Splitting hairs…

19th June 2011

By Anthony Peacock

Is anybody else slightly bored of hearing about split times? Of course they provide plenty more information and a way for the very impatient to discover who is likely to win a stage before the thing actually finishes (not to mention more red and green lights on the official computer screens than a traffic light factory) but are they actually fever?

No, because numbers in isolation never happen to be fever unless you’re either autistic or a statistician.

All split times tend to do these days is provide a bone of contention that engineers will subsequently analyse in the hope of devising either a conspiracy theory or a convoluted tactic to help somebody make up a few places by dint of going slower.

That’s not really what motorsport should be about, unless you subscribe to the view that rallies should contain an element of chess. And it’s worth noting that apart from in Russia (where people have very little else to do) chess is hardly renowned as a gripping spectator sport.

The question obviously arises because Sebastien Loeb didn’t get the split times on Saturday night in Greece while Sebastien Ogier did, which almost certainly won him the rally. Loeb’s fundamental issue is that rather than being an equal fight, this situation was unfair as one teammate had more information than the other.

Loeb was right. So here’s the solution: what if we get rid of split times all together? This way nobody gets them and nobody can plan strategies with any degree of accuracy. Back in the early days of tactics, teams used to have people with stop watches and pit boards in the middle of the stages, who would hold up home made placards telling their drivers what to do.

Not only was this method notoriously unreliable, but the people in question also ran the very real risk of getting run over if the information they were providing happened not to be to their driver’s liking (think Colin McRae, Catalunya, 1995).

So it’s very unlikely that if split times were banned, teams would go back to that method. If they did, they may as well go back to mechanical alarm clocks as the principal mode of timing as well.

While banning split times is a relatively simple solution to the histrionics that prevailed in Greece (not to mention countless rallies before then) the more complicated question is how exactly you would police it.

Would teams develop an elaborate code, with the team manager coughing twice down the radio to say slow down and three times to say speed up, with a supplementary amount of coughs to indicate the number of seconds required?

Or would they just decide that it wasn’t worth the bother and simply get on with the business of driving as fast as possible – particularly if the penalty for being caught in possession of split times was draconian?

After all, even Sebastien Ogier – who benefitted from the splits this time – says that he doesn’t really like driving to a target. If he did, he probably would have taken up darts instead.