F1 isn't what it used to be last century. Races were nail biting epic contests, cars visibly improved every season, drivers were international celebrities dicing with real life ending risk, and passionate fans filled the stadiums. Modern races are just a procession of the same few people each weekend in global rich social events.
Literally everything you've said is still true. Formula 1 stopped being like that in the 70s at the latest. Mercedes are too dominant, but there is nearly always a dominant team in the history of F1. The MP4/4's records were set in the 80s for god’s sake.
A Minardi won a race this year (They're called Alpha Tauri now)
It was still quite watchable in the '90s, but at some point overtaking got really difficult, and then it got a bit boring.
Its still a great way to spend a couple of hours on a lazy Saturday afternoon though. In the UK at least, TV coverage of F1 benefitted from having possibly the best theme tune (the outro from The Chain by Fleetwood Mac), and one of the all-time greatest commentators (Murray Walker). Paired with the colour, travel, celebrity and danger of the sport, it made a really compelling TV package.
There was a lot of crazy development in the 80s and early 90s with carbon fibre, aerodynamics, turbos, automatic gearboxes and active suspension. I think from mid 90s on a lot of innovation got killed by regulation.
There is orders of magnitude more engineering-hours put into a car these days but it has to be through very narrow directions.
Ideally you want rules that allow smaller teams to come up with mad ideas and not big teams but it's not feasible for the sport. This is why they have finally managed to bring in the cost cap.
I think the mad ideas are missing from F1 these days. They put a lot of effort into polishing small details but what made F1 exciting in the past were big things like six wheelers, ground effect, turbo vs non turbo, active suspension and so on.
Are you forgetting that Mercedes turned up to pre-season testing with a double axis steering wheel? That's active toe adjustment, driver controlled even.
The races may be more or less interesting depending on preference, but everything else you've written here is false.
Cars still visibly improve each season, as demonstrated by the fact track records continue to fall each year.
Drivers are still international celebrities, and it's still a very dangerous sport (the fact there are far fewer deaths is a triumph, but it still occurs - Jules Bianchi died from a crash in 2014 and last year in F2 Anthoine Hubert succumb to a hideous incident). If your issue is that too few drivers are dying, then I really don't know what to say because mitigating that risk is a hugely positive thing.
Fans still fill the track grandstands (with the exception of some of the newest venues which may not sell out as easily). Just look at Monza 2019, with the sea of Tifosi under the podium. That passion is still there for a big number of fans, and as the sport is evolving (and more interesting young drivers come through) the fanbase is changing and growing more diverse.
Modern F1 has an extreme amount of simulation behind it that just didn’t exist last century. Whether you can make a car that is good or not is a factor of budget you can spend on engineering teams, wind tunnel time, etc., instead of what whacky idea you can come up with that makes the car better.
Budget caps introduced this year will hopefully start to level the playing field once the 2022 regs kick in.
From what I see, budget caps and limits on testing reach the opposite of levelling the field: they make it harder for slower teams to catch up. So these days whoever makes the best car after big regulations change wins with little challenge until next change of regulations. First RB, now Mercs.
Not to the degree seen in F1 since the start of the turbo hybrid era. Scrappy underdog teams could score wins with creative, out of the box thinking that was possible with a small budget. Today the only time you see a team with a budget less than Mercedes, Ferrari or Red Bull winning is because of some act of god during the race.
Seems to me that should be ok to have a class where teams can throw money at it without real limits. Sure, that shouldn’t be everything, but if they want F1 to be the fastest, fanciest stuff possible, restricting investment to improve competitiveness doesn’t seem like a great move.
That’s kind of the running joke in the world of F1 fans, you have Mercedes, Red Bull, and I guess now Renault (because Ferrari is doing really bad this season) in F1, everyone else is F1.5.
The problem is there’s only so many manufacturers that have the desire to spend that much money. Especially on what is obviously dead-end technology wise, so it’s nothing more than a marketing spend that requires them to actually have a chance at winning to be worth it.
Honestly I’d buy the rumors that Mercedes was debating pulling out of F1 if the new cost caps didn’t mean the team will run at a profit instead of a ~$30m expense after sponsorships and prize money are taken into account. Hell, they just won the Formula E championship the first year they were a manufacturer branded team, and they know electric vehicles are the way forward.
