Checo is simply a seat blocker. His move to Red Bull was freakish and now keeping him in the seat is tedious. I've heard all the "whys" and none include, "he's the best driver available".
Best drivers in the seat or F1 starts looking like IndyCar where a last name, a corporate sponsor and a big bag-O- cash gets you a ride.

We already have that series: it's called Formula E. How many people watch those races?

I've heard race drivers admit that most F1 laps are done
at 7/10ths to save tires etc.
Maybe if they didn't have to slow down to
3 mph in the pit lane, they could pit more often
and actually RACE again.

it doesn't matter how good a driver is if he can't
push the limits of the car because he needs to nurse
it around for 40 laps.
It doesn't matter if you are faster or not if you are afraid
to try to pass for fear of wearing out your tires.

Who wins the races and the championship?
The guy who's the best at managing the tires of course. :rolleyes:

They even have to pace the cars in their 20 lap sprint races.
How messed up is that?
Make it easier and faster to pit and they'd do it once in a while.
Or they could just award trophies and points for qualifying and forget the racing.
They either need to get rid of the restrictions that cause the races to turn into parades,
or change the tires.
That could go one of two ways:
Make them last forever no matter how hard they push
so the drivers could race on them, or make them fall off
a cliff in performance after a certain number of laps.
I mean have them stay good until lap 15 and then lose
5 seconds a lap.
Heck, make them go flat after 20 laps for all I care,
at least it would make it interesting again.
And what's up with the stupid tire restrictions?
Having to run two different tire specs and only having a set number of
sets for a weekend, all from the same manufacturer.
It's F1 for pete's sake.

Tell them they have 5 or 6 options to pick from and can
run them any way they want,
and can use as many as they want.
That would help.

There was a time when F1 was considered sprint racing,
and endurance races like Le Mans was where they paced
the cars to save them and for reliability.
Welcome to bizarro world.

/rant

Great rant, very impressed

Pit stops take 1.8secs or around 2ish if the guys are slow

A friend ran Ferrari F1 tyre testing programme during the Bridgestone vs Michelin tyre war unlimited testing era

I'm sure he told me they burned through 30,000 tyres in one season but I'm going to double check this

If you think tire management is bad, wait til 2026 when they have big power management strategies:

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Oh boy so we get to watch them "race" as they try to hypermile. Efficiency races suck.

David and Glen, please accept my profuse apologies ;)

Been neck deep in the trenches of this impending 2026 PU war for over a year now :rolleyes:

Starting to feel a bit fatigued by 2026 before 2024 has even finished

Not my 1st F1 war but I'm battled hardened so will keep fighting a good fight and pushing new recruits forward into the F1 meat grinder :D

My own doing, got no one to blame but myself, just can't say no when asked to help with an impossible motorsport challenge :)

Well then, that deal Haas has got with Toyota should prove big dividends. Have Toyota bring over all those Prius engineers they've been honing for a couple decades.

There's an old saying in sales:

"you always screw over your best customers".
This is usually uttered immediately after a strategy meeting.
It means a business inadvertently ignores or neglects it's established,
best customers by shifting too much focus onto attracting new customers.

F1 is following that model to a T.
They are screwing over their loyal fans in hopes of
attracting newer, younger fans.

They do it with rules like getting rid of fueling,
hybrid technology, fuel usage rate restrictions,
V6 engines, and hundreds of other dumb regulations
designed to put less emphasis on performance and
put it more on everyone getting as participation trophy.
They are trying to do it with DEI but it hasn't taken hold yet
(except during FP1 aka DEI Friday).

The cars have become HUGE, complicated, expensive, and frankly boring.

Can't afford to compete?
We'll put spending restrictions on the good teams.

Can't keep up?
We'll slow the good teams down.


They are deathly afraid of being irrelevant with
coming generations so they are killing themselves before that
can happen by ruining the "brand" for loyal fans.

