shades of grey. Or so I thought.

My time in Salisbury, where you spent your early childhood years, has painted for me a new picture of your world, and also changed the way that I view England. It isn’t just the largest grey palette in the world; there are actually some exceptional colours to be found.

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I Spy With The London Eye

The flight in to London was probably one of my more anxious flying experiences. I haven’t done a great deal of flying before, in fact this was probably my 23rd or 24th flight, but when your plane is circling above London and a bit of turbulence is thrown in to the mix, it’s bound to be a little bit of a nerve wracking experience. Mind the gap.

Nonetheless we landed safely and found ourselves with a bit of time up our sleeves somewhere near our elbows. After I tightened my watch strap we headed out to take in the very best that London had to offer and after a wander through the generic tourist spots in London, finished the night at an Indian restuarant on St Martins Place for a curry. Mind the gap.

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So Long Abu Dhabi

Abu Dhabi is a lot like Melbourne, only not. For starters Abu Dhabi is green. Not green with envy, but green like a rainforest, which is surprising since you’re in the friggen desert. Abu Dhabi is so green that if it weren’t for the incredible heat you’d actually forget that you were in the desert. But turning a desert in to a rainforest is no easy feat, especially when you only record 120mm of rain a year. So its no wonder that around 97% of water in Abu Dhabi comes from desalination, allowing Abu Dhabi residents to each use 550L of water a day, which certainly blows Melbourne’s ‘Target 155′ out of the water, so to speak. In contrast Jordan residents, who live in a similar climate to Abu Dhabi, use 87L of water per day, and that kinda puts Melbourne to shame; for all the complaints about droughts back home, at least we don’t live in the desert.

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Come Fly With Me – Abu Dhabi

Before flying to Abu Dhabi, my longest flight had been between Melbourne and Darwin, which is around a four hour flight. So the idea of sitting in ‘cattle class’ for 14 hours was about as appealing as watching hard core porn on my own with cheese graters taped to my hands. But alas last night I boarded my Etihad Airways flight to Abu Dhabi and tried to stay positive about the journey ahead.

It wasn’t too bad in the end. The flight landed an hour ahead of schedule and getting through customs was painless. Things got interesting once we left the airport; if the humidity in Abu Dhabi doesn’t kill you, one of the countless crazy drivers surely will! Despite the warnings of speed cameras every few kilometers, the attitude here seems to be along the lines of if you can afford a car that’s fast enough to race in a Grand Prix, you may as well drive like you’re Lewis Hamilton.

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Don’t Judge a Facebook By Its Cover

On the 3rd of October 2007 I signed up to Facebook. Some might laugh and think that I was early to the party so I’m a bit of a square, yet others might scoff and think I was late to the party so I was more of a try(angle) hard. When you think about Facebook, it’s quite an amazing not so little piece of social media. When I first signed up I was more amazed than I was with the contents I found the last time I cleaned my belly button. You mean all those people from high school that I haven’t contacted in almost 5 years are all pieces of lint in my belly button? And those people I went to kindergarten with are here too! Holy shit! Maybe I can finally get ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’ back from Scott? About fucking time! It’s only been 24 years since I’ve seen him!

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Posted by Jase in Commentary