......The water gets into motorsport's official's brains and they can't function properly (or so this weekend seems to show)

In a weekend when world weather seemed to want to play as big a part in deciding the winners of races as, say more conventional variables, like....say, drivers and cars, two different races, on 2 different continents, in two different types of car, a total of 65 drivers and BOTH managed to screw up - royally.

Let's start with the F1 from Fuji. Now, wet F1 races are far better than the procession that results from a race in decent weather, but Fuji, like the other wet race in Germany this year, was handled about as well as a slippery bar of soap. These drivers are (alledgedly) the best in world, yet they don't feel able to drive in the wet. The car maker and tyre maufacturers spend millions on developing wet tyres yet whenever rain falls they're made to drive around slowly.

Lots of other forms of motorsport, including a vast swathe of British racing (thanks to the stereotypical weather over here) needs near apocolyptic conditions to stop, yet here is someone's sneezes into the wind they call out the safety car.

What makes even less sense is that they ran the first 19 or so laps like this. Surely it would have made sense to delay the race until the powers that be deemed it safe to race rather than force fans to sit through the tedium of this. What makes even less sense is the fact they pulled the SC in when it was still raining and still wet and when it started to rain harder they kept racing, with the SC only coming out again so the fragments of the Spanish Moaner's car sould be cleared up. This stupid inconsistency made what could have been an exciting race seem more like Wacky Races.

Then it really hit the fan. The latest chapter in what seems to have been NASCAR's wettest season. Now, I don't like shortened NASCAR races. They throw any idea of strategy out of the window until the race resembles a 43 ticket raffle - the second rain delay which came during a round of green falg pitstops is a perfect example. Now, I'm sensible enough to realise than running these races in the wet is only a tiny bit short of suicidal, so I had no problem when they red flagged the race just after the half-way point (other than the pit-stop thing). But after 2 hours to re-start a race that could (probably should after 2 hours) have been called is just mental. I couldn't care less that it may have cost Tony Stewart the race - it was a daft call to leave him out there on the restart. Then the final nail in the coffin. How long was the race?. 267? 225? 210? Does the phrase "Moving the Goalposts" exist in American English.

Surely in this age of NASCAR stuff like this would be stopped. As the sport tries to make itself more respectable a dabacle like this is the last thing they need. With all races televised I think it makes more sense to have a time cut off point where the race is either stopped and rerun later, or called regardless of how many laps have been completed - at least then the teams have a solid point of reference for strategies in such races rather than guessing what NASCAR will do next.

The other alternative is - to quote another blogger on here - "to grow some stones and race in the rain". Now I realise that racing on 1.5-2.5 mile banked tracks in the rain with tyres grooved any shallower than the average canyon is unsafe, with the banking causing the sort of rain running down the track that made an F1 race in Brazil so much "fun" a few years back.

But, how about having a set of tracks where it's acceptable to race in the rain. Let's start with Watkins Glen and Sonoma, and how about some other the flat-banked-short-tracks - Martinsville, Milwaukee, Loudon etc. Tracks where the speed isn't too high and the banking isn't going to be treacherous.

Because cloud-seeding just doesn't work......