The beauty of F1 is that is evolved from gentlemen racers
who races for the love and thrill of it.
They, along with certain manufacturers who participated
to prove how good they were, pushed the state of the art
in performance.
Not woke, not green, not PC, just pure performance.

But somewhere along the line it ceased to be racing and became
a show designed to generate money.

All that matters to those in charge is increasing the flow of money.
And that is what will ultimately make the "brand" irrelevant.

Boy that’s a lot of wining for one of the best seasons in a long time. lol

Bob, couldn't agree more but F1 is all $hit, Red Karen told you so! :D

Love a romantics view of F1, it changed from racing to a business easily over 30yrs ago

F1 went bad when they moved the engine in the rear and stopped painting cars in national colours when sponsors arrived

Like saying NASCAR went bad when they stopped using cars for moonshine running :rolleyes:

Can't stop progress, good or bad, just got to embrace it or stay grumpy and life is to short to be grumpy ;)

Uh oh, someone's meal ticket is being
exposed,
time to break out the personal insults.

Real classy.

My meal ticket will be around a lot longer than I'll be eating from the F1 table

OK, maybe Karen was an insult, sorry, hope I didn't offend any Karen's, that's British humour just to be clear ;)

Your posts never offer up any valid suggestions on how to improve a sport you're obviously very passionate about

Happy to discuss ways to improve F1 as in some ways it needs it and always happy to offer up an insiders perspective and insight into how F1 has ended up where it is

F1 is always evolving, trying to stay a step ahead of the rest of the world while trying to stay on the top of the mountain of world championship motorsport in an ever increasing woke world

Enjoy it for what it is because when it's gone, all you can watch is AI generated racing, you'll wish for racing like we have today

really?

Those sound to me like suggestions to improve the racing.

But you are right about one thing, I am passionate about F1 racing.
Have been since the late 80's and the emergence of
turbocharged 1400 hp 1.5L engines and ground effects.
Races were won by guts, not by pacing themselves.

I enjoy watching older races on the F1 channel.
Some of my favorites where when the ferrari would
dash into the pits for a quick splash fuel and 4 new tires
and then kill it for 15 laps.
He'd make up the time lost from pitting and then some,
and would do it over and over.
He could do that because he was really good at
running flat out and because the tires would fall off quickly.

It made sense to run flat out and wear to the tires
and then replace them with new.
The time gained outweighed the time lost and
the racing was great. Unless you didn't like Ferrari.

I also recall watching later races when Schumacher was at merc and
they had changed the tires (2009) among other "equalizing"
aero rules changes.

They became less of sprint races and became more of endurance-type processions.

He was no longer dominating but drivers like hamilton emerged.
Why?
Because MS was FAST but hamilton was better at
managing tire wear.
And fast was no longer as important.
That's when the sport started the current downhill slide IMO,
around 2009-2010.

Pretty much what I outlined in the above rant.

I'm not a big fan of DRS BTW,
It was well-intentioned but is a band-aid for a deeper problem:
While making it easier to pass on the straights,
it also discourages pitting and encourages cruising around for 40 laps.

Solve the real issue and DRS would not be necessary.
By that I mean allow ground effects but go back to small wings
that are less effected by cars in front of you so you won't NEED DRS.
I believe it would also improve the racing in the corners.
Huge wings help the car in clean air and hurt everyone behind.
So they get in line and hang back a several seconds to save the tires.
And we try not to get bored for a half hour until the next pit window.

We all love you here, Captain. We do. But try not to be offended by what so many of us fans feel has become of the sport. I’ve literally not met ONE fan who thinks F1 has become “better” since 2014. Well, let me edit that. It HAS become safer - that’s for sure - so in that context, yes F1 has become better. Definitely.

