First of all, my apologies to Anthony, I tend to do this often, to assume that I understand what other people mean. In this situation I obviously misunderstood your suggestion
I think what we should do is what the majority of our racers think is a good idea (although it helps that I too think it is a good idea). Some might find it sacrilegious to suddenly start the championship all over, but I actually found Reik's proposal very refreshing. Any other thoughts around this?
Frans mentions that this would not have been a problem if those who sign up actually show for the race. I can tell you that after 5 seasons this has always been a problem, but it is a problem we can tend to. This is exactly why this season several things are mandatory, such as:
Reading all info from Race Director
Reading and understanding the Race Document
Handing in a well done incident review after each race
Read the drivers meetings thread and try to participate in the forum.
Putting in a competitive online time well before race day
It is a great correlation between these factors and attendance. I usually know roughly who will show and who will not show just from observing these parameters. For each round we are getting closer to where we should be, where
100% of the members do their part of the job (all of it).
Now it is 13 hours past the deadline and I have received race reports from all but
David Turnbull, Janek Grabowski and
Nicolas Rouge. In addition it is obvious that all racers do not read the information they should before the race, or what do you think Frans?
My point is that it has taken us 5 seasons, learning as we are going, how to host such a league (no past experience) but now we are very close to have fully adapted a system (based around "The Document") which should give us much more stability.
So the rules are simple and fair I think. Doing your part contributes to making the league move forward (safer, better and more consistant), not doing so is creating obstacles for reaching our goals and is not fair to the rest.
I will spend some time with the Monaco replay and try to point out where drivers have room for improvements. As I have said before, it is important that we all are "syncronised" so that our actions will become predictable for all. This has nothing to do with raising the finger at somebody; it is just the most effective way to improve the quality of racing. I feel we can quickly get much better league racing, there are just a few "elements" that needs to be removed or improved to put it nicely
Bottom line, we have a lot of patients with drivers that are interested in improving and learning, while the opposite is the case for those drivers who seems uninterested in e.g. submitting an insightful incident review or reading the incident report from the Race Director.
On a different note, I think the best medicine our league can get now that all are driving in the same division is to try to minimize that gap between the fastest and slowest. At Monaco this was 4,5 seconds while currently it is 3,3 seconds at Interlagos.
Sharing setups is one way to improve this gap, being helpful in general another.
The sharing of setups have unfortunatly had a declining development. Almost halfway to the next race only I and Anthony have posted anything, I must say I am disappointed. The idea was that we all can be open about what we think, wing settings etc, so that we know we are roughly on the right page when it comes to race setups and can rather focus on our driving (which we all can agree is important for the race quality). Posting a setup shortly before a race is for me personally of no value. I need to get used to a setup from the start, and I only do minor adjustments the last week before race. If I am to do 1 hour of stable racing without mistakes I cannot be unexperiensed with the setup I use.
Remember, at the end of the day it is the 20-25 drivers racing the race that are responsible for making it into a good experience!