The stress of losing the World Championship in the final corner of the season has finally started to show on Ferrari's Felipe Massa, as he bleats out his vision for the future for Formula One, and it's not pretty.
One might think that old Felipe might be pushing for points to be awarded for spins or unforced errors, but thats not the case, instead the little Brazilian has his eyes on the entire construction of the F1 season. Firstly he wants to make his job easier by cutting the final 15 laps from each race to make them shorter and thus more interesting. He theorised that "in the last 15 laps nobody cares about the race anymore". Well you would say that if you lost the title in the last lap of the final race, or if you're regularly sitting on the sidelines for the last 15 laps because you've spun off anyways.
Getting in touch with the fans who pay huge prices for trips to the races, Massa also wants to get rid of Friday running completely because "Friday is not so important for the show". So now the tracks who are paying Bernie huge sums can continue to pass these costs on to the average punter, who will now have his viewing of the cars cut down nearly 50%. Tops idea.
But surely he can't just be cutting things all the time right? No, his main idea is to create a testing championship. This would be done by having a "nice" practice in the morning, presumably followed by some tea and crumpets, before a big qualifying style session in the afternoon. For their trouble what would the drivers get? "Maybe the winner has a bonus for the championship, or whatever you want to give." is the well thought out response to that query.
So, to sum up, Felipe wants to make the races shorter, since no one really cares about them anyways, he also wants to take away the Friday practice sessions at the races because how does actually showing the cars to the public improve the show? Then he wants a practice and qualifying session on a weekday at a track in the boonies, where it costs hundreds of thousands of extra dollars to get setup at, then give the fastest on said borefest a bonus or whatever you want to give to the main championship, maybe.
Perhaps next time Felipe, you might think about the fans a little more. Why don't we keep the races as they are, or even extending them especially at events like Monza. Why don't we increase the incentive for running on Fridays, keep the in-season testing ban and make Fridays sessions "free" engine days again. Why don't we look at putting live timing in for pre-season testing, maybe even some cameras setup that stream online and increasing the online coverage of the current race weekends? Novelties like 'testing championships' get older quicker than Davild Coulthard in an RB4. What is needed is additional depth and information for the public, as well as an increase of the on-track time and action at race weekends, not in Jerez on a Tuesday in June.
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