F1 Under Pressure To Make Changes

[Polaroid]

It will be a long 10 days for Formula 1 as it now wonders how it can avoid another dreary race that had armchair viewers searching for the off button in Sunday's Bahrain Grand Prix. With new rules in place which limited the number of pitstops and prevented refuelling during the race, expectations were heightened that it was going to be a new era of the sport. Having four World Champions competing this year, including seven time winner Michael Schumacher, could only have made the changes more thrilling but in the end we were left with 49 laps of something that made NASCAR worth watching as the race was essentially won on the first corner.

Even the drivers were voicing their disdain of the new system with Schumacher saying after the race that "overtaking was basically impossible unless somebody made a mistake although his biggest concern should be that he was well off the pace of his team mate Nico Rosberg who finished one position ahead of the 41 year old German in fifth place. For all the technical progress in optimising the car technology and engineering skill to ensure there are the fastest and most efficient cars on the track, it certainly seems that F1 has lost the entertainment aspect of the sport.

Introducing refuelling again is not an option on cars and teams built specifically around the new rules and even having a mandatory two pit-stops won't combat the biggest issue in F1 the lack of overtaking. Bernie Ecclestone, the F1 President, is favoring a wait-and-see approach until after the next three grand prix after which there will be a three week window of opportunity for change before F1 travels to Europe for the first time this season.

One Ecclestone proposal is one of creating short cuts at each track whereby a driver has a limited number of chances per race to make use of the short cut to either overtake a competitor or move past slower moving traffic. After doing nothing to combat the overtaking issue for years, which could have been rectified by designing different styles of new tracks and retrofitting older ones, it seems like the old man is taking his ideas from Mario Kart. So don't be surprised to see drivers collecting gold coins around the track and changing the name of the Monaco Grand Prix to the Mushroom Cup before the season is out.


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[Dunder]

Nice write-up.

Everyone knows what the problem is. Cars which are too heavily dependent on aerodynamic downforce and that produce a turbulent wake.
The rules that were put in place for 2009 were supposed to improve the situation, but the top teams spend literally hundreds of millions of dollars and were able to design around the rules. The engineers are always one step ahead of the regulations.

F1 has always been first and foremost about the engineering but something has to give. I would favour allowing the cars to run some sort of skirting in order the can produce downforce via ground-effect (this was banned in the 1980s) and ban rear wings altogether. This would allow cars to follow each other much more closely through fast corners, at the moment the following car loses downforce at the front and understeers, making overtaking virtually impossible.

Ecclestones idea of shortcuts is just ridiculous.

 

[roguejuror]

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[Immortality]

I have to say I was kind of bored watching parts of that race last weekend. I watched like 15 minutes and then just fast forwarded through it.

 

[roguejuror]

immort you just picked probably the most boring race in 5 years to get into it, keep the faith alive brotha