F1 shake-up revealed

"The effect will make it more difficult for a championship winner to emerge quickly,'' said Max Mosley, president of the sport's governing body the FIA.

With television audiences going through the floor and sponsorship revenue following suit, drastic changes were required. But the difficulty was devising dynamic new measures which could be implemented at the start of next season. That difficulty was compounded by the fact that new rules are decided by the teams, who naturally vote to protect their own interests.

Hence the much-vaunted proposal of driver swapping, under which each driver would pilot every car in turn, was jettisoned, along with the idea of success ballast - adding weight to slow down cars for every point won by a driver.

The only changes which could be imposed at once were to qualifying and the scoring system. So the current one-hour qualifying session on Saturday only - which frequently saw 30 minutes of empty track as the best teams waited for the optimum moment to go out - will be scrapped.

From the first race of 2003, qualifying will be divided over two days.

On Friday each driver will be allotted a s p e c i f i c time when he must go out and make his bid for pole, alone on
the track. These slots will be decided by the current championship standings or, at the first race of the season, the standings at the end of the previous championship.

Until now, weather has played a key role in when drivers choose to go out for their qualifying dash - rain slows the cars down, as does extreme heat.

Next season drivers will have no choice but to deal with whatever weather happens to be around during their allotted time slot. Saturday will see a second qualifying session, over one lap only, with the running order decided by Friday's times.

The ultimate places on the grid will be decided solely by Saturday's running times - Friday's will not count - but the weather lottery could relegate anyone, including Schumacher, to the back of the grid.

Some observers will see the new measures as purely tinkering round the margins.

No matter where Schumacher's Ferrari starts on the grid, if the team are as dominant as they were this season, then well before halfway he will have worked his way through to the head of the field. But at least he will be required to race to get there, rather than forming the instant procession seen so often until now.

Moreover, the German will now have to work harder for the one record which eludes him. The late Ayrton Senna was on pole 65 times in his career, with Schumacher 15 short of that figure.

Whether the new measures are sufficient to reverse the crisis remains to be seen. ITV are said to have lost an aggregate five million viewers after Schumacher had the world title wrapped up with three months of the season to go.

Ferrari scored as many points as all the other teams put together, finishing one-two in nine out of 17 grands prix. The lack of any initiative on reducing computerised driver aids will certainly be unpopular. Many observers believe these aids are killing Formula One.

But the teams have spent millions of pounds developing them and are reluctant to cast them aside.

"Racing should mean exactly that but it's a rare sight in Formula One,'' said former driver Mark Blundell, now an ITV pundit.

His ITV colleague Martin Brundle, also an ex-driver, agreed. "The great element of unpredictability has been engineered out of F1,'' he said. "I want to see an end to traction control."

None of those issues has been addressed by the new measures.

When it was first known that the Formula One Commission would be meeting today, it was thought the meeting would last for hours while the parties argued fruitlessly.

But with so much public debate preceding the summit, Mosley and Formula One boss Bernie Ecclestone believed it essential that something concrete should be announced today.

So at the end of last week a series of smaller, private meetings was called, in order to thrash out much of the horse-trading ahead of time. Today's meeting was further s i m p l i f i e d when it was agreed to defer debating new t e chnical measures.