Okay folks, it is the off season time for useless debates.
If you could change one thing about F1 (and just one thing you anoraks) what would it be and why?
Run one race a year for the unwashed masses. Tickets are cheap and by lottery. Infield camping. No generators. No luxury booths. No RVs. Tents only. No re-entry. First year at Watkins Glen.
Get rid of all the energy recovery/engine size/fuel efficiency rules.
I want to see what kind of technology engineers come up with when the rules simply say “you get X kg of fuel per race, figure out the most efficient way to use it.”
Better yet, specify X units of energy and the teams decide the source: hydrogen, battery, hydrocarbon, etc.
Oh god. Imagine a car powered by uranium…
imagine an F1 car with an Orion drive
I mean…assuming it would be smaller than the track…
Now I’m picturing the ensuing turn 1 carnage after a Fallout car explosion.
Lol there wouldn’t even be a circuit anymore. Hell, the entire city would be wiped off the map.
Weirdly enough it would be very slow. Or supersonic in pieces in one direction once.
True. I’d love to see the materials science that would be required to pull that off. Right now, battery technology…isn’t great compared to the advancements humanity has made in electricity generation the past twenty to thirty years or so. That, and the current bulk of battery materials are either ethically problematic (e.g., lithium), quite toxic (e.g., nickel), or both (e.g., cobalt).
I wonder if the best option then would be a gas/methanol generator and electric motors.
You’d only need to design a generator for one RPM so no transmission. Instant torque, regenerative braking, and let’s add AWD, active aero, and torque vectoring.
Yes!
A similar idea I keep telling friends is to have one car be a spec f1 car, the other is full prototype no holds barred so long as you stick to whatever the general formula might be like the weight you mentioned. But as few limitations as possible.
One car is innovative and got the constructors, the other is for the drivers and the skill.
I wanna see F1 make innovations!
If you cause a yellow or red flag in qualifying your fastest time is taken away instantly. You are ruining the laps of others and you can not benefit from it imho
Reverse-DRS. Every driver who is more than 1 second behind another driver gets DRS to catch up but then they have to work hard for the overtake.
It’s probably nonsense but I’d love to try it out in a handful of races.
Replace the sprints (and Monaco) with some kind of drivers exhibition.
Have them all race in the same car, a car that can be rented at that track. B that way fans can go to the track on track days rent they same car and see how they stack up.
This is a win in so many ways.
We get to see who the best drivers really are. It gets rid of stupid sprints. The track gets off season attention and money. Fan interaction, and so on.
Make it a kart race (most if not all of them come from karts, after all). Or see them all in F2 cars. Or something like that.
I would also like to see a virtual championship with all the actual drivers too. Some of them are already into eSports, but wouldn’t it be nice to see them all compete in simulators? I don’t know, I think it may be fun to watch. :P
Karts probably wouldn’t be fast enough for those tracks, would they? It would be cool cus then it’s even cheaper and more accessible and the recruitment possibilities. But I think they are probably too slow.
F2 is the exact opposite.
I had in mind normal people cars like GTRs or R8s or something in that field. Still fast, still sporty, but anyone could drive em.
Yes, you’re right, and I explained myself awfully. I meant a kart race, but not actually in the F1 track. More like a side event to entertain people. Some circuits have kart tracks around that can be used. But now thinking about it, I’m realizing that a kart track can’t probably accommodate the amount of people wanting to see the race. So, let’s forget about my dumb idea. Yours is actually good and feasible. XP
I’m going straight in there with the controversial ‘I’d change the 2021 result’.
At least, I would change the decisions made by Masi at the end of the race. Not just straight up take the title off Max.
But I know that’s not really the spirit of your question. So to follow that, I’d just get rid of sprint races.
What you’re saying about not simply taking away Max’ title is probably the reason Mercedes thought better of going to court over this.
You just can’t say with 100% certainty that Hamilton would’ve won the race under different circumstances, it wouldn’t hold up in court. The only thing they probably could’ve achieved would’ve been to invalidate the race result, but that wouldn’t have changed the outcome of the championship.
I mean, had the race finished under the safety car as it ought to have done then we can say that Lewis would have won the race and the championship
We’d assume, yes. And I’m not a lawyer, but I don’t think this would hold up in court. There’s a non-zero chance Lewis’ car would’ve died during the last lap driving slowly, for example.
I mean, courts don’t work on the basis of non-zero chances.
What I’m saying is that they probably can’t “invent” a race result in court by fantasizing about how it could’ve been.
And I’m saying extrapolating one safety car lap forward is not ‘fantasizing’
Yep, exactly. Nothing to say Lewis wouldn’t have crashed behind the safety car. Unlikely? Sure. But not guaranteed. I’m happy for max and I feel sorry for him that it will always be brought up alongside his first title. There will always be that imaginary asterisks there.
