68 replies to this topic

[CSquared]

Has any racing series, anywhere, ever had rules like this?

[Dolph]

Yesterday Raikkone trashed his Ferrari, and in the ensuing carnage he damaged the Marussia and Williams.

Should the team of the car driven by the driver who is at fault foot the bill to repair the cars damaged through no fault of the other drivers?

Maldonados big smash at spa for example, he caused thousands of pounds of damage that the teams had to foot the bill for... Should lotus have paid for all that? He trashed their races and left them with damages to pay for.

They could have the stewards decide who is at fault for determining who is to cough up.

F1 is expensive enough without having to pay for your Williams to be rebuilt because Kimi decides to get fruity with the barriers...

 

 

But why stop there. If a teams budget is 200 MUSD then they'd have to pay 200 MUSD / 19 races / 2 cars per team = 5 MUSD just for the development and other finances spent.

 

What if they damage just the front wing of the other car?  How much do you pay then?

 

Btw, Maldonado has not raced for Lotus at Spa... YET. You probably mean Grosjean!?

[Dolph]

Has any racing series, anywhere, ever had rules like this?

 

The unofficial street racing league!?

[CSquared]

Fair enough in a racing situation but what about when your club car is written off for the third time in a year because of drivers who drive flat out under yellow flags or deliberately take another driver out so their mate can win the race? Seen both happen on more than one occasion. Banning the driver doesn't help the guy who has a wrecked car and no money left.

 

Motorsport shouldn't just be for those with deep pockets. I've raced for many years on a tiny budget in series which don't seem to attract the nutters but others aren't so fortunate. When I started racing I assumed that all the other people on the track would obey the rules.

Totally agree, but it goes the opposite way as well. The first unwritten rule of amateur racing is "don't race something you can't afford to throw away," but if the requirement becomes you need to be ready to throw away other people cars, too, how many would be able to afford that? 

 

In club racing I've seen racers sometimes come to agreements among themselves about the at-fault party paying for or helping with repairs, but nothing official. This obviously only happens with a certain degree of good will from the at-fault party. 

[John B]

McLaren may have ceased to exist after 1981 if this were in play between the resources they spent on DeCesaris' cars and others,though I can't remember how many instances that took out others, or after Spa 1998.

[D28]

McLaren may have ceased to exist after 1981 if this were in play between the resources they spent on DeCesaris' cars and others,though I can't remember how many instances that took out others, or after Spa 1998.

Or how about the 1973 British GP where their man Jody Scheckter wiped out the entire Surtees team along with about 5 other cars in a 1st lap crash. Not a workable idea.

[f1RacingForever]

The solution is to have Bernie pay. He's got lots of money. Everyone wins...well except Bernie but who cares.

[Ali_G]

Square jaw could have bankrupted McLaren overnight back in 98 if this was the case.

[windoesnot]

I'd love to see this tried in Rotax kart classes at club and national level, most who drive the class are Maldonado level

[Tsarwash]

No, silly idea.

[PayasYouRace]

Fair enough in a racing situation but what about when your club car is written off for the third time in a year because of drivers who drive flat out under yellow flags or deliberately take another driver out so their mate can win the race? Seen both happen on more than one occasion. Banning the driver doesn't help the guy who has a wrecked car and no money left.

 

Motorsport shouldn't just be for those with deep pockets. I've raced for many years on a tiny budget in series which don't seem to attract the nutters but others aren't so fortunate. When I started racing I assumed that all the other people on the track would obey the rules.

 

It would just result in motorsport being for those with even deeper pockets, because it wouldn't just be your own equipment that you'd have to pay for, but potentially many others if you cause an accident.

[John B]

There is one instance I would fully support this - NASCAR's dubious (an all too familiar phrase of recent) 'have at it' for on track retaliation when other drivers are caught up in an obviously deliberate crash, as happened during the Gordon-Bowyer incident at Phoenix and a Nationwide race at St Louis when Edwards intentionally caused a wreck that wound up totalling several cars, including small teams. Actually have wondered if this has ever happened behind the scenes with an owner trying to make right with innocent parties.

[redreni]

No. It's in the sporting regulations that teams must have insurance, and policies must stipulate that drivers are not third parties in respect of each other. And there's a very good reason for that. Teams paying repair bills of a few tens of thousands of Euros would be an unnecessary administrative hassle for everybody and could lead to disputes over the cost of repairs, but the reason the idea dies on it's arse is because if you make teams responsible for damage done by drivers, where would that have left Mclaren when Martin Brundle broke a marshall's leg by crashing under yellow flags at Suzuka in 1994, or whichever of Williams or BAR would have been deemed responsible for the coming together between Ralf Schumacher and Jaques Villeneuve in Melbourne 2001, had these things been routinely investigated at that time (a marshall died as a result of that crash)? Where would it have left Ferrari if Kimi's tyre had struck Max Chilton's head and injured or killed him? I don't see how you could work it that teams are responsible for damaging other teams' cars but not for damaging the tracks, or other drivers or marshalls or members of the public.

