FIA The Penalty Points Plan

Mephistopheles

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Okay this subject has risen it's ugly head again, it is a system where drivers will accumulate points on their Super Licence and will be given a race ban, if a set number of points has been reached.

http://www1.skysports.com/formula-1...introduction-of-a-penalty-points-system-in-F1

I believe they are looking at giving out points from anything such as speeding in pit lane (The drivers objected to being fined for this as the licence costs so much in the first place and the FIA agreed they would not be fined, which is why the team is fined now.) to causing an avoidable collision or race ending accident.

I do not know if the points will be permanent and only cleared once a race ban has been given or they have a time limit of a number of races or until the season ends, and everyone gets a clean slate the next year.

I'm not sure how I feel about this proposed system.

What do you think of it?
 
Well they'd have to give drivers a clean slate each season, if you got a ban after years of racing but only a few isolated incidents it would be wholly unfair.

I dislike any penalty system. Never needed it before (I'll ignore the people saying Maldonado's name ;)), don't need it now.
 
It kind of smacks of taking away stewarding during the race (To be honest the number of times I see "The incident will be looked at after the race." is getting bloody ridiculous.) to me and they can sit down after and point at driver and say give him a point on his licence give him two give him three.

Sometimes the punishment needs to dished out then and there not months later, are stop go's and drive through penalties to become a thing of the past?
 
To me, the very idea of penalty points smacks of micro-managing at its worst.Even worse, it can create the impression that the powers that be are trying to manipulate results to benefit their favourites.

Drivers should only be penalized for serious infractions, and the penalty should be either a driver-thru or, for the truly egregious wrongs, a race ban. Race bans should be the penalty of choice for teams caught cheating (and that term implies DELIBERATE wrongdoing).
 
Mephistopheles

Back in the old days (well until about 1993), there were no such things as stop/go penalties and drive throughs... The only real punishment that was dished out was disqualification- and most incidents went unpunished! Penalty points will at least mean that there is a return to less artificial adjustments to races, but at least allows the possibility of punishing misdemeanours! Hopefully we won't have situations where the results are no longer changed ex post, and everyone knows where we start ex ante!
 
Drivers getting points on their license for a period of time for infractions that cumulatively could lead to a ban....

The very idea, it'll never catch on!
 
Well, if the penalty points are only awarded for major incidents, the bigger teams have no way of exerting influence on them and the stewards are consistent with penalties then it should be okay.

But since we all know how consistent the FIA is this is a rubbish idea.
 
Josh

Suppose that there is a controversial incident between driver A and driver B during a race... Which of the following options would you prefer:

1. The stewards make a mistake and give driver B a penalty, even though it was driver A's fault- allowing for no appeal as the penalty has to be served during the race
2. The stewards decide to award a 25 second penalty to driver A after the race, leading to driver A being dropped from 1st to 4th, making a mockery of the podium...
3. Race results are unaffected, but a set of penalty points are applied- since these aren't directly affecting the race results, there's less issue with allowing appeals (certainly it gets away from the farce of race results changing weeks later) - but then when you collect sufficient points, the penalty needs to be serious- like a race ban!
 
One of the problems with any leveling of penalties comes from the old adage that "not only must justice be done, it must APPEAR to be done". With the constant pronouncements from BE and others that Ferrari is the most important team to F1, can anybody truly believe that they would receive penalties that would have been meted out to other teams?
 
The Artist.....

I'd prefer option 4: driver A gets a penalty.
I like the idea of appeals but honestly I can see it becoming a circus with everyone appealing every point and a ton of political shenanigans (even more than now!) to make sure they're getting less penalty points than they should (fixed penalty points for every type of incident could be a solution but then you get the issue of not every incident being equal).

On second thought, after giving this some more thought, it seems like a bad idea
 
Josh

I'd agree with you, but the issue is that so often the incorrect driver gets penalized - it's bad enough in football, where the referee's view means that the wrong team is penalised... By having decisions ex post (Other than for the most egregious offences), then time, and a full set of data, can be used to assess the incident!
 
Does anyone think it may create a system where a driver can go in hot take chances and argue the toss later..?

Mind you that may not be a bad thing...

And what about when we come to the last few races, especially the last race if the points are wiped clean for the next season how would penalties be applied? Because the points become meaningless.....
 
Yes I agree the points system should only be a secondary system only used for minor offenses such as speeding in the pit lane, blocking in qualifying that sort of thing but things like ignoring yellow flags should not carry a points penalty as it puts the marshals lives at risk....
 
Simple solution ... create a list of penalties that can be judged without varying degrees of interpretation (as night and day as possible) ... with the access to telemetry data as well, this will assist with certain infringements that could be grey ... and then hit them where it hurts in 2013 ... take away a set of options or primes... >:(

During a race weekend ... speeding in pitlane on a Saturday ... bye bye set of primes ... argy bargy during practice 2 on Friday ... bye bye set of options ... any infractions assessed during Sunday will carry over the the next race...

I will guarantee you that we will see a reduction in transgressions... :cheers:
 
Nice idea but the difficulty will be proving those transgressions. I'm pretty sure at least one team will find a loophole
 
They should do away with Pit Lane speeding penalties entirely. These are the best drivers in the world and do not need to be scrutinized so heavily during practice. Only Junior Formulae should require such draconian obedience to an arbitrary safety measure.
 
There are a lot of people working in the pit lane and I don't think it would be a good idea for their safety to have a car going though the pits a 180 miles per hour....
 
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