[sperry]

All the stuff like the two tire rule, the addition of KERS, the moveable front wing, etc are all attempts to make the cars go different speeds at different times in their race strategy.

So even if everyone is still finishing the race distance in the same overall time, some teams will be faster than others on track because they opted for the soft tires in the 1st stint rather than the 3rd, or one driver that uses KERS for passing vs. one that uses it only on the longest straight, vs. one car w/o KERS at all that's faster in all the corners because they've got better weight distribution.

It's sort of a silly way to manufacture on-track speed disparity (and therefor passing, even if it's not "real" passing), but it did seem to result in make the race more interesting than the time trial parade it was in the Michael Shumacher era. It's especially silly, when the last two seasons have been fantastic without all these changes... hell, last season's championship came down to a pass in the last corner of the last race of the season!

But it's all especially ridiculous when after the race, they just go and move the standings around anyway. Jackie Stewart is dead on when he rants and raves about the league needing a fixed stewarding crew that stewards every event... and it needs to be made up of an FIA rep, a couple of ex-drivers, and a local track rep. The ex-drivers are the guys that know how to dole out fair punishment for incidents because they've all been there... they can tell who was at fault, and they can tell immediately. This post race time penalty BS ruins the credibility of the sport.