I'd blogged in June last year, about how Pirelli was killing Formula One. It's been ten months since, and things are just as bad, if not worse.  In the Malaysian gp last month,  Sebastian Vettel overtook his teammate Mark Webber who had all but switched off his engine and was coasting along to the finish, upon orders from his team to conserve fuel and reduce engine wear.  More than ten laps remained at that stage.  Vettel went on to give a public apology to Webber, saying that he'd put himself above the team.   Just about everybody called Vettel's move a cheap tactic, and I don't disagree.  However, the issue brought something more important than Vettel's lack of sportsmanship to the fore, and that something has been largely ignored by everybody: why was Webber coasting along with a tuned down engine, with more than ten laps to go in the race?  Oh, that's standard practice.  Nobody races in the last ten laps anymore, unless they really have to.  Hmmm.  See where I'm going with this?  Thanks to some ridiculous restrictions such as an increased number of races each engine will have to last for, and Pirelli's notoriously poor quality tyres,  it's becoming increasingly common for teams to instruct their drivers to turn down their engines and just coast the last few laps.   For some teams, the last few laps begin as early as fifteen laps from the end of the race!!

I was reading an article about NASCAR which pointed out that several teams were exploiting a loophole in the NASCAR rule-book which made it possible for teams to enroll their cars,  race for a couple of laps and retire, pocketing a nice sum of money, without having to run the whole race!  This is very lucrative to the teams as they greatly reduce chances of incurring costly damage to their cars while keeping wear to a minimum! They just show up at a race,  take the start flag, go around the circuit for a few laps and bring their cars home and laugh all the way to the bank! The only losers are the audience who paid good money to view a keen contest with a full field of cars.  In a way, what's happening in F1 is not very different.  Audiences come to the race hoping to view 50-70 laps of entertaining racing.  Instead, all they get is action for the first twenty or so laps and then everybody goes all conservative.  Some teams deliberately hold back so that they can pounce like hyenas on weakened opponents towards the end of the race.  Either way,  it's cheating the public, the fans worldwide.  Turn on the television during a race these days and chances are, the word you'll hear the most is 'tyre'.  Tyre this and tyre that.. how this driver is better at  nursing his tyres and how that driver is going to get an edge for himself by making one less tyre change.  F1 has deteriorated into being a tyre management sport rather than a sport about speed.  This, for an F1 fanatic like me, is very disheartening.