Overtaking in F1 is too difficult. No-one's saying it should be easy but when you watch a race and 95% of the position changes happen during pit-stops, something's got to be wrong. With that in mind, would someone like to tell me just exactly what the FIA is doing? Their recent regulation changes have:
- made the cars narrower so that they're more nervous during direction changes
- imposed the use of grooved tyres, increasing the reliance on aerodynamic grip, while failing to reduce downforce
- given drivers all the electronic aids they need to help eliminate mistakes
Well, thanks for that. If they were trying to create processional races, they couldn't have done a better job.
With cars so reliant on downforce for their grip, running anywhere near a car in front of you means running through the "dirty" air they've disturbed as they force their way though it. This means that your own aerodynamics are not working nearly as well and you've therefore got much less grip through corners. So guess what? The driver in front can just pull away from you. And with your skinny, grooved tyres, you can hardly lean on mechanical grip because you haven't got any. Genius. Add to this the fact that, with all his friendly electronic helpers, the driver in front isn't going to miss a gear or misjudge his throttle control and you might just as well give up.
Here's an idea or two:
- Drastically reduce aerodynamic grip. Make the wings much, much smaller or even ban them altogether.
- Give the drivers back their fat, slick tyres.
- For god's sake get rid of driver aids. Traction control is a nice safety feature for Mr Bank Manager in his Volvo but these are meant to be the best drivers in the world. Let them prove it.
- Ban carbon brakes and replace them with steel ones. It would make the braking zone longer. If you need to make it longer still, increase the cars' weight.
With cars like this, speed through corners would be dictated not by downforce but by mechanical grip and if you're following someone closely, your tyres, unlike wings, won't suddenly produce less grip. You'd have plenty of it, too, with those big, smooth tyres and it would be possible to capitalise on those small errors that have been eliminated from the sport. I'm not talking about spinning off or crashing here, just mistakes that momentarily reduce speed and let a car behind get closer or draw level. With longer braking zones, there'd be more scope for drivers with fresher tyres or bigger balls to leave their braking later and overtake their hamstrung or lilly-livered rivals.
And if Max Mosley and his mates are so concerned about capping the speed of these cars, they can look at the engines rather than dabble with engineering concepts that they clearly don't understand. Reducing the size of the air intake would have the desired effect and would be cheap for the teams.
You know, looking at it, what I've just described is a Formula 3 car. Fuck it. I'm off to Thruxton to watch some real racing. |
