Ciro Pabón wrote:I don't think the idea will fly, but I'm amazed at the opinions stating that winner's penalties are something evil. Touring cars and horse racing use them routinely. If success is not penalized you end with a few big fishes, even in something as simple as a pond. F1 grid and anti-monopoly laws are my witnesses.
Well, this is a tricky subject. At first there's a maxima that fastest driver in a fastest car MUST win. Secondly, every time the rules are somewhat complicated there's some "not so sporting" activity going on. Remeber fuel saving runs in Q3 past years? Also there were complaints that the WRC practice of putting fastest driver of a previous day going first on the next day (that put him in a disadvantage of gathering all debris) made drivers play cat and mouse until the final day. I don't want F1 to become a chess game. We have seen teams using jocker engines for Monza and I belive in F1 where every rule is exploited ad infinitum we may see some ridiculous things with any type of imposed handicam.
E.g. we have weight handicap (like in Touring Cars). Imagine we have three tracks in consequence (say A, B, C), now imagine track A being 0.2s slower per kg of weight (I'm tacking this numbers off my head so don't laugh

), B being 0.3s and C being 0.1. With this in mind we can probably see some teams giving away track A to have lighter car on track B and than fight on track C handicapped but it woun't metter much, as weight is not much a factor.
We can probably imagine handicaps being dependent on the nature of consequent track but why such complication?
And in F1 it is not about
monopoly it is about
domination which is quite differnet in my mind. If leading team could put say 15 car on the grid that would be a monopoly, because monopoly is about erasing your competitors. Budget cap would be much more brilliant "anti-monopoly" measure than imposed handicap. All-in-all, good effort must not be punished!