let s face it there has been so much tinkering with the rules under the guise of improving the show. can anyone actually identify a single change that has made an ounce of difference in a positive way.

under mosely then bernie f1 has become bit of a joke.

we have cars that neither look fast nor can overtake with a principle supposedly to make it more affordable nonetheless makes the emphasis on conservation not out and out speed. is it a targa rally we are meant to be watching or f1. to think we have gone through the vast changes of first groove then slick tyres and yet the fundamentals changed not one iota. we now have incredibly ugly cars and yet even less able to overtake than their replacements. and the purpose of v8 vs v10 was what exactly?

I have always had my doubts about schumachers return. he left a sport still largely dominated by the need for maximal speed albeit matched to some reliability. now we have a sport where guys are told not to challenge for fear of damaging their chances in coming events. we have seen guys driving back to the pits with rev limiters on to protect engines - hello? the testing ban means anyone starting with an advantage gets to keep that for much of the entire season. we have teams allowed to start that qualified by getting to the pitlane and regarded each lap as a triumph. - and we cringed at the lola entry with mastercard.?

we have ongoing conflict between wanting to encourage overtaking and others want to even up the show. doesnt go together sadly. in fact as has been ably demonstrated thanks to the nonesense of ever allowing the double diffuser max happily let teams waste yet further millions to get exactly where? now we have fia allowing mclarens rear wing stalling device - didnt exactly make much difference but will encourage yet further wasted spending yet aagin not improving the show.

and then the ultimate - bernie's idea of escape roads where you can take a legal shortcut like a wild card.

what future does this sport have with such warped thinking? I'd suggest that the leadership is so off the mark that it cant find its way to any sensible solution. we will continue to see tracks such as singapore added with little appeal or interest. could add valencia etc to this list with probably only turkey being a genuine quality addition to the programme. that sector 2 in bahrein was a farce pure and simple but because they were prepapred to pay bernie his millions they get to make any changes they want despite the fact no one local could be arsed to attend. 4th division soccer match has more atmosphere.

Everyone is jumping on the DDD bandwagon without even thinking. Removing them wont make a difference, they are not a major problem. If anyone disagrees, go and watch the Malaysian 09 gp, where a very slow slow Alonso with no DD, held up a long train of cars for many laps. Kimi couldnt over take him for many laps until the renault's tires were totally shot, and Sepang is a big wide over taking track.

Marbles and the one racing line mostly doesn't help much as well! Yes I agree with the poster that said that no race fuel stops and one set of hard tyres to last the whole race is the way to go! No stops at all required all race, in the norm anyway...

I like Dernie's thinking: HARD tyres = less marbles and manual gearshifts = mistakes under pressure.

I would love to see manual gearboxes back

Tyre wear is the single biggest reason why we see overtaking in motor racing, if the tyres are too hard we won't see that....

I could not agree more...

No KERS again... Cars with better KERS system will not be overtaken...

And I add the tyres war...

One of the plans that was being explored was to have a spec KERS unit developed independently of the teams and run by everyone.

Similar problem though. If all cars have the same KERS system, then there no advantage to any team, so no overtaking advantage as all cars will use it on the same part of the track to avoid overtaking.

But the system would be rationed out the same as it was in 2009: the drivers would only have a limited amount available. Not every driver would be using it in the same place, and I see no reason why they couldn't have a variety of option at hand; ie an extra eighty hosepower for ten seconds or an extra one hundred and sixty for five seconds.

But the Tilkedrome's which consist of straight/slow corner combo's mean that the only real time to use KERS is just on, or coming onto the main straight, as that is where you pass. If all drivers know that, then the advantage is nullifed.

When inevitably they make a quick fix for the rest of this season, I hope its that they only supply the super soft tyre for all the races.

It's brilliant, and gives me the opportunity to post this ...



and this ...

If in fact the first 3 races are similar to Bahrain, what about changing the height of the front wing for the return to Europe?

Lower the front wing to pre 2001 heights.
Lower wing would be less affected by the turbulence from the leading car and "might" allow the trailing car to follow closer.

About the only thing I can think of that would be somewhat practical for the remainder of this season.
Downsides would be cost of teams designing new wing and the fact that it might not make enough of a difference to matter.

true to an extent


Subjective


Conservation has always been part of racing Why do you think Prost is seen as one of the best F1 drivers in history?



What's the point of challenging when you can't overtake anyway?

You obviously didn't watch McLaren last season, even with the testing ban they were fighting for podiums while at the start of the season they couldn't even get into the points.


