The FIA has announced engine limits and penalties will be stricter than originally intended for 2018, this is despite the recent outcry against enforcing tighter rules after the grid farce at Monza.
At the Italian Grand Prix, nine drivers were impacted by penalties for new engine components or gearbox changes. That led to a situation where some who had penalised actually started ahead of where they originally finished in qualifying.
With all teams struggling to make the current limit of four full power units last until Abu Dhabi, there were calls to freeze if not add an additional engine to each driver’s allocation for a full season, especially with 2018 set to feature 21 races.
However, at a meeting of the World Motor Sport Council on Thursday, the governing body went the other way on some components actually reducing the number allowed for next year.
It was intended the limit would drop from four to three engines for 2018 and in the case of the MGU-H, turbocharger and Internal Combustion Engine that will be the case, however, for the battery, control electronics and MGU-K, that number is now reduced to just two.
Furthermore, a slight modification has been made to the grid penalty system. The underlying system remains of a 10-place drop for the first infraction over the limit of each component and five for any subsequent but, should a team need to change a component more than once over a weekend resulting in penalties, only the last component used and raced with is added to their pool for the season.
The FIA insists these ludicrous limits and subsequent penalties are all a matter of reducing costs, but what they fail to realise is many of the components simply aren’t capable of doing the mileage demanded to stay within the rules.
Teams won’t save money because if they need to buy a fourth, fifth or sixth component to complete a season they aren’t exactly going to consider the financial impact if faced with a situation where they wouldn’t be able to go racing.
Instead, all this does is harm the show for the spectator as now there will be much less Friday Practice running with teams trying to save mileage and quite possibly a situation like Monza where only four drivers started where they qualified and two of them were the men who started 1st and 20th.
Efforts are underway to find alternatives to the grid penalty system, however, perhaps it should be remembered by the governing body that F1 has been or should always be about the fastest cars going as fast as possible. If President Jean Todt wants to have a sustainability championship where parts last forever, there’s just a place for that too, it’s called the WEC.
