Talking Di Resta and Rule Changes

Testing continues around the Valencian Ricardo Tormo circuit today and I'll report on all the action later but in the mean-time some things have been decided off of the track.

Paul Di Resta (cousin to Indycar champion Dario Franchitti) has been signed by Force India as their test and reserve driver for the 2010 season. The Scot has been impressive in the DTM for the last few years; in particularly in 2007 when he took some wins driving a year old car and was similarly good when he took part in F1's 'baby' test in December. This isn't unexpected news but it is good news nonetheless and hopefully it will lead to a race drive for the Indian team either this year (if one of the drivers - Adrian Sutil / Vitantonio Liuzzi - doesn't perform well enough), or in 2011 if there is a space available.

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The other piece of news is that two rule changes have been today agreed by the FIA and the F1 teams.

The first is a tweak of the new scoring system suggested in November. Rather than the 25-20-15... points system agreed then, the final solution is to have the scoring as follows: 25-18-15-12-10-8-6-4-2-1. The idea of this is to encourage drivers to push for the win rather than settle for second (to a milder extent it also pushes them to race for the podium rather than settle for 4th). I think that this alteration is silly; If a driver can win, he will. Normally, if he can win but doesn't push it then the driver in front is his team mate and he's not allowed to overtake him - changing the scores won't change this. Furthermore, the differences between the points were reduced for 2003 because the situation was that the championships weren't going the distance. Whilst I concede that the driver who wins the most throughout the year probably deserves the championship, I also want the race to be close and to go to a decider - this doesn't help that cause.

The other rule change is a little more interesting - the top 10 qualifiers (i.e. those who make it to Q3 on the Saturday) will have to start the race on the same tyres they finish qualifying on. This adds a nice technical scenario to qualifying because teams could either opt to start at the front having qualified with the soft tyre but aware that when the car is full with fuel, the soft tyre will wear quickly and therefore the first pitstop will have to be early. Alternatively, teams could try and get the best performance possible out of the hard tyre in qualifying, knowing that it will last longer and therefore be in better shape after 10 laps in the race. This will add an interesting dynamic to the grid and the best thing is that it is driver specific too - for example, aggressive Lewis might not cope as well with soft tyres and heavy fuel as smooth Jenson.

I am a little disappointed that the new rules don't include bonus points of pole position and the fastest lap though.