Eric Silbermann: Someone call for a doctor

If you’re looking for Eric Silbermann at a swimming pool, you can usually find him going off at the deep end. He doesn’t seem to happy about new qualifying formats, driver awards, or trucks getting in his way on Spanish motorways.

I backed a horse at 20 to 1…it came in at half past three. Ha ha ha! I went to the doctor the other day. He said, “What’s wrong with you?” I told him I had an ingrown toenail and massive shooting pains in my chest and down my left arm and couldn’t breathe. He said, “Don’t worry, we’ll have that ingrown toenail sorted in no time.” To the best of my knowledge the brilliant comedian, Tommy Cooper didn’t ever tell the second of those jokes, but if he’d been keeping an eye on the politics surrounding Formula 1 this past week, then he might have done.

The F1 Commission meeting was causing quite a buzz as testing got underway in Barcelona (or Buckinghamshire in my case) with everyone keen to know what the great minds of the sport would come up with to sort out what is clearly a difficult era for Formula 1. What we got was a ridiculous new qualifying scenario. Distilled to its essence, they’ve taken the only bit of F1 that is currently really sorted and actually exciting and turned it into something that’s going to be even harder to understand and pretty difficult to police. The current Q3 top ten shoot out is very exciting, but now we are faced with a scenario where after 1 minute 30, the first Manor goes out, 3 minutes the second Manor goes out, 4 minutes 30, the first McLaren goes out and so forth. It will be like playing Bingo except you know exactly what number is coming up next and you have all the numbers on your card. Qualifying wasn’t ingrown toenail-wrong, but the sport itself is going into cardiac arrest.

And the other stroke of genius? A “Driver of the Day” award: a perfectly harmless award that’s been around in football and other sports for years, but it’s hardly a game changer. A load of old men who have been told they have to engage with a younger audience believe this is the way to do it, because maybe, if you’re in your final term on the planet, pressing a button on a phone or a computer is your idea of being down with the kids and cool. It isn’t.

These guys are meant to be Captains of Industry but they’re just Captain Chaos. It’s clear that the people in charge are either businessmen who still don't understand the sport or people who have lived their entire lives in the paddock, but are maybe getting on a bit and losing the plot.

Which brings us neatly to Bernie Ecclestone’s declaration that he wouldn’t pay to take his family to watch a Grand Prix. I know the accepted view is that, as usual Bernie is being “good old Bernie” and contentious on purpose to generate publicity and at just the right time prior to the F1 Commission meeting. But that wasn’t the way the world’s media reported it and it isn’t the way the stern faced bean counters at Volkswagen-Audi see it, or in the finance departments of other motor manufacturers or companies considering an F1 sponsorship programme. Why should they pour millions into a sport run by egomaniacs, which is always making news for the wrong reasons, when they can take part in other less costly forms of motor sport, or simply spend their money on R&D. What did you say? Technology transfer from F1 to road cars? In reality, it’s minimal, not to say infinitesimal.

There are a series of knee jerk reactions and suggestions which are then picked apart and have holes poked in them by various parties, depending on their own vested interests

Some of the more sensible voices in the sport, Williams technical director Pat Symonds and former driver Martin Brundle for example, have expressed their doubts about the effectiveness of planned changes. I say “planned” but that’s the problem, there is no well structured planning for the future. Instead there are a series of knee jerk reactions and suggestions which are then picked apart and have holes poked in them by various parties, depending on their own vested interests. Red Bull’s Christian Horner is quite right when he says teams should not be involved in making the rules, but the governing body doesn’t seem to be exactly pro-active when it comes to delivering a road map for the future of F1.

In the short term, you need to get rid of “lift and coast” by upping the fuel limit, then free drivers from having to think about saving engines for the following race by simply allowing them more power units per season and give them tyres they can race on from lights out to the chequered flag. Those things are easily achievable. Forget the obsession with saving money and being green. The big manufacturers can easily afford the engine costs and there is no reason why F1 should lead the way in saving the planet, not as long as China and India are belching smoke out at the rate they do.

If you wanted to see how environmentally unfriendly motor sport is, you just had to be on the motorway from Barcelona to Monaco the year those two races were back-to-back on the calendar. An endless procession of Formula 1, GP2, GP3, Porsche Supercup, trucks, as well as the supporting cast of catering crews, tyre suppliers and so forth only served to put Formula 1’s pathetic claim to be green into perspective. In the long term? It needs some radical thinking, a proper calmly mapped out plan, with minimal involvement from teams.

Back on track in Barcelona, there were signs that, despite all the above, we could be in for an exciting season’s racing. You’d be a fool to make predictions on the strength of four days of testing, but I will risk surmising that, Mercedes aside, the rest of the field looks to have closed up a bit. Maybe we can expect more battles and occasionally, if the Silver Arrows have a bad day, those battles might even be for the lead, but that will require some exceptional circumstances. Manor is at last going to be racing rather than just tugging around, Red Bull should be in a better place and Toro Rosso are clearly happy to have last year’s Ferrari for motive power. They’ll be joined in the midfield by Force India and Sauber as usual, leaving two of the greatest names in the sport, McLaren and Williams, as the hardest to read.

Maybe what the sport needs to clear its cobwebs is a good corruption scandal similar to the one rocking FIFA. You know the sort of thing, countries paying huge amounts of cash for the right to host a race. Oh hang on…

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