GP teams protest Bahrain date - for the wrong reasons

This snippet from [The Guardian] today. The Haze thinks the GP teams are writing the right letter for the wrong reasons.

The Bahrain Grand Prix is once again in doubt after the Formula One Teams' Association wrote to motorsport's governing body demanding it abandon plans to reinstate the race this year.

Fota, the umbrella organisation that represents 11 of the 12 teams – Hispania Racing being the exception – called on the FIA to scrap the proposal to stage the race on 30 October, the date originally reserved for the inaugural Indian Grand Prix, which would then move to early December.

The teams say it is not practical to add a race at the end of a long season, saying a 20th race would be "unbearable to our staff".


Unbearable to their staff!?! They should check in with the staff at the Bahrain race track itself - a section of whom were suffering from rather more than overwork...

"Of the 108 local staff of the government-owned Bahrain International Circuit (BIC), which hosts Formula One, some 28 were detained and mistreated according to a source in Bahrain close to the event. All of those arrested are Shia and have since been sacked. Five of these are still in prison including the chief financial officer Jaafar Almansoor, an employee of BIC told Reuters news agency.

"They made us beat and kick each other," said the employee, who did not want to be named, describing their 20 days in detention. "They said they'd rape us. They tried to touch you in various places to make you think it's going to happen." The prisoners were insulted for being Shia and, on being released, were told not to talk to the media. "

The F1 teams should protest the GP in Bahrain because the human rights abuses going on in that country right now mean that no civlised sporting event should be held there.

Any ethical and moral person should not be looking at the garish glamour of F1 while unarmed protests are met with gunfire.

Thanks heavens for Mark Webber & Damon Hill who have been alone in saying what everyone in F1 should have been saying all along - that a Grand Prix in a country that shoots at its own unarmed citizens and then arrests those who try to tend to the wounded and the dying is unthinkable - on moral grounds.

...and if that means no GP in China, then so be it. So much the better.