Step up to the challenge

A few years ago, the powers that be decided to increase the toll at the Dartford Crossing. Needless to say this pissed a number of people off. Firstly, there wasn’t much in the way of notification so for the first few weeks millions of drivers were turning up to the toll and wondering why their pound coin didn’t raise the barrier. This resulted in even longer traffic jams than usual. The other reason it pissed people off was because the toll was originally put in to recoup the cost of the construction work and that money was paid off some years ago.

This was just a blatant way of getting more money off Joe Public. An increase of 50 percent is an obscene amount in itself and the powers that be decided to try and soften the blow by not charging a toll between 10pm and 6am. Now, call me cynical here but am I really the only one who sees through this? What they have effectively done here is removed the charge at its quietest period so the loss to them will be more than made up by the 50 percent increase during peak hours. They have also saved themselves a bucket load of money by not having to pay as many people to man the tolls during unsociable hours, which I would imagine would be double pay.

It’s really rather clever isn’t it? Well until you consider the trouble that is caused at 6am when the barriers come down again which results in a logjam of cars that ends up causing a 54 mile tailback which in turn increases the Co2 emissions by a gazillion percent meaning we have to listen to more hippies tell us the world is going to end unless we all start eating lentils and recycle our urine..

The government are always coming up with new and ingenious ways to rape us and steal all our money in the same way that the governing body of Formula 1 is always coming up with new and ingenious ways of ruining the sport.

Ever since the sport’s inception the goal has been to make the cars faster while the governing body tries to slow them down. It’s a silly and futile game that has often led to stupid rules and bizarre looking cars.

After Senna’s death for example, the most logical safety measure would have been to put padded headrests on the cockpit sides to reduce the chance of skull meeting with concrete, tyres and flying suspension. But the FIA decided to wait 2 years before making this mandatory. No, what they insisted on doing was raising the bottom of the cars off the ground and putting a bit of wood underneath. Their next step was to reduce the height of the rear wing and make the tyres thinner. The logic of this was to give the cars less grip and downforce so they wouldn’t be able to corner as fast. So basically they decided to make the sport safer by making the cars more dangerous.

Then it was grooved tyres. Again, the logic behind this was to give the cars less grip to slow them down. Obviously slippery cars with no traction are safer to drive than cars that actually stick to the road.

They banned V6 turbo engine cars at the end of 1988 because they were becoming too powerful, only to replace them with normally aspirated engines with twice as many cylinders. They banned driver aids like active suspension, traction control and anti-lock braking systems because they wanted the drivers to actually drive the cars but then re-introduced traction control (but renamed it launch control to make it sound like a different thing) because they basically weren’t clever enough to police it. They have now decided that the V10 engines are too powerful so have decided to make everyone go back to using a turbo.

They reintroduced refuelling in 1994 which I always thought contradicted the general trend of making changes on the grounds of safety, and then banned it again at the end of 2010 during the midst of their regulation changes designed to aid cost cutting. Because making teams completely redesign their cars around a fuel tank twice as big isn’t going to involve millions of pounds in redesign and manufacturing at all is it?

Their ban on testing was also a master stroke. They decided it would be a good idea to limit how much a team could test their cars at the start of the season because 24 un-tested cars worth millions of pounds each all piling into the first corner isn’t in the least bit dangerous. They also decided it was a good idea to pretty much ban teams from testing and developing their cars during the season. This means that teams can no longer test young drivers, which makes it harder for rookies to find out whether or not they can actually drive a Formula 1 car. Then they came up with the genius idea of allowing teams to do straight line testing so we end up with ridiculous situations like the pre-teen Jaime Alguersuari lining up for his first race having at least driven a Formula 1 car but never been allowed to turn a corner. Again, perfectly safe. An 18 year old novice driving into a corner for the first time at 200mph with dozens of other cars around him isn’t even slightly hazardous.

There have been literally dozens of stupid an illogical regulation changes in the sport. The latest one just makes me sick. Not from anger but the sort of sick feeling you get when you see a middle-aged, chain-smoking mother of 20 walking around in a tight top with her muffin-shaped belly wobbling around like sacks of lard. They actually make me feel sick because they are just so vomitoriously ugly.

I am of course referring to the new stepped nose concept. The FIA in their infinite wisdom have decided that the nose section of all cars should be lowered. This is to stop the nose of the car decapitating another driver when they t-bone them. This is fundamentally a good idea because, let’s face it, seeing people decapitated live on TV before the watershed might result in a few complaints from viewers.

The trouble is the designers have jumped on the loophole that states only the front portion of the car needs to be lowered. The bit directly in front of the driver has remained the same. So what we have now are cars that look like they have been made from Lego. Why not just lower the entire front? Or better still ban raised noses altogether? Next they will be building cockpit sides so high the driver will be invisible and then they'll cocoon them in a transparent bubble cockpit. Then they will be fitting all cars with armoured plating and caterpillar tracks.

I have a better idea. Why stop at V6 turbo engines and stupid looking shapes on the nose? Why not fit them with proper body panels and cover the wheels with arches. Better still, cars could use identical bodywork and maybe even the same engines so everyone is on a level playing field. It will be great, they could then be fitted with a windscreen and roll cage. They could then tour all the circuits of the world. It could be called the Touring Car Championship. That’s got a nice ring to it.