F1 has become farcical hasnt it
Discussion
Sunday's race wasnt decided by who made the best car or who was the fastest driver but who managed the tyres best. So the teams make the best car they can and its then put onto tyres that are deliberately faulty. And the teams are forced to use two of them. To enable overtaking there is the false arrangement of aero. Why dont they just tell the leading driver to slow so that the following driver gets to overtake - it would save on spoiler costs? Then they make the competition unfair by allowing bottomless budgets for three teams and forcing others to scrabble for money.
Whereas F1 used to be about engineering and driver skill, its now been degraded into entertainment. And run by Yanks who have no interest or tradition in the sport.
How long before we get pro / celeb racing in F1?
Whereas F1 used to be about engineering and driver skill, its now been degraded into entertainment. And run by Yanks who have no interest or tradition in the sport.
How long before we get pro / celeb racing in F1?
Drumroll said:
clearly the OP knows nothing about motorsport and it's history. Tyres have always played a part in motor racing. Go back to the beginning when mechanics used to ride in the cars, they nearly all carried 2 spare wheels. Even in series with a control tyre, some teams do better than others. In part it is tied up with how they manged the tyres often a combination of engineering (tracking, camber etc) and driving style.
Most of the responses have been reasonable arguments but this one is nonsense. I've been watching F1 since the tail end of Vanwall racing, right through the likes of BRM and Lotus up to the present day. Not to mention local club circuit racing. le Mans etc. How long have you been into F1?Current F1 is entirely false. In the early days, it was all about engineering and driver ability / courage. There was real innovation such as the move to rear engines, ground effect, and we even had a period of competition between teams with different sized engines. Tyres were free. Fuel stops allowed.
So what do we have now? A set of rules designed to be so tight that only those with a mega budget can engineer in a tiny advantage. The result is cars that cannot overtakes so we have false overtaking assistance with DRS. No competition between tyre companies and instead tyres engineered to fail safely after not much use.
How can this be the pinacle of motor sport
And dont get me started on le Mans and the farce of prototypes which arent remotely prototypes
heebeegeetee said:
I mean, I can't help thinking that strictly speaking, to meet the OP's standards, Formula E is the real Formula One.
I dont know where you get that one from! To the contrary, here would be my basic rules for a new F1 competition:1/ max £20m budget for the season for a team of 2 cars
2/ max 100kg of pump 95 octane per race
3/ cars with open wheels but passing the existing crash and safety tests
4/ any tyres available for general sale to the public.
5/ no blue flags
6/ no mass vehicle manufacturers allowed except to manufacture and sell engines to the teams.
7/ no other rules except those relating to the conduct of the race.
Bound to be lots of holes in these off the top of my head rules but they are intended to help techical innovation by what Enzo used to call the garagistas - the likes of Williams, McLaren, Cooper etc So maybe we would see 4wd - why not. maybe ABS or active suspension or 6 wheels. What we wouldnt be seeing is cars winning because their little fins on the bargeboards give them a half second advantage over anyone else. How interesting are those bits?
And whilst redesigning F1 how about le Mans.
1/ only 95 octane fuel allowed
2/ any road tyres sold to the public
3 prototypes must be made in a minimum batch of 5o cars with at least 30 sold to the public and must be capable of use on public roads without major structural alternations.
4/ road car class must be of a car made in 1000 min, sold to the public, with no more alterations than are rquired for safety when racing. These cars must be driven to the circuit on public roads.
The idea here is to get back to cars that mean something to the potential buyer.
Now that lot should give the schoolkids that infest this forum something to be rude about.
The latest "racist" chant - cant remember which team it was - was "I'd rather be a louse than a scouse". Sure its tribal and unintelligent playground noise. But racist? No way.
Anyway, back to the topic.
Why 95 ocane pump petrol? Because the likes of Ferrari are using exotic chemicals at great expense supplied by Shell. Where is the "racing" in that? Where is the interest in that except perhaps to an organic chemist?