Someone else commented that it would have been the same if it was the other way and it was Max that got screwed. I agree, I think it was just Masi trying to make it exciting. But that doesn’t change the fact it was completely wrong.
If the situation was reversed, the same exact thing would more than likely have happened. What Masi did was fucked though.
I completely agree. Masi tried to make it exciting and fucked up massively.
Relax. Have you ever watched a soccer match? There are at least half a dozen errors by the referee in each match that can influence the outcome of a match. Even with the video referee. Sometimes it is in your favor , sometimes it is not, deal with it. Max won and he deserved it.
This wasn’t an error, it was a deliberate missing out the rules to create a dramatic ending. it’s not the same as a referee missing an offside call.
That was the entire season though, its way more complicated than 1 race
I can’t think of another point in the season where the race director chose to misinterpret the rules to change the result of the race?
Get rid of track limits. I never want to hear those words again. Put a tire barrier in the corner you don’t want people to cut. automatically sanction people who cut the corner and do it immediately. Add an extra bit of asfalt that drivers have to drive on as soon as the have cut a corner, so they loose 5 seconds per lap when they do that. Be creative.
They always say the asphalt corners and run offs are for safety, which I get. I have always figured there should be a grass/gravel moat though. Get a meter or so of stuff the drivers don’t want to drive on right at the edge of the track. The. Turn back on to asphalt. That way if they really fuck it up they are safe but it keeps the drivers from tipping a toe over the line.
Get a meter or so of stuff the drivers don’t want to drive on right at the edge of the track
mines.
In the drivers’ briefings tell the drivers that a construction crew has mistakenly dropped a box of nails off their truck on some random unknown portion of runoff outside of track limits.
We do a little trolling
Reintroduce another tyre supplier on top of Pirelli forcing competition rather than the artificial throttling of tyre life we get now in order to make racing closer. I am sick of Pirelli being told what to do with tyres to introduce competition. Lets have the cars being able to max out the tyres for longer. Make it mandatory that the grid is evenly split between brands and not by PU.
It was bad during Michaels time with Bridgestone as Bridgestone only made tyres for Michael and Michael tested endlessly to provide data to improve the tyres (and rest of the car). Testing is limited now, although we will probably need a few testing days just for tyres over and above the current schedule.
But the issue is the FIA wants to have a certain tyre degradation, how would a second supplier bound by the same rules solve anything?
US GP 2005.
That’s why we will never see two tyre manufacturers again. And I agree with that. F1 wants certain degredation. It’s not a manufacturer problem. Pirelli can make a tyre that will last the entire race. F1 doesn’t want it. They want tyre strategy.
Ofc you can want to change that. But it’s for good reason we are where we are with tyres
Bring back proper defending going into corners - no more of this stupid one defensive move and then just let the other driver sail past. Make them work for it.
Oh and single lap hotlap for qualifying with the order drawn by lottery. Stop them complaining about traffic.
Make the cars lighter and smaller.
No changing tires during a red flag.
I was tempted to say no working on the car AT ALL during a red but I’ll settle for just the tires.
Edit: for clarification, a red flag for an accident. Obviously a red for weather is a different situation.
Might not be a popular change but I would like to see less races. Feels like there are way too many and some of the newer street courses aren’t that great. One of the reasons I follow IMSA more than F1 is that there were only 11 races last year. For me that made each race weekend something to look forward to.
More tyre manufacturers, less street circuits, reduction in car size just to name a few
I knew there would be an anorak somewhere.
Counting to 1 is quite difficult for some…
More tyre manufacturers
No one else wants to supply tires that purposely destroy themselves.
The running of a sport like a business. I don’t want authoritarian regimes sportswashing their crimes by paying for a big race. I don’t want rights-holders playing with formats and locations in order to promote their brand for a new target audience. I don’t want to have to pay through the nose to watch my favourite sport because a rich corp bought up the broadcasting rights.
I despise the very concept of sponsors and advertising, but I can at least acknowledge that it pays the bills for my best boys to race their colourful cars. All the rest can fuck right off!
I think the success of features based on calculated track position - like DRS and the Virtual Safety Car - proves that the time has come for Mario Kart style power-up cubes. Project them onto AR displays in the drivers’ helmets, and show them on the TV feeds.
- Mushroom allows the driver to cut corners and speed over track limits.
- Squid ink appears in the field of view of all other drivers’ visors.
- Verstappen gets blue-shelled and all his power cuts out until he’s stationary!
- etc.
Call me crazy, but I think in 10 years time you’ll be looking back on this post as prescient.
