bhall II wrote: .... It was the grand juxtaposition of racers attempting feats that hadn't been done before, some big, some small - some underhanded - in cars with levels of performance that no one had ever seen before, all for the sake of racing, ...... there was a time when it aspired to be little more than an idealistic playground for ambitious overgrown children.
The freak show is the current disparate group of faceless entities, from holding companies to automakers, all trying to pull the sport in the direction that's most beneficial to their own bottom line and with no regard for the consequences. This has been going on for so long now that everyone seems to have simply grown accustomed to things being --- up all the time, and they've reoriented their thought processes accordingly. It's why nothing about it withstands even cursory scrutiny from the outside. There are cracks everywhere.
The Atlantic, Jan/Feb 2016 wrote:The sociologist Diane Vaughan coined the phrase
the normalization of deviance to describe a cultural drift in which circumstances classified as “not okay” are slowly reclassified as “okay.” In the case of the
Challenger space-shuttle disaster—the subject of a landmark study by Vaughan—damage to the crucial O‑rings had been observed after previous shuttle launches. Each observed instance of damage, she found, was followed by a sequence “in which the technical deviation of the [O‑rings] from performance predictions was redefined as an acceptable risk.” Repeated over time, this behavior became routinized into what organizational psychologists call a “script.” Engineers and managers “developed a definition of the situation that allowed them to carry on as if nothing was wrong.” To clarify: They were not merely
acting as if nothing was wrong. They believed it, bringing to mind Orwell’s concept of doublethink, the method by which a bureaucracy conceals evil not only from the public but from itself.
what would sociologist Diane Vaughan do with any version of F1 except close it down ?
(and explain that it was anyway inevitably doomed by changes in behaviour/fashion as were Elvis 78s)
the DVs of this world have no answers to anything material, that's why they chose sociology or whatever
before I read the above quote I favoured sending to the electric chair some of those who 'managed' the Challenger shuttle flight
(similarly so wrt eg Titanic, Air France 447, and many others)
without the weekend overtime ban at the Cape there wouldn't have been any cold weather exposure to the O rings
the Columbia problems were caused by do-gooder rulings, as was (arguably) Chernobyl
in aviation, official investigations conveniently underplay faults in the totality of ground processes and overplay the part of flight processes
legal, commercial/contractual and political foundations make every manager a full-time or part-time Judas
risk assessments are just guesses, and they remain so regardless of the word-miners like this Vaughan person
nothing is new here
and thinking management is a skill that can exist independent of industry-specific skills is deluded