On what grounds could the FIA deem them legal? Both exploit grey areas in the rules. It's more the FIA being blamed for not making the rules tighter.


For your information, Singapore was a success as far as interest as cocerned. You actually put Turkey higher than Singapore?

That's senseless. Why invent an expensive device, equal for all, when at the same time genuine engine output is artificially restricted. Better direct the extra money to a higher number of less restricted engines. And to restrict them not by rev limiting but by other means - air or fuel consumption. That at least will bring some development in engine management technologies.

the only other thing the bigwigs at the FIA or whoever makes the decisions these days can do is make f1 cars fast again.

What you have at the moment is cars that have far too much downforce for the amount of power they have. Thus meaning, for racing drivers of fantastic skill they arent that difficult to drive on line and a decent pace and as a result keep a faster driver behind. In other words you have to do something very wrong to make a mistake.

Give the cars some bloody power back! Yes ok they have 2.4litre v8 engines, producing approx 850horsepower? With the amount of downforce available nowadays due to massive technical advances this simply isnt enough to make the cars hard to drive. Give them 3.5 litre v8,v10,v12 engines back. Let them have big power, and watch these guys make some mistakes. I dont know if we need to go to the extent of bringing back turbos but what we have now is silly.

Lets look back to the last time we had a formula like we had now, its back in at least 1991. This is before traction control and active suspension. The cars engines back then were too powerful for the downforce they had, if you like....they had a low downforce to power ratio. Now we have the opposite.

People can say its dangerous, but do you want racing on track or do you want pit stop strategy races? Coz if you bring back refuelling thats all you will get and im sorry it doesnt excite me at all.

You cant stop designers from finding more downforce they will continue to do it, unless you physically remove components e.g the front wing and give them back some underbody aero.

But give the cars more power to make them a handful again, coz all i see these days its scalextric cars that are on rails 99% of the time, when they press that go pedal i want to see action not a nice slow turn of the steering wheel easily hitting the apex, these guys are the best drivers in the world give them some bloody speed!

Are they?

I would say therein lies one of F1's biggest problems.

I did a breakdown of overtaking (in dry, last 5 years, stats from www.cliptheapex.com) vs circuit average speed. 2010 will be hard to directly compare, because of the new teams, so overtaking will increase.

The idea was to compare overtaking with downforce levels, on the assumption that (on average) the higher the average speed, the lower the downforce.

The conclusion is that for the slowest tracks (around 100mph) you get 6 overtakes per race, and that goes up to about 13 for the fastest tracks (around 150mph).

You could argue its the type of the fast circuits, but most circuits still have several overtaking opportunities, even slow ones - its only possible to use these places on the low downforce circuits.

So it seems clear that the downforce is the biggest factor in reducing overtaking, by far, and it is all to do with being able to follow closely or not. Everything else (tyres, gearboxes, driver aids blah blah) make at best a much smaller difference, if any at all.

Very true. The "world's best drivers" tag has always been merely a marketing tool that doesn't reflect the reality of the situation unfortunately.

Your conclusion is partly false, you say:
"So it seems clear that the downforce is the biggest factor in reducing overtaking, by far, and it is all to do with being able to follow closely or not."
The second part, follow closely, is not necessarily a product of downforce but you still conclude that downforce is the problem. I say turbulence is the problem. If you can create downforce without turbulence, the problem disappears. If course, if you remove the dependency of downforce, the problem disappear as well.

So to start with - what is it that creates the turbulence? It is not the downforce itself, it is the methods used to acheive it. I think the angle of attack on the rear wings maybe make just as much impact as the diffuser.

I also think that the diffuser is something that should not really exist, it is a result of a loophole that should have been closed many many years ago. They should do it now. Today.

Sorry, to be clear, I specifically mean downforce generated the F1 way, rather than all downforce - its the effect of the way they currently generate downforce that is the problem - as you say, the turbulence.

Until they can get radical and change the type of downforce, all they can do is reduce the overall magnitude of the current downforce, and hence the overall size of the wake.

I don't think anyone disputes that when they run a lower downforce setup (of the current arrangements) they generate less turbulence / wake for a given speed? So by running lower downforce, they generate less turbulence in for example the mid speed corners and so on, allowing them to close up more.

