The immediate cause of the problem was Michelin’s failure to produce safe tires. But the FIA had 48 hours to find a solution. Of the three possibilities they offered, one was stupid (driving slowly), one reckless (keep changing your tires, and hope they don’t explode in the meantime) and one I admit to not fully understanding (use other tires but take a points penalty.) But, happy that they had offered choices, the FIA sat back and rejected all other alternatives, and we can only assume that the reason for this was that the famous chicane would have hindered Ferrari.

The Indy circuit, with its high speeds and close concrete walls, is one of the more dangerous F1 circuits, with very little room for error or accident (if Ralph had suffered the same blowout on most other circuits, after all, he would have spun off onto gravel.) There, of all places, you can’t have some drivers either going 20mph slower or risking a blowout. Although the cars are so much safer these days, flying debris is still a risk to spectators and stewards, and you can’t ask drivers to go out on tires that they know will fail at speed before the race is half over. Michelin goofed, but FIA turned that mistake into a farce.

The blame should land squarely on Mr. Mosely and whoever else was responsible for this stupid “one set of tires for the weekend” bullshit foisted upon us this year in the name of safety.

That rule has made the practice on Friday pointless… no one wants to wear out their tires. It’s made qualifing lamer too… some tires are good in the race some are good at qualifying. This has lead to lamer races too, since the good qualifiers get out fast then desperately try to hang on to their lead, and pit stops are especially boring now.

If that wasn’t bad enough, the one set of tires rule is very, very unsafe. Ask Kimi Raikkonen. He experienced a shunt while leading the last lap of the race when his flat spotted tire finally shook the suspension to distruction. The rules are vague enough that Kimi had little choice but to continue driving an unsafe car.

Now we get this weekend. If the teams could change tires, the Michelin teams could have come in every 10 laps or so and swapped tires. Sure they’d have been torched by the Bridgestones, but the racing would still be cool.

The rules in F1 are becoming too arcane and narrowly defined. We are a few years away from some lame-ass spec racing series… with many millions of dollars going into optimizing within the very narrow ruleset instead of developing new technology. I long for the days of V12s racing against V10s and V8s… that was exciting. F1 should be taking lessons from NASA-X (National Auto Sport Association’s power-to-weight segregated, nearly unlimited technology racing classes) instead of IRL and NASCAR.

They haven’t turned me off the sport yet, but they are pissing me off.