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Until yesterday I couldn’t use my washing machine. The taps, it seemed, were leaking because they’d been turned off for so long between tenants. My sense of domestic completeness had been ruined.
Happily it took just 24 hours for my landlord to arrange for a plumber to fix the offending taps, and as he went about his work yesterday afternoon we engaged in the only topic permissible for discussion in my house: Formula One.
How was Daniel going to go this year? It’s very sad about Michael Schumacher, isn’t it? What do you think about the noise? And on it went, until my tradesman friend hit on the week’s hot-button topic – what’s happened to qualifying?
What has happened to qualifying indeed. What has happened that a 60-minute session on a Saturday should necessitate the addition of no fewer than, as of this column, three articles to The Roar’s motorsport annals in the last week alone?
It depends on when you’re asking, because if I’m totally honest, I can’t be confident that the format won’t have changed between when this column was written and the moment you read it.
However, according to the best information at the time, qualifying will run to three lopsided sessions: a Q1 and Q2 of 16 minutes each and a Q3 of 12 minutes. All 22 cars will compete in Q3, but after seven minutes the slowest car will be eliminated from the session, and every 90 seconds thereafter the slowest car at the time will be similarly sent back to its garage until 15 cars remain.
Those 15 cars progress to Q2, where the same format prevails – one car knocked out every 90 seconds after seven minutes – until eight cars remain, all of which proceed to Q3, which is the shoot-out for pole we’ve all come to know and love.
The original plan was to have the Q1 and Q2 system apply to Q3, but Bernie Ecclestone said it wouldn’t be possible to have the necessary timing systems and television graphics ready to go for Round 1 in Melbourne – but apparently two-thirds of the change is possible (somehow).
“Geez,” my plumber said, half at the discovery of a secondary leak, half at my best attempt at a succinct description of the unwieldy format. “That’s bloody complicated. Just let them race!”
So it was summed that these changes very obviously do not pass the plumb test, the most accessible test available to me on the day.
Pub, plumb, or otherwise, the result is the same – Formula One has a habit of creating increasingly complicated ways to invent itself out of problems it has often itself created.
The drag reduction system, fast-degrading tyres, double-points rounds – to name but a few that found their way into regulation – only put further out of reach a sport that is already made distant by its technical sophistication. The one part that the casual viewer should be able to latch onto – qualifying and the race – was made impure when it should be sacrosanct.
All these solutions are merely bandaids over some vaguely related problem. In 2011 the sport introduced the DRS to counteract the tricky aerodynamic regulations that made slipstreaming difficult, then over the following years it tweaked Pirelli’s tyres to create a greater differentiation in grip between the cars that might pull alongside each other in a DRS braking zone. Then it ratified double points because some drivers were still found to be uncatchable over the course of a season anyway.
Now the fixes have extended beyond the race itself – teams, Bernie and the FIA are attempting to fix the racing via qualifying, which would have been as useful as my landlord sending an electrician to fix my leaking taps. Addressing the primary problem inherent in the cars would have been a cleverer place to start.
“And they should just get back to the days of loud engines and 1000 horsepower,” the plumber suggested – until I told him that a turbocharged 1.6-litre hybrid was already generating in excess of 900 horsepower and will likely tip the magic thousand before long.
To think that the sport briefly attempted to bring in a V8 parity engine and endure all the associated pain when a simple explanatory sentence would have done just as well!
So my plumber and I found agreement – which is astounding when you think that the teams, Bernie Ecclestone and the FIA can’t do the same despite Formula One being their listed professions. The duration of his work was spent talking about other things, particularly the Germans, who are efficient at seemingly everything, whether it be the Mercedes W07 or various German-branded toilets, all of which are apparently very good.
So the sport should be asking itself: (a) does a proposed change fix any problem directly, and (b) will my plumber understand it?
If the answer to either question is no, back to the drawing board we must go.
Follow @MichaelLamonato and his various essential services travails on Twitter.