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I caught up with the races today and while I enjoyed them overall, we've been here before i.e. Phillip Island producing fantastic racing only for the rest of the season to be somewhat of a letdown in terms of sheer competition. I'm not getting carried away just yet.
I'm not sure what to make of the raft of new regulations; essentially, BoP (whisper it) has come to WSBK. It seems the age of purist motorsport is well and truly dead and buried - when it comes to the major categories at any rate. I can't think of any major racing series where the need to attract diverse entrants by attempting to force a level playing field hasn't trumped the purity of motorsport. I've come to accept it over the years but it's a double-edged sword: you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't.
My only persisting issue with it is that it can get silly and lack of transparency sometimes means one is never quite sure how level the playing field really is. Is what we're watching reality or a fudge?
Anyway, what about the tyre issues? I don't get Pirelli as a corporate entity. I never have. They seem to go out of their way to give the impression of dare I say it, incompetence or ineptitude. How many times can one corporation (the motorsport tyre division at any rate) claim exceptional unforeseen circumstances? Whatever happened to systems thinking/systems approach/systems engineering? Perhaps I'm being overly critical and the situation was really unforeseen this year, maybe tyres are required to made and shipped way in advance in which case they take guesses which sometime fail to meet expectation. It just feels like, it's always them.
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