It's really no problem for Race Director to wait a few dozens of seconds between sending SC out. Immidiate sending of SC doesn't improve safety. Marshalls need to wait a few minutes before they can start benefitting from that anyway, so a few additional dozens of seconds doesn't change much.
If there is a need of immediate intervention, Race Director should red flag the race.
If there's a need of immediate intervention the race director must scramble the medical car. He won't do that without either calling the SC or red flagging the race. If the SC is called the reduction in speed of all cars is immediate because the delta times come into effect immediately. Waiting a dozen seconds may be feasible in some cases but definitely not in all, and not only do I regard your suggestion as impractical, I think it's wrong in principle for the race director to even think for a moment about how the timing of his decision to hit the yellow buton will affect the race. It's just not his job, and if the race director were to think along those lines it would call into question the integrity of the sport.
I fail to see how unfairnesses you've described as avoidable are worse or less random than those which I've described. It's just your personal preference.
Well, you see, it's about the intention of the rule. A set of simple SC rules (e.g. those that applied in 1995) can lead to big advantages or disadvantages for certain cars compared to if the SC never came out, but those rules were intended for no other purpose than to avoid the need for red flags, to allow a race to continue when otherwise it would have had to be stopped, and to provide a period of safety for marshalls to work. Any unfair consequence of the application of those rules was unintended and not easily avoidable.
A rule that says lapped cars can overtake does not have as its intention the avoidance of red flags or the provision of a period of safety for marshalls to work. It's not only unnecessary for those purposes, it's not even intended for those purposes. It's consciously intended to improve the show, and my beef with it is if you're going to put show-oriented rules in place, knowing they will create added unfairness, you might as well start giving stop-go penalties to Vettel just to improve the show by making him fight his way back into the lead.
And not giving drivers a chance to unlap themselves may cause that two cars, that were running within 3 seconds of each other before SC and were going to fight for position, now have the whole lap of gap between them, just because it happened for the race leader to be between them when SC was sent out. How is that less unfair than reducing a lap of a gap?
See above (further up the thread). If you keep the lapped cars lapped the amount of time gained or lost by one car to any rival can never exceed one lap. But if you give a free pass a car can be on the brink of going two laps down when the SC comes out, and yet when the SC pulls in that same car could be on the lead lap just a few seconds behind the leader. And there's no reason why a GP couldn't be won from such a position if the car that's three minutes off the lead and about to go two laps down happens to have fresher tyres than the leading cars. That would make F1 a laughing stock. As if the Super Mario overtake buttons aren't bad enough already...
So the unfairness is quantatively greater under the free pass system. It's also wrong in principle that a car should be allowed to unlap itself when the car that would wish to retain the lap's advantage isn't allowed to defend his position, which he would be able to do under green flag conditions, and it is wrong in principle because the origin and intention of the rule under which the free pass is made is unconnected with the original purposes of having a SC.
Edited by redreni, 23 September 2013 - 22:24.