jayeff

It is an almost unbelievable situation, but just to keep the record straight, none of the teams practised at Indy until Friday. It isn't allowed.

In addition, the Indy track was resurfaced last winter for the first time in 10 years. The work was done so poorly that bumps had to be ground off all over the track. Nascar tests were postponed and two hours into the Indy tests, they were also postponed: because of cars experiencing unusual tire problems. As a result, the whole track was skimmed off, using some kind of special grinding equipment.The Indy 500 did then go ahead.

So Michelin are not the first to have tire problems at Indianapolis this year. And whether that is any kind of excuse or not, the fact remains that on Friday, two cars crashed with identical tire failures, at which point what else could Michelin do except try to find out why? What they learned was that they expected similar failures - the tread belt separating from the side walls - on all the teams' tires within 10 laps. Around 2am Sunday morning, they managed to recreate the failure in their laboratory and found their backup tires would fail the same way. However hard it is to swallow that so much money goes into developing these tires, yet something like this can happen, it did. So over to the FIA.

Their problem was that to change the rules or the track to make it possible for the Michelin teams to race safely, in effect penalized the non-Michelin teams that were ready to race. I doubt that back-runners Minardi and Jordan would have been too concerned, but Ferrari almost certainly were. Max Moseley, the boss of the governing body, said that if a chicane were put onto that last turn to slow it down, he would withdraw FIA sanction from the race, meaning that it would not have counted towards the championship.

Personally, although it would almost certainly have meant Ferrari refusing to race, that is the option I would have chosen. The fans would have been upset, but not near as upset as they were. But then again, I have no idea what fines or other penalties might have been imposed on the track owner or on teams which did participate in such a race.

It's a tragedy for F1 and its US fans in particular. F1 has the third largest TV audience of any sport in the world, despite its relative lack of exposure in the US. The past few years, holding one of the races at Indianapolis, has meant a huge growth in popularity here which was all been undone, and then some, in one afternoon. Sadly there is so much money in the sport and because there is so much at stake, so much backroom politics in it that there was already a crisis looming. It's just a huge shame it had blow up like this.