Engine development freeze in F1...

[docevi1]

Surely this is a bad thing?

What happens if the engine has an inherent flaw which means it blows up regularly? What happens if the engine developed for, e.g. Toyota is significantly more powerful that Ferrari's - will everyone suddenly become customers of Toyota? What happens a teams know how to eek out significantly more power due to technological breakthroughs but are stuck with 2006 designs? What happens to the poorer teams this year when suddenly they have to spend all their money / effort / R&D on simply trying to get the best possible engine for the future years racing...

I applaud the attitude to move towards greener methods of getting power, but why not start now and offer teams incentives - you can't modify your existing engine unless it's "free power", e.g. getting power back from brakes and the like?

[d-man]

I'm pretty sure the regulations allow them to address reliability problems... That being the case I can see all the manufacturers apart from Renault and Ferrari taking super powerful hand grenades to China rather than engines. They've already got no chance at this year's titles, so they might as well go there knowing they'll blow up but gain an advantage for the next few years.