Why 100kg limit - apart from the eco / PR side of things, because that prevents the simple approach of building a humungous 16 litre V24 engine as a way of winning. The engineers have to be efficient.
Why a fixed budget - because that gives 6 or 8 teams a chance of winning rather than just the big car manufacturers.
No fixed tyre choices - to encopurage tyre development and competition
No other rules - thats there to stop the likes of Ferrari rigging the races using the FIA
As for le Man - what exactly is the purpose of LMP1? And why on earth have the balance of performance to rig th sports car results - why not have every driver in identical cars instead?
Anyway, back to the topic.
Why 95 ocane pump petrol? Because the likes of Ferrari are using exotic chemicals at great expense supplied by Shell. Where is the "racing" in that? Where is the interest in that except perhaps to an organic chemist?
Why 100kg limit - apart from the eco / PR side of things, because that prevents the simple approach of building a humungous 16 litre V24 engine as a way of winning. The engineers have to be efficient.
Why a fixed budget - because that gives 6 or 8 teams a chance of winning rather than just the big car manufacturers.
No fixed tyre choices - to encopurage tyre development and competition
No other rules - thats there to stop the likes of Ferrari rigging the races using the FIA
As for le Man - what exactly is the purpose of LMP1? And why on earth have the balance of performance to rig th sports car results - why not have every driver in identical cars instead?
Edited by bordseye on Saturday 10th August 13:08
Nothing wrong with "full beans". In fact that should be the objective. But what we dont want is the easy American style solution of just building a bigger engine. We want a better engine. A more efficient one as indeed the current 100kg limit has encouraged.
By the same logic, there should be no minimum weight for the car itself. "Adding lightness" should be the objective to give better performance.
By the same logic, there should be no minimum weight for the car itself. "Adding lightness" should be the objective to give better performance.
Nobody would want to return to the bad old days of drivers dying every year but that can be covered by the crash testing. A minimum weight as well isnt necessary.
What I had in mind harks back to the Lotus 11 ( was that the model) which won against much bigger and more powerful sporstcars because it was light and minimalist. I'd like to see designers have a much greater range of design options - at present they are shoehorned into one standard set up only differening by the design of the fins and the bargeboards.
What I had in mind harks back to the Lotus 11 ( was that the model) which won against much bigger and more powerful sporstcars because it was light and minimalist. I'd like to see designers have a much greater range of design options - at present they are shoehorned into one standard set up only differening by the design of the fins and the bargeboards.
Vaud said:
Respectfully disagree.
Crash testing is part of it.
Avoiding crashes is the other part. Open rules would no doubt drive up power, aero and probably ground effect. Which drives up energy in crashes - both gforce and velocity of debris, etc.
Which would also in turn move spectators further away from the action.
Be careful what we wish for. If cars were reaching 250+mph we would see more fatalities; crash structures can only go so far. Humans are squidgy and fragile.
Fair point. Its easy to see that being an issue - even with road cars , many now have more power than can be safely used. Crash testing is part of it.
Avoiding crashes is the other part. Open rules would no doubt drive up power, aero and probably ground effect. Which drives up energy in crashes - both gforce and velocity of debris, etc.
Which would also in turn move spectators further away from the action.
Be careful what we wish for. If cars were reaching 250+mph we would see more fatalities; crash structures can only go so far. Humans are squidgy and fragile.
My inclination would be to ban wings and reduce cornering speed that way. Maybe add to it by the old trick of having a small diameter opening for the engine air intake. Maybe the cleanest and simplest would be to just reduce the fuel allowance since fuel = power.
For me, F1 is a team sport all about technology and engineering. The drivers are very much secondary. So I would like to reduce the rules that are stifling innovation and give designers much greater freedom to take a different line
Edited by bordseye on Tuesday 13th August 13:33
Vaud said:
The problem is that you would need to do it all formulae, as you can't have the optics of F2/F3 being faster than F1.