[HP]

No

 

The carbon fibre on leading cars costs much the same as on everyone else's car. Radiators, wheels and suspension arms contain roughly the same materials, whether leading or trailing. The gross difference in team budgets is not raw material, it is how many people you employ to conceive, test and design the component and then how many employed to more rapidly build it.

 

 

Well when the blame is unclear, everyone pays their own repairs. When the blame is clear, as reported by race stewards, then the guilty party pays. It wouldn't be the most complex system that F1 has conceived.

Labor force and quality of worksmanship also determines price.

 

Imagine you break someones Rolex and then you go and offer him a cheap copy watch as replacement. Doesn't matter same materials used you were saying..

 

It aint that easy because the team already loosing out because someone else destroyed their machinery, would have to be prepared to outline to a court why their piece is worth as much as they claim and might have to divulge their manufacturing secrets to justify it. This can be abused like if team X has a rocket of a machine, and I want to know why, I have my driver crash into them, to learn a bit of their secrets. Cost me a bit of money, but it paves the way to catch up otherwise.Or even better, if a rich team has a satellite team, use the satellite team to do the damage, and later send a check to them for their efforts.

 

So all in all I can't see that ever working.

 

Teams enter racing at their own risk. Lets keep it that way.

Edited by HP, 10 July 2014 - 22:53.

[jonpollak]

Is this some surreptitious type thread to get us thinking about Car Insurance?..

You guys are real sneaky.

 

 

Jp

Edited by jonpollak, 10 July 2014 - 23:06.

[HaydenFan]

This also brings up questions about results. Say a car is taken out while leading a race. That said car then fails to win. How much money is potentially lost by not only the damaged parts, but the victory? Teams could then argue that a car had the potential to score a podium, or smaller teams a points finish. 

 

Look at this year. Sauber and Caterham have yet to score. Say Sutil is in position to score a 10th and gets taken out in the finals laps. If the teams fails to score a single point all season, that crashed 10th place running car costs potentially tens of millions of dollars for Sauber. Now not only is the car damaged, but in business terms, potential income is lost. Could you attribute that loss for the other team as well? 

[rooksby]

No

 

The carbon fibre on leading cars costs much the same as on everyone else's car. Radiators, wheels and suspension arms contain roughly the same materials, whether leading or trailing. The gross difference in team budgets is not raw material, it is how many people you employ to conceive, test and design the component and then how many employed to more rapidly build it.

 

Labor force and quality of worksmanship also determines price.

 

Imagine you break someones Rolex and then you go and offer him a cheap copy watch as replacement....

 

 

No, not no .... yes.

 

That reply was in response to someone suggesting that "What happens when a Caterham wipes out a leading car - and all of a sudden has to pay the bill for repairs that cost more than the annual running costs of their own team"

 

The notional replacement cost of a Mercedes rear wing is not grossly dissimilar to the replacement cost for a Caterham rear wing. The fact Mercedes may have five autoclaves and four shifts of technicians while Caterham only two autoclaves and two smaller shifts does not make fashioning an additional replacement wing more expensive. I'll go further, assuming the greater fixed costs of a big team's extravagant manufacturing infrastructure as having already been spent, in isolation, it simply means one replacement item will be faster to produce, which means cheaper to produce in terms of human hourly rate.

 

Watches and fake watches is nothing to do with this. The fat-end of any team budget is spent long before the drawings reach the factory floor. Engineers and aerodynamicists burning boxes of money. The carbon fibre in a Mercedes wishbone is sourced from the same supplier as Caterham. The cutting, machining and forming equipment is identically sourced in both factories, Mercedes just choose to have more of it. They could build a wing as frugally as Caterham if they desired, they just typically don't have to. So here we just need to find that baseline price and use that.

 

A couple of FIA factory visits to a few teams from a couple of guys with clipboards will readily determine typical mean replacement pricing for F1 car components, nosecones to rear crash structures. With price list in hand, Jo Bauer's team, instructed by the race stewards and their verdict, will easily and without controversy assess the cost of what a victim team had to throw in the trash. Even if instructed to be conservative in their assessment, I am sure any team assaulted by a maniac on-track would rather receive 80% of something rather than 100% of nothing as they currently do.

[BRG]

If this were to become the norm, the next step logically would be for drivers to reimburse their teams when they are responsible for damage. So Kimi gets a bill from Ferrari for pointlessly binning a car, plus extra bills from Williams and Caterham for third party damages.  

[Kraken]

If this were to become the norm, the next step logically would be for drivers to reimburse their teams when they are responsible for damage. So Kimi gets a bill from Ferrari for pointlessly binning a car, plus extra bills from Williams and Caterham for third party damages.  

Reimbursing the team is how it works in a lot of motorsport. There are have been drivers in quite high profile series who have lost their drives because they couldn't afford the upgraded insurance premiums/excess after a couple of accidents.