The radio ban created a second language in the pit lane

Rules against coaching drivers by telemetry did not remove the coaching, they only made it harder for stewards to hear.

Two-way telemetry is banned. Nobody can change a setting on a moving car from a laptop on the pit wall. That part of the regulation works, it is checkable, and the sport is better for it.

The other half, the part about not coaching the driver, has never really worked at all.

The intent was honourable enough. A driver should be driving, not receiving corner-by-corner instructions on brake points and differential settings while an engineer reads a comparison trace against a team mate. So messages were restricted, a list of permitted phrases appeared, and race control began monitoring team radio for anything that amounted to driver aid.

What happened next was predictable to anyone who has watched people obey a rule they dislike. The information did not stop moving. It changed shape. Numbers became switch positions. Switch positions became codes. A message about a differential setting turned into a reference to a page in a document that both parties had memorised on Thursday. Every team ran its own vocabulary, so an official listening live had to decide whether "position five on strategy three" was permitted information or forbidden coaching, without knowing what either meant.

That is not officiating. That is guessing in real time, and the sport eventually admitted it by relaxing much of the restriction.

The residue is what interests me. Broadcast radio is now curated. What you hear at home is a selection made by a feed operator, chosen for drama, and the messages that would tell you most about whether a team was over the line are often the ones nobody bothers to play. The rule created a body of communication that exists in the sport's records but almost never in public, which makes independent scrutiny impossible. You can only be outraged about what you were played.

There is an equity dimension too. A team with a big simulator group can prepare a code book and drill it. A smaller operation says the thing plainly, gets heard, gets a warning, and looks like the offender.

I would rather the sport wrote the honest rule. Say that engineers may talk to drivers about anything, publish the full audio afterwards, and let the audience judge whether a driver is being driven.

Half a ban just teaches everyone to whisper.