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BGonline.org Forums
OT - Tennis - Why Federer is the best (long)
Posted By: Chuck Bower In Response To: OT - Tennis - Why Federer is the best (long) (Stick)
Date: Wednesday, 22 June 2011, at 11:58 p.m.
To me it's like if you took a modern day race car and went back 25 years and allowed it to enter races with all the drivers/cars of the time. You could have the worst driver on the track and still crush the opposition.
You may be a bit out of your comfort zone. Many sports (including auto racing and baseball) adjust the rules and/or equipment to maintain a status quo. For example, at Indy the record times for 500 qualifying (1995) and race (1990), both by Arie Luyendyk, occurred 1 1/2 to 2 decades ago. Similarly the two fastest tracks in NASCAR (Daytona and Talledega) have led to the rules requiring limited air intake ("restrictor plates") to keep the cars at "safe" speeds. (Equivalent changes in F1 and road/sportscar/prototype racing are also typical.) In racing, the tracks are basically bounded by safety, so allowing improvements in engines and chases/aero pushes the performance of the cars to unsafe levels, unless the equipment rules are modified to maintain an overall standard of performance.
It's true that if you go back far enough in time you might find a region where the track's safety margin isn't threatened, although even then the track surfaces and walls (cf. "safer barrier") at times were primitive, not to mention the car and driving practice (sans seatbelts!) so the performance/safety ratio was, even then, perpetually being tested. If you look at life expectancy for racecar drivers prior to ~1970 and since, you'll see what I mean.
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