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It’s that time of year again. The annual six-nations rugby championship is well underway, but almost as soon as it begins, it’s over. With just five weekends of rugby, something else has to fill the year’s weekends with a reason to cling precariously to the sofa’s edge. One of those somethings is, or used to be, Formula 1. What hope is there for the 2006 season?

March marks the commencement of the spectacle. This year twenty two overpowered and over-engineered cars will be driven by the now typical gaggle of cocksure youths, high on velocity induced adrenaline and believing their own marketing hype. Throw in a few irrelevant famous people on the start line, and ensure that any actual, real, action gets interrupted by commercial necessity and you’ve pretty much got the year sewn up.

There, that’s my pessimism out of the way. I’ve not peeked at the rules for this season yet, but I’m hoping for a good year. A year in which overtaking is at least possible, where cornering speeds are increased through greater aerodynamic downforce and larger tyers. A year devoid of processional qualifying with a return perhaps to the strategies and tactics of the hour long 12 lap qualifying session. I’m hoping tyre changes are back, and if I’m really honest, I’m hoping re-fuelling is outlawed.

Above all else, I’m hoping ITV puts it’s ad breaks at more appropriate times this year.

2006 Regulation Changes

OK, time for some reading, and looking around… and “by crikey”, the new McLaren MP4-21 looks like an absolute beauty.

2006 Qualifying

Ok, now I’ve checked the regulations, and read a few others thoughts on it too. I’m reminded of it’s a knockout - this new qualifying system could work. The single lap system that’s been used of late was “required” because advertisers were worried people would switch off if all the cars only came out onto the track for the last 20 minutes of a 1 hour session.

The new qualifying format will feature three sessions, with the slowest six cars in the first and second session having to drop out.

The faster you are, the more qualifying you do. This is interesting because historically, some of the slower cars have gone out on track early purely because they know they’ll get uninterrupted coverage of their car, which pleases the sponsors - thus the slower teams have more money to invest in developing their cars. This system will make it harder for the slower teams to get a fair crack at advertisers because they’ll only be on TV for one lap on a Saturday, intermingled with all the other cars, which will no doubt be the focus of all the attention.

This also means that the cars at the front of the grid must all perform well on every one of their qualifying laps. Have a bad first lap and they’ll end up in Minardi soup.

Perhaps the last session will be interesting, perhaps it’ll be lacklustre. If you’re in a faster car in the last session then you’ve made it into the top 10, you can perhaps afford to fall a little bit off the track on the last lap, because providing you make it back round to Parc Fermé, you’ll only drop down to the fifth row at worst, and if others fall off too you could still move forward. Conversely, that last lap is done on racing fuel, so although there are fewer cars on track, the extra fuel load may result in a processional last 20 minutes.

It seems like it could be a good in-between that will keep the qualifying interesting and ensure that advertisers (on the faster cars, and on the TV) are happy. Finger crossed.

Tyres

Hurrah! Tyre changes are back! But also hurroo: it seems the tyers are no bigger than before, so cornering speeds and aerodynamic holes will not increase. Tyre assisted cornering capability is important because the pursuing car can stay closer to it’s quarry through the bends and thus be closer at the start of a straight section - resulting in more overtaking (i.e. racing). This is distincly different to downforce-assisted cornering, which decreses significanlty for the second car through a bend, and thus makes overtaking less likely because the chasing vehicle is further away at the start of the straight.

Hope for Formula 1

Well, it seems like there’s been a move towards a less prescriptive formula, which is a good thing: only time will tell, but I’m hopeful.

There’s one other thing I’m hoping for. The official website of Formula 1 needs a to be vigorously beaten with the cluestick.

Many people now have a computer in their television room and want to watch the (often mis-directed) television coverage whilst keeping track of the real action using the innovative live-timing system. It has great potential - but - in it’s current minuscule and proprietary format it’s almost worthless. There’s very little that even the most technically capable person can do to improve matters because the data is accessed though a Java applet, so it can’t be scaled up to a sensible (readable) size.

Sadly, accessibility is not something that formula1.com seems to give a stuff about. If you scale this page up or down, you’ll notice that the text re-flows as necessary, and everything remains readable. If you try doing similar with formula1.com you end up with a squashed and confused mess.

There are so many problems with the formula1.com that a usability expert would be in danger of threatening a small forest if they delivered their review on paper.

Come on F1, stop trying to look like a glossy magazine and just concentrate on providing information. Give the public accessible content that can be read without squinting and there there’s tens of thousands, perhaps millions visitors who’d stay and read the articles, and maybe even click on the adverts.