[Captain Ahab Jr]

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