Love you guys too, everyone here is why I pop onto this thread to share my experiences

Not been offended at all and agree with you guys the racing in F1 is not best ever

I actually agree with nearly everything Red has pointed out but unfortunately most of Red's proposed improvements to make the racing more exciting are just unviable so not really options to consider

Despite doing what I do I'm not a F1-centric fan, just a fan of cars and motorsport who loves pushing engineering/technical innovation beyond current limits

My biggest passion is saving weight in the pointless pursuit of improving car performance

What F1 is very good at is turning the simple into complicated, too many clever people involved, simple is harder and for most of the time not faster. F1 is all about being fastest so teams are ruthless about finding ever more complicated ways of exploiting the technical rules

I was at Ferrari, working in their skunk works, future projects design group when the current hybrid PU rules were introduced in 2014. The level of complexity this brought to the design, building, race strategy of a F1 car is difficult to put into words

As an example, the steering wheel I designed for 2014, was actually just a box with highly complex internal electronics with handles and launch control/gear changing levers attached to it.

Ignoring all the mechanical function of the wheel, it had a large display screen, many lights, recieved a huge amount of info., 14x push button electronic switches, 5x lever electronic switches, 2x optical electronic switches, 8x rotary switches controlling 2x micro processors that could control 330x different car functions from pitstop speed limiter to an active diff and everything inbetween

Was manufactured from intricate moulded carbon fibre and many complex shaped titanium, aluminium, steel, PEEK machined parts to make it as light as possible

Cost was around $55k each

Complexity didn't end with the design, only getting started, complex software needed for the best PU stratergy that the steering wheel could control, fault management scenario's, launch stratergy, gear change stratergy, diff stratergy etc etc

Just for launch simulation to help the driver train for different start positions we designed/built a small simulator the driver could take with him around the world with a simulation program created by the Italian Olympic Authority

Now consider this level of design complexity/level of dacross the full car, this what an F1 car has evolved into beyond the simple shaped car you see racing on the TV

Worth mentioning, Nik 'the Greek' Tombasiz who is the FIA's single seater director in charge of enforcing/creating the car tech rules, is no fool but probably one of the cleverest people I've had the pleasure of working with

He and his group of clever guys have an impossible task as every team has much bigger teams of clever and some cases more clever people with more time available trying to think of ways to exploit loopholes to give their team an advantage.

I've been on both sides of the fence, writing and trying to exploit rules at world championship level, exploiting is much easier than writing, the FIA will nevervout think the teams so can only close down loopholes they missed when writing the rules

Not saying above is how it should be, just saying how it is

I seriously doubt many fans think the V6's sound better than the V10/12's of the past . Or that the size of the current F1 cars is too large and too heavy . In my opinion the only added weight should be for driver safety .

I have no problem admiting I am stuck in the past of F1 glory . I do still watch F1 and still enjoy it . But tire management races are not full on racing . Again my opinion.

It would be nearly impossible to loose me as an F1 fan since I've been one since I was a kid in the '70s when all I got was the rare glimpse on TV or in a magazine. I finally got to hear them in Dallas in 1984 and WOW! The sound was almost undescribable. The engine shriek, the huge bang on the gear shifts! I never got to hear the V10's in person but the V8 was pretty spectacular. You still needed ear plugs unlike the hybrids :(. So no, I won't be tuning out when they're 50% electric.

It is pretty frustrating when the racing gets really close at the close of one spec generation and then someone dominates for a while with the new spec.

Very cool story Capt. Interesting to get a glimpse of the inside challenges.

Now lets get back to wondering when MV will crash Lando... :)

I understand the political push for F1 to be "greener" but lets get real, just flying the vehicles, staff and equipment for the 20 teams for one race to the other side of the world has to be more CO2 in the air than I can imagine.

F1 is really about the very fastest race cars at the bleeding edge of technology. Tire use is an obvious thing to restrict how many tires a team can use, but I miss the days of coming in for multiple sets of new sticky tires and blistering lap times and lots of passing to get the pit stop time back, or just keep the lead.

The tire use is a minuscule carbon cost compared to the carbon cost of just the fans showing up.