PRETTY BIG RANT COMING UP. PREPARE YOURSELVES.
What a horrible US GP race this past weekend. Everyone seems to blame Ferrari for not allowing the chicane to be added but it's not their fault Michelin fucked up. [/b] They had the better tire throughout most of the season, but lately they seem to be having reliability problems. The whole race was a disgrace. Also the fans who threw things onto the track are idiots. Ferrari, Jordan, and Minardi are just doing their job. At least the 2 Ferraris didn't just cruise around the track but instead fought each other to the point of almost taking each other out.[/b]
I wonder how many Michelin engineers are fired now
Of course everyone's going to blame Ferrari. Considering how dominant they've been over the past few years (not including this year), a lot of fans see the FIA as favouring Ferrai and doing Ferrari's bidding. The real fans, however, those of us who actually follow the sport know that, as you so eloquently put it, it was Michelin who fucked up. Michelin, unlike Bridgestone (who were the tire suppliers for the Ferrari, Jordan, and Minardi cars, in case anyone didn't know) did not do any serious testing of their tires on the Indy course. The section of the track at the heart of this is a right hand turn on the oval part of the track. It is, many would say, the longest section of track where you go absolutely FULL OUT on acceleration in any of the entire F1 tracks. The fact that this particular turn is banked (i.e. at an angle of, I think 45-60 degrees) puts a LOT of extra stress on the tires. Simply put, Michelin were overconfident in their tires, and it bit them in the ass when they fucked up. You'd think that they'd have done some extra testing/strengthening of their tires after last year's USGP when Ralf Schumacher lost control of his Williams car (ON THAT EXACT CORNER, MIND YOU) and suffered one of the scariest and most dangerous crashes of the season. But NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. Rather than ENSURE that it wasn't the fault of thier tires, Michelin just automatically assumed it was some other problem and that they were in the clear.
The fans who threw the shit onto the track were unaware of the situation with the tires, and were extremely pissed off and frustrated because they'd been severly screwed out of a good race. Many of them had travelled from S. America, Canada, and other parts of the country. They had shelled out $100+ for their tickets/hotels/etc. And they got fucking gypped. Does that make what they did right? Of course not. But, IMHO, it makes it understandable.
The Ferrari boys almost DID take each other out. If they had, imagine the podium...Jordan 1st and 2nd, and MINARDI!!! THEY'RE FIRST PODUIM FINISH IN WHO KNOWS HOW LONG!!! IF EVER!!!
FIA should have a way to solve these kind of situations. This Indy GP was the worst possible outcome.
Why couldn't they let Michelin teams have new sets of tyres and offer Bridgestone teams the same chance to get new tyres. Or just get that chicane there... [/b]Yea, it may have been not 100% fair to Ferrari, but it would have been a smaller loss.
I never thought they would let the race end up being this kind of joke
You know what, they SHOULD have a procedure for solving a problem like this. Unfortunately, they don't. Why? Because it's only been in the last few years that F1 has had more than one company supplying tires to the teams. For the longest time, Bridgestone was the sole tire supplier for F1. Everyone got the same tires, everyone (in that sense) was on equal footing. However, a few years ago (maybe 5 or 6?), a few teams fought to allow Michelin enter as a "competitor" to Bridgestone. At first it was only a couple of teams that took Michelin over Bridgestone. However, because of their superior performance in the EARLY STAGES of the race, more and more teams switched from Bridgestone to Michelin. Think of it this way:
Michelin tires are like a gas stove. They perform REALLY well right out of the gate. However, they also have a tendency to "blow up" if pushed too hard (like this year at Indy and when Raikkonen's tire blowing out on the final lap of the European GP 3 weeks ago).
Bridgestone tires are like electric stoves. They take a lot longer to reach peak performance (usually about 20 laps or so into the race), but they're a lot more realiable/sturdy in the long run. Bridgestones also have out-performed their Michelin counterparts with their "intermediate" tires and their "rain" weather tires.
Giving the Michelin teams a new set of tires would have done nothing to help, because they would STILL have been made by Michelin. The problem wasn't a defect in this particular set of tires. The problem was that Michelin built an INFERIOR tire compared to the Bridgestones. It's not that the tires Michelin weren't good. They just weren't GOOD ENOUGH to endure this course.
As far as building the chicane goes, there likely wasn't enough time to build one, considering that the tire problem was announced by Michelin ONLY on Friday afternoon/evening (at the earliest). They would have had to have designed the chicane, build it, and then allow all the drivers from all the teams to have a few laps driving around the new course (not just the chicane, but the entire course) in order to get a feel for it. And they would have had to have done this within 36 hours (between Friday afternoon/evening to Sunday at around noon, when the race was scheduled to start). Logistically, this would have been next to impossible to do.
Another, more simple reason why it wasn't built was that it was basically against the FIA rules to do it. Basically the rules said that it's unfair to change the course just because a team/teams did not come with the proper equipment and therefore cannot compete safely. It's not fair to the teams who DID come properly prepared, so the change to the course was not permitted. As an example, would it be fair, say, for MLB to mandate that ALL baseball stadiums MUST be build with a dome (non-retractable), or that all ballgames MUST be played at night because a few players have trouble seeing flyballs outdoors on a sunny day? Or how about making the hockey puck glow a bright, neon colour just because American audiences can't see a black puck on a white ice surface?
Funny, they don't seem to have trouble distinguishing black and white most of the time. But I digress.Bottom line, according to the FIA, if you don't come with the PROPER equipment, that's YOUR problem, not ours. Obviously, the teams and drivers who withdrew are not to blame here. Many of them said they'd take the chance and wanted to race. But Michelin wouldn't allow it because they knew that they brought an INFERIOR product to the race, and they didn't want to risk all those lives (not to mention the lawsuits and bad press for them), should their tires fail.
All of this shit could have been avoided if there was only a SINGLE tire supplier for all the teams, like it was with Bridgestone before Michelin came onto the scene. Bridgestone has been involved in competitive racing WAY longer than Michelin. They've got tons more experience with Champ Car, the IRL and NASCAR (dunno if they're in rally racing or GP racing). Apparent rumors have actually had the FIA considering going back to only one tire provider within the next few years. Let's hope it's Bridgestone.