Why not? Does anyopne watch or follow F2 and F3 - tbh I didnt know that they still existed. Just like Formula E and formula W - of no significance.The whole debate depends on how you see F1. Are you only interested , as Sky seems to be, in drivers competing. If so then the answer is to have one standard car design and draw lotteries at each race for car allocation to the drivers. Then at the end of the season you know who is the fastest or paybe luckiest driver there.
To me that would be an enormous yawn fest. I'm interested in the technology and the competition between teams. The tam champonship not the driver one. And I would like to see inventive wide ranging designs giving a chance to the teams with small resources. Disrupters.
The issue with the present situation is that big budget wins. So the small budget teams have no chance. You arent going to see McLaren or Williams or Force India or even Alfa winning the champonship
StevieBee said:
I'm genuinely not being confrontational but I have to say that your belief that F2 and F3 no longer existed and that Formula E and W Series are of no significance demonstrates a serious lack of understanding as to how the whole mechanics of global motorsport operates today. Formula E is of huge significance. At some stage in the future, Formula E and Formula 1 will in some way shape or form, merge into one. W Series has just completed its first season, and I have to say, very successfully. When was the last time the winner of an F3 or F2 championship was interviewed in Breakfast TV?
I could give a sexis answer but I guess the real answer is when an F2 or F3 championship was newsworthy. Which is my point, I guess.StevieBee said:
What you've described is how the W Series operates that you roundly dismissed as being of no significance. Each driver gets a different car and a different team of mechanics at each race. Perhaps give that a watch next year. You may prefer it to F1.
As I said, what interest me is the technology not the drivers. StevieBee said:
The majority of viewers are motivated by the support of a driver or drivers. The sport itself is geared around the constructors championship. That's it's DNA in that motorsport evolved for the benefit of participants. Others liked to watch and natural affiliations towards those driving evolved stronger than towards the teams (Ferrari being the exception to the rule).
The modern sport evolved when teams of enthusiasts got together to build a car and race it - drivers like jockeys in horse racing were hired and fired according to their results. Enzo in particular regarded them simply as employees.StevieBee said:
With you on the 'disrupter' notion. But the means to achieve this would destroy the closeness of racing that we have now. As I mentioned a few posts back, design flexibility leads to widely dispersed fields. You don't have to go back that far to find races finishing with the last third of the field five or more laps behind the winners.
So? Winning is everything. I dont see any practical difference between the present situation with half the field being lapped and half the field being lapped twice or three times.bordseye said:
The issue with the present situation is that big budget wins. So the small budget teams have no chance. You arent going to see McLaren or Williams or Force India or even Alfa winning the champonship
StevieBee said:
But you might! And that's part of the intrigue. Who would have thought Leicester City could have ever won the premiership against hugely better funded teams? Part of the interest in sport is 'believing' and then sometimes 'seeing' the little guys succeed. Doesn't happen often (in any sport) but is magical when it does. It's these races that tend to linger in the memories the most. Pannis winning in Monaco in the Ligier, Button in the BAR Honda in Hungary, Hill almost taking the win in the Arrows also at Hungary....Even Maldonado in Spain. If these sort of results became the norm I rather think that some of the sparkle would be lost.
Budget is of course a factor but is not the be all and end all it first appears. I mentioned previously that Red Bull operate on half the budget of Mercedes yet is not beyond the realms of possibility that they could win this year's title (slim but not yet impossible). Mercedes have less money that Ferrari. Toyota spent ten years and $1billion to achieve nothing other than a few podiums.
Dont hold your breath waiting for a motoring Leicester City Sevie. Its quite possible to have a big budget and not win - Ferrari are proving that at the moment as did Toyota and Honda and BMW. But IMO it isnt possible to have a small budget and win.Budget is of course a factor but is not the be all and end all it first appears. I mentioned previously that Red Bull operate on half the budget of Mercedes yet is not beyond the realms of possibility that they could win this year's title (slim but not yet impossible). Mercedes have less money that Ferrari. Toyota spent ten years and $1billion to achieve nothing other than a few podiums.
Maybe we should have two championships - a driver one run on the same basis as formula w and a car builder one run on open rules but with a fixed budget.
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