The difference in "lower" downforce is only the wing, I believe. So if the diffuser is the main problem, the difference between low and high downforce tracks is quite small.

might be worth banning the upper elements on the front wings, for next year you could mandate side exhausts and little sideways flips to direct air sideways/downwards across the track to help blow the marbles and dust off...

for the dust gp's maybe buy some old drag racing tyres and make a machine to lay rubber down offline ?

I agree with you, and it's a point of view that few think of. I too think that the engine regs should be opened up, specially in thie "green" Formula. They already have the things in place to limit the fuel that the car starts the race with as there are no fuel stops anymore. If they limit the max starting fuel, let the teams and manufacturers come up with solutions to make efficient engines, yet fast engines. Different technologies will bring differences in performance, might bring some passing, and if not, then at least it will be more interesting.

Well, I guess I don't agree that the shape of the wake is as analysable as that. It may vary in shape, but there is a lot of speculation about this, and the F1 aero folks don't agree on what is worse (wing or DDD), but what we can do is look at the end result.

The end result is there is too much turbulence because too much work is being done by the aero, so there is too much energy left in the air after the car has been through.

There is definitely something about high downforce tracks that reduces overtaking drastically. My hypothesis is that whatever the teams do to reduce downforce at fast tracks also ends up allowing much more overtaking, and I believe it is because it reduces the wake.

There are only a small number of things it can be really, and apart from 2 or 3 tracks, there are what should be at least usable overtaking opportunities at every track. At the low downforce tracks they can use these, at the high downforce ones they can't.

You can eliminate marbling because the problem occurs right from the start of the race - in years gone by a car at the back would rapidly catch up a few places - well they can't now, even on a clean track before marbles build up.

What the FIA should do is have a minimum weight of the chassis excluding the fuel tank so it naturally penalizes the teams with less fuel efficient engines without putting too much emphasis on fuel economy in race conditions as the teams can race with as much fuel as they want.

They should just buy some sledgehammers and use them on the diffusers, problem solved

Well that sounds like a fair enough idea, and more in line with what f1 should be too

I thought there was an FOTA meeting today?

I dont think so - Whitmarsh was at the McLAren MP4-12C launch - and he's the chair. Unless the meeting was don at the MTC straight after??

http://www.autosport.com/news/report.php/id/82162 --> article written on Monday

"AUTOSPORT understands that there is a FOTA conference call on Thursday between the team principals, where the problems of the lack of excitement in Bahrain may be discussed."

I think you guys as the FIA and teams are in a sort of a tunnel vision and forgetting the most obvious while trying to implement another sort of monster revolution in racing car design. If drivers are complaining on a severe tendency to understeer in turbulent air, then maybe the problem is the plough front wing, which didn't really improve anything considering that the car running in front has gained the same amount of frontal aero downforce potential and thus makes them both more "clean air dependent." Just shrink the wing, get rid of the diffuser and we are rocking again. Releasing rpm limit, obligatory pit stops and only 2 sets of tires would help as well. Nothing new here, really.

Man I agree with you so much, not many people see it that way either. I've been sazying the snow plw wingshave been the problem for some time now, I wrote this earlier in this thread:

" I know it's a long shot of getting it past by the teams, but if they could only be persuaded to think of the grater good. What if, as a quick fix for this year only, the FIA bans the current font wings and in replacement, installs a standard, little or no effect front wing.

Now, you would think that that will only make things worst by making the cars understeer, but the teams will have to set up their cars accordingly, and in order to obtain a proper balance, rear downforce will have to be reduced dramatically, hence, reducing the effects of dirty air. Cars will in turn be less dependent on that front wing grip for directional control, so, the effects of dirty air will be even less dramatic to them while running close behind.

For the record, I hate standarization in F1. I'm just thinking of this as an interim solution til they figure it out for the next year.

I don't know I might get shot from all you guys out there, but, hey!!!! just an idea, blast away gentlemen!!!! I can take it!! lol"

I too believe the big front wings were a huge mistake, and I can't believe these aerodynamicists let this one get past them. Or maybe they're just trying to save their salaries, if aero becomes less important in F1 their stock might drop, I don't know, but could be.

Joe Saward has some thoughts on the matter.

And make sure to read the comments to what he said. Lots disagree, and where they agree it is often based on hope it will improve rather than reason - maybe their hope will turn out to be right, but there is not much reason to think so.

He says about people need to appreciate the finer points and commentators explain them. Well, if you want the equivalent of F1 opera, then fine, but opera is the same - hard to understand without a translator and opera guide - end result is the number of people who pay to go and see opera is miniscule, and that is what will happen in F1.

