Nigel Roebuck: Fifth Column

So there we were on Friday afternoon, waiting, waiting, waiting... for news from the FIA International Court of Appeal, regarding McLaren's post-race appeal at Interlagos. The afternoon came and went, and it began to look as though the evening would, too. What was taking all this time? Must be something big.

Well, yes, someone murmured, it could be that - or it might simply be that they're dragging it out in the hope that the announcement will come too late to make the dailies. After all, it's Saturday tomorrow, and a story like this probably won't get much of a show in the Sundays.

It will, came another voice, if Lewis gets promoted to fifth - and becomes world champion in the process. We all laughed. "Well," he persisted, "Bernie's said he'll consider retiring if that should happen..." Hype, we said. Probably it'll be straightforward in the end - fining Williams and BMW a hundred million bucks apiece, that sort of thing.

In the end it was indeed straightforward, in the sense that the Court of Appeal announced not that McLaren's appeal had succeeded or failed, but that it was inadmissible. In places where plain English is spoken, this is known as a cop-out.

The reason for McLaren's appeal in the first place, you will remember, was the failure of the FIA stewards at Interlagos to take any action against Williams (for whom Nico Rosberg finished fourth) and BMW Sauber (Robert Kubica fifth, Nick Heidfeld sixth), after it had been discovered that these cars had used 'over-chilled' fuel.

Eventually the stewards announced they would not be penalising the teams because they lacked sufficient evidence to do that - despite the fact that the fuel in the cars had been variously monitored at 12-14C below ambient temperature, when the FIA regulation requires it to be no more than 10 below.

There was no suggestion that Williams and BMW were trying to cheat; rather, the belief was they had been caught out by a sudden increase in ambient temperature. Unfortunate, certainly - but that had rarely counted for much in the past: a rule is a rule. And the stewards' contention that they did not have sufficient evidence to convict seemed more than a touch disingenuous.

McLaren's appeal went in because they wished to know how the stewards' decision had been reached - they wanted clarification as to how the fuel temperature regulations were interpreted, and checked, and the only means of doing this, they felt, was to put in an appeal. From the outset, it was stressed this was not an attempt to change the outcome of the world championship.

So, two days of debate - and at the end of it McLaren's appeal failed, as expected. No one seriously anticipated that Williams and BMW would be disqualified from the Brazilian Grand Prix, that Hamilton would move from seventh to fourth, and thus snatch back the world championship from Kimi Raikkonen - indeed no one wished to see that, not only because it would have been an absurdity, but also because it would have been a final step too far in a year already disfigured by politics.

By side-stepping the issue, by coming up with this ludicrous contention that McLaren's appeal was 'inadmissible', the powers-that-be have failed to clarify anything. Indeed, BMW's Mario Theissen, while conceding he was happy that the Interlagos controversy was at an end, said the question of the fuel temperature regulations had still not been addressed, and needed resolution before the start of the 2008 season.

To my mind, at issue more than over-chilled fuel and inadmissible appeals is the frequently eccentric behaviour of the FIA stewards. Way too often they leave unpunished a driver who blatantly swerves at another (as patented by Messrs Senna and Schumacher), yet swiftly issue a ticket if a car is 2km/h over the pitlane speed limit.

I'm not saying that a penalty for the latter is wrong, merely that it seems rather less of a crime than ushering another car off the road at 190mph. When, for example, on the first lap of the 2003 British Grand Prix Fernando Alonso presumed to pass Schumacher on the Hangar Straight, he was swiftly consigned to the grass. Stop and go? Fine? Slap on wrist? Don't remember it.

On the other hand, when, during Monza qualifying in '05, Alonso was adjudged to have delayed Massa's Ferrari by a zillionth of a second, the stewards docked Fernando's three best times, which moved him from fifth to 10th on the grid. The episode bordered on farce.

Then there was Hungary this year, and another Alonso happening. In the course of qualifying the McLaren drivers had a puerile battle to screw the other out of pole position, and certainly the episode deserved sanction of some kind - but from Ron Dennis, not the FIA stewards. No other team was involved in, or disturbed by, the altercation, and quite why it required intervention by the stewards remains a mystery - as does their decision, given that both drivers were culpable, to punish only one.

On this occasion the penalty was shaped differently. This time the stewards opted not for discounting Alonso's three best laps, or whatever, but went for simply fining him grid positions, as when an engine change is required. What d'you think? Three? Six? Let's say five...

It's this aspect of the stewards' behaviour that disturbs, this inconsistency, in actions and decisions - and in apparently arbitrary punishments. Or not, as at Interlagos.

Changing tack, it struck me the other weekend that we haven't heard much recently from the 'F1 Overtaking Group', set up by the FIA to find ways of allowing cars again to do what the man who conceived the phrase 'motor racing' presumably had in mind. Various aerodynamic solutions have been studied, and I sincerely wish the group's members well in their endeavours, but please God, don't let them even contemplate - as I heard recently - any question of 'power-to-pass'.

The principle here is simple enough: pressing a button gives you extra horsepower, and you have a fixed number of seconds' use of it in a race. Not only is it patently artificial, but also another source of possible punishment. At the Champ Car race in Mexico City, Sebastien Bourdais and Graham Rahal committed minor transgressions during the warm-up, and were 'fined' 22 of their 75 seconds of 'power-to-pass' boost.

A couple of decades ago, we had 'power-to-pass' in F1, in the sense that drivers could adjust their turbo boost, while bearing in mind that they had a strictly limited fuel allocation. With today's normally-aspirated engines, it would be a matter, I guess, of being able temporarily to override the 19,000 rev limit. Whatever, it doesn't belong. This is F1, not Super Mario Kart.