F1 should keep punishing drivers for team failings

At first glance, the argument that drivers should not be punished for their teams and engine suppliers making errors through engine component and gearbox changes is compelling.

After all, why hit the drivers with grid penalties for something outside of their control? It has a big impact on what is called the drivers' championship, so why not just take away points from the team?

It's an argument espoused by some very shrewd observers of Formula 1 who are usually very difficult to disagree with given how rational most of their arguments are. Autosport's own Gary Anderson has also argued this case well.

But in this case, they are wrong because the bigger picture is ignored. Sometimes, evils are necessary and that's exactly the category such penalties fall into.

What if the rules were changed to dictate a points penalty for the team instead of bumping a driver down the grid? We'd have to decide what the scale of the points penalty should be, so for the sake of argument, let's say it corresponds to the number of the grid drop.

So that would make it five constructors' points lost (instead of a five-place grid drop) for changing a gearbox not used for six consecutive events, 10 points for the first new element for the fifth power unit and beyond, with five points for additional elements within each one.

It could be more, it could be less and some have suggested more draconian systems, but this system works for the sake of this example.

But using the suggested system, consider this scenario. It's the championship showdown, Mercedes has a 33-point lead in the standings over Ferrari (based on the current gap), but Lewis Hamilton is just behind in the drivers' championship and battling with Sebastian Vettel.

Perhaps Mercedes has a special turbocharger that isn't good for so many miles, but confers a performance advantage? Or maybe there's a lighter gearbox that will have the same effect. Using points as currency, should it be able to 'buy' such an advantage for its driver that Ferrari could not afford?

And imagine the admittedly improbable scenario that one of the big teams is fighting for the championship against a far smaller one. This would be just another means for money to talk by buying yet another advantage.

Don't be foolish enough to imagine that teams won't consider doing this. Vast amounts of effort go into eking out small advantages, to the point where any top squad that did not factor this into its thinking would be leaving a significant stone unturned.

Even tiny differences can be telling, and would it be correct for Hamilton to get a technical advantage from the fact that Valtteri Bottas is a stronger performer than Kimi Raikkonen? Clearly not.

F1 must not allow the strategic bartering of constructors' championship points to influence the drivers' battle. This would lead to even more criticism and make a mockery of the whole championship.

You can argue that exactly this happens when one team-mate compromises their race to help the other, but that's in an organic racing situation. Save, perhaps, for at Austin in 2012 when Ferrari deliberately broke the seal on Felipe Massa's gearbox needlessly in order to trigger a penalty and move team-mate Fernando Alonso up one place on the grid and, more importantly, put him on the clean side of the grid, the grid drop rules are not abused in this way.

But to buy a technical advantage, no matter how slender, by sacrificing points already scored, is unacceptable. To say that teams can gamble on components with more performance but that are fragile in an attempt to counter this is a false equivalence.

In this season's nine races, there have been a combined total of 133 grid position drops applied. Unsurprisingly, 103 of those are down to penalties for McLaren-Honda drivers Stoffel Vandoorne, Fernando Alonso and Jenson Button.

So using the one point penalty for each grid drop, that would put McLaren on -101 points in the constructors' championship. Needless to say, everyone would then start complaining that negative points tallies were ridiculous.

It would also sting Sauber, which would now be on -5 points thanks to gearbox change penalties for Antonio Giovinazzi in China and Pascal Wehrlein in Canada. But of the big guns, it would just knock five points off Red Bull and five points off Mercedes, which admittedly would close the gap in the fight for the constructors' crown.

All of the above is predicated on one thing: that the power unit and gearbox restrictions should be in place at all. The gearbox rule was introduced in 2008, demanding that they lasted four races. Engine penalties date back to 2004, when a rule demanding that only one engine could be used per weekend with a 10-place grid penalty for anyone using a second.

Today, these rules have evolved to the point where gearboxes must last six events, with just four complete power units (defined as comprising six separate elements - the V6 engine itself, the MGU-K, the MGU-H, turbo, the control electronics and the energy store) permitted per driver. This is down from five last year.

The argument for this is cost saving. And there is a net benefit in that as though extra investment has had to go into developing more durable components, this has been less costly than constantly chucking new parts at cars.

Remember, there was a time when we used to have qualifying engines, constant changes, gearboxes going in and out. This is hugely costly, and would happen again among those who could afford it were things unrestricted. And if you have to have a restriction of some sort, then you have to have some kind of penalty system.

You can certainly argue that the switch to four power units per driver per season was premature. Honda has incurred plenty of penalties and there seems little doubt that some Renault drivers are going to pick some up in the not-too-distant future.

Ferrari also has Romain Grosjean, Kevin Magnussen and Vettel all on their fourth turbochargers, so it's very likely there will be some grid penalties to be served by those with Italian propulsion as well.

Mercedes has mostly had a very strong record when it comes to its engine penalties. In the first season of the new regulations, when five power units were allowed per driver, Mercedes did not incur a single penalty.

In 2015, Mercedes-powered Manor picked up a few such penalties, while in '16 it was only Hamilton's flurry of strategic new components at Spa, the result of having most of the misfortune when it came to Mercedes components that suffered and then the team justifiably stockpiling new ones given Hamilton was going to start at the back anyway. So it is perfectly possible to achieve a good reliability record.

It's also worth noting that, in the later years of the previous 2.4-litre V8 regime, the number of engines usable in the season ultimately reached eight per driver. But these engines were frozen for the last six years of that era. That meant no changes, no development, no new parts to fail (some changes were permitted, but only for reliability and safety reasons, or to try and balance things up under what was referred to as the 'fair and equitable' rule). There was little scope for unreliability to be engineered in.

You can certainly argue the toss over whether the structure of the penalties is correct, or the life demanded of gearboxes and engine components, but there is a legitimate need for them. Allowing any areas to be unrestricted will put costs up.

Without such penalties, the gap between the haves (the works teams and the odd big independent like Red Bull) and the have nots (the rest), will grow further. And that's something everyone also rails against.

When it comes to rules like this, the answers are rarely clear cut. Yes, it is frustrating that something rarely connected to a driver can distort their championship bid (that said, there have been plenty of gearbox changes necessitated by crashes), but it's ultimately the same as any reliability problem. That's always been part of grand prix racing.

The law of unintended consequences would sting, and sting hard, the well-intentioned removal of the penalties.

Either to come up with a constructors' championship penalty, or get rid of limits entirely, would be foolhardy. It would also further devalue the constructors' championship. And imagine how you would feel as a team member on a bonus based on the team's finishing position to have a cash reward sacrificed to aid the individual driver's title bid?

Separating car and driver is a nice idea, but it is also a ludicrous one. Drivers such as Fernando Alonso can be condemned to years in the wilderness by being stuck in a McLaren, and it's almost as frustrating for those of us following grand prix racing as it is for him to see his ability shrouded deep in the pack. But he's also benefited from some very good cars. It's swings and roundabouts.

That you cannot separate car and driver is the eternal problem of motorsport, but also one of its appeals. As the saying goes, it's about "(wo)man and machine" and this fusion of technology and the organic is one of the calling cards of motorsport.

Yes, sometimes it's unfair. Yes, sometimes it distorts things. But as explained above, in the case of grid penalties it's a price that has to be paid.

Ideally, the engine manufacturers need to deliver improved reliability records. Then, it wouldn't even be a matter for discussion.