The fans are speaking, and its time F1 took notice, instead of making excuse after excuse.

F1s current huge following is based largely on people who did see good racing and lots of innovations, back in the 70s and 80s and early 90s. It started getting poor in the 90s, but was still OKish, but the last few years have just continued downhill. It takes a long time to alienate F1 fans, but it will happen, and more importantly, the influx of new fans will be far less.

Every year, a set of new adults become fans of one sport or another. Its vital for F1 that a large number of them start following F1, but with F1 like it is, its just not going to happen - they will pick football, or Nascar, or hockey, or anything else - even tiddlywinks would be more exciting than races like the last one.

And to the people who say nothing can be done about it - what nonsense. They could for example mandate running 1980s spec cars, and the racing would be hugely superior. I'm not suggesting that, but they for sure can fix it, they just need to stop pussy footing around the edges of the problem.

This quote made me chuckle:



Go figure. New tilke-tracks are the way forward. May the Gods protect F1 from the all knowing people.

Yeah, right, do away with all the classic tracks, bring more tracks in countries were F1 is only relevant as a touristic or betting exercise. I love seing a good race amid the sands. Only that one usually involves TT vehicles.

It is so sad! Hmm I do really still think that boycotting races will send a clear message though. F1 is boring etc., no one wants to buy tickets etc., then we'd see em wake up to the fact that we aint happy!

Agree with his line re: expectations being a big cause of the disappointment, rather than the race/product being particularly bad. Still, I think F1 should gun for meeting high expectations. If the new rules made fans expect overtaking then whilst they may have produced unrealistic expectation I don't think they produced unreasonable expectation (if that makes any sense).

No tyres ...

For this year there are, and there are 18 more boycott able races to go lol

But what were we actually told about the rule changes

1) No fuel stops so drivers have to overtake on track
2) Drivers finding it hard to cope with heavy fuel-load cars
3) Tyres wearing out leading to differences in ability and strategy.

None of the above actually happened in Bahrain.

Maybe it will happen at the next race? But #1 is not true since they HAVE to make a pitstop and I think we will see two stops more often. Just another example of how they make one rule and then they make another one that is nullifying the first one.

But problem still remain: If they can not drive close to each other there will be no close racing, no fighting. We might see some overtaking when someone is 3s per lap faster and disappear into the distance immediately , but that is not interesting. No more interesting than to see someone being lapped. We attack, defence, pass, counterattack, defence, re-pass, counterattack.... Simply fighting, racing. It used to be rare also before, but those are the moments that we hope for. As it stands, there is no hope Racing will happen. It's hopeless. Time trail. That is not interesting at all.

I hope you're wrong but I fear you are correct.

The only possible solution I see for this year would be to lower the height of the front wing to get it into cleaner air, allowing the trailing car to follow closer. This solution would require that all the teams build new front wings so I don't know if it would get unanimous support or not.

Tyre solutions depend on Bridgestone and given that this is their last year they may not be inclined to cooperate. Mandatory second stop will look exactly like the current mandatory one stop but any passing that will be done will be in the pits.

and when you have two cars close towards the end of the race the one behind is never going to even try to overtake until he is coming out of the last corner knowing that the guy infront will always be passed.

I do think KERs should be brought back
and before people say it has no relevance to real world lets not forget both Ferrari and Porsche have brought out KERs on one of their road going cars and both were directly developed from F1 kers systems (Ferrari's from their own and Porsche's from williams's)

They have a solution already - its called their low downforce setup. They just need to be forced to use that at every race and it will make a huge difference. To ensure they do use it, just mandate they have to reach a high top speed on each track, which they can only reach by using a very very low downforce setup.

Might work but quantifying a teams low downforce setting might be difficult. Even then I would still allow them to lower the height of the front wing. When it was initially done drivers were commenting on how much more sensitive the cars were to turbulence. Even in a low downforce setting the front wing is still going to be right in the wake of the leading car.

SIMPLY AWESOME...



I think F1 should quickly change to huge super & regular soft tire options and remove the front wing entirely.

Think they can adopt such a change before Australia

I'm all for removing the front wings!!!

BTW, that car really looks more futuristic than our current boxy cars lol

We need more power than grip. Reduce the downforce.

Surprisingly that picture of an old F1 car still has advertising space on the front and rear. Goes against the argument of removal of wings leading to less advertising space.

PS - Maybe the FIA need to rule that the engine needs to be placed about 80cm in the air for cancelling out the rear wing.