We're not talking about racing or driving, we're talking about swapping wheels. That being done fast is not racing, and it being done slowly does not make the racing any less pure or difficult. Racing/driving a car at the limit will always be inherently dangerous. There's no reason swapping wheels should be dangerous.
I understand what you're saying but I don't agree. A Grand Prix is a competition not just between drivers, but between crews to complete the distance ahead of the others. The crew's role is fundamental to a car's success, not just because of the pitstops, but because of the work of the strategy guys, the role that the race engineer plays in communicating with the driver and managing his race, the work that the mechanics do on the car in preparation for each session, the whole package. If you look at the amount of work that has to be done to get a car to the end of a Grand Prix, the driver does such a small per centage of it that it hardly seems fair that he is the one who gets the pot if they get on the podium.
For me, stopping is not a break in the racing, it's part of the racing. It's done because, in the medium/long run, it is quicker to stop than to keep going. And the quicker the car can be serviced and released, the quicker the car can complete the race distance. The drivers push for every tenth on the in lap, and it's only right that the crews push for every tenth at the stop. The teams and crews are competing against each other in every other area, and for me you need a pretty compelling safety reason before you stop them competing for advantage in pitstops too, since the pitstops form part of the cars' overall race times and help determine their finishing position.
So for me rules designed to slow down the stops are no different than rules designed to slow down the cars generally - you only bring them in when it's necessary because things are getting too dangerous. So on the track, you don't limit the cars' speed except in certain special circumstances where there are people on the track who need to be protected, at which point you bring out the safety car. In the pits, you do limit the cars' speed because, before the speed limit was inroduced in 1994, it was starting to get very hairy indeed. Is it necessary to also have a minumum stationary time for pitstops? For me, it's not only unnecessary but also not guaranteed to be effective. It would take the pressure off routine stops and probably cut down on the number of incidents, but as others have said, problem stops would still occur and so would unsafe releases, unless the stops were made so long that virtually any issue could be fixed before the clock ticked down to zero, in which case it probably wouldn't be worth stopping anyway.
Just cut down on the number of men you can have working on a pitstop, bring in the white line rule they have in GT racing, and investigate the feasibility of a failsafe system where cars cannot be released until the wheel is fitted correctly, These are the avenues that need exploring before we take the competitive edge out of yet another area of F1. We've already got spec tyres, spec ECUs, perfrmance-balanced engines that cannot be developed - the list goes on. Must we really standardise pitstops too?