That's because of the emphasis on reliability, made worse by limits on components and a scoring system that makes it much harder to catch up after DNF. In the past a quick but unreliable car could get to some high place thanks to luck.
Quite. Most innovation over the history of F1 has come from the lower-funded teams (Brabham, Lotus, Williams), and is quickly banned if Ferrari or Maclaren can't make it work. Ferrari and the other well-funded teams have the money to eke out ever-diminishing returns; Lotus and Williams have to rely on "making turbos work", "ground effects", or "introducing aero", or "dynamic suspension", not to mention strangled-in-the-crib tech such as CVT or fan-assisted aero.
Drivers still are international celebrities and they still dice with death. Someone died in an F2 car just last year.
But you’re right that it has gotten far safer. Drivers walk away from horrific crashes at insane speeds.
And modern cars despite being less powerful post lap times that boggle the mind. The aero is bonkers. Drivers regularly pull 5G laterally in corners. If it weren’t for rules, I bet we’d see cornering blackouts like fighter pilots get.
To understand why F1 is attractive, watch this speed comparison video, it’s 9 years old so more powerful engines, but slower lap times: https://youtu.be/K2cNqaPSHv0
As for rich people ... you can say the same about any sport. Why watch basketball? It’s just a bunch of millionaires running around in shorts
I don't think that's likely considering that they are mostly laying down in the car with the feet only slightly below their head, so relatively flat overall. In braking, blood would be forced to their legs/feet, so you'd see gray/black out.
You might have gotten it right. I believe the major cause of redout is blood rushing into the eyes/veins in the eyes bursting. The head is still more or less level, even if the body isn't. So it's still very much "eyeballs out" G.
Breaking G is also more or less required for the drivers to break properly.
All breaking force has to be generated by the driver as per regulations, and the pedal requires over 100kg for maximum breaking, all while modulating the force precisely to extract the maximum without locking up[1].
So they rely on the breaking G forces making their legs heavy.
Good post but I don't understand the comparison. F1 is faster, we get it. The racing in MotoGP is so much better.
I caught the start of F1 Mugello this year and I turned off after 7 laps of safety car. (Was the first real lap 11?) It's embarrassing. The amazing additional crash under safety car wasn't the kind of entertainment I was seeking.
And what are the rules for track limits in F1? I understand that braking when running wide - if not an outright incident - is safer with a "normal" grippy surface, but now it appears that both sides of the ripple strip are in bounds!? I think many people agree, independent of alternate formulas/vehicles, that the last 10+ years of F1 is questionable progress and the races are too often outright boring.
Track limits tend to vary from ciruit to circuit (or even corner to corner). The race director publishes the "rules" for a given weekend, defining the track limits for the event.
Agreed speeds are insane, but its less interesting than when people were overtaking more. The rich people bit was a dig at Abu Dhabi & Azerbaijan which seem mostly empty.
> The rich people bit was a dig at Abu Dhabi & Azerbaijan which seem mostly empty.
Tho that's not really a new thing, it's been more of a "rich people" sport for a while, at least for watching live, as races often happen in rather "exclusive" and expensive locations like Monte Carlo.
That's why the people watching F1 live, shown during broadcasts, usually look nothing like football fans but rather like rich people on an expensive vacation, at least that's what stuck most with me from watching a bit of F1 in the 90s.
That's why MotoGP is so much more interesting. Not unusual to see multiple passes for the lead on the last lap alone, and the top, say, 8-10 riders to be within a couple seconds at the finish.
F1 is more interesting to read about than watch. Quick fix: limit braking efficiencies. The ridiculously short braking zones make opportunities for fighting very limited, so I’d love to see racers having to be more strategic in their driving. It’s not really a spectator sport, it’s a technical contest. MotoGP exists for racing and action.
With the automobile market transitioning to EV, it is inevitable that F1 will be rebooted as an EV contest. Expect Honda to re-enter then, particularly if MotoGP goes EV first.
Formula E already exists. As a PR play, other power unit manufacturers may follow Honda. Volkswagen put a lot of pressure on them with their announcement last year. However, I don’t think (and hope) that ICE racing will go anywhere. The engineering challenges and reliability challenges are part of racing that EVs remove from the equation. I don’t understand why EVs can’t have their place as personal and commercial vehicles and racing can keep ICEs in competition vehicles.
> I don’t understand why EVs can’t have their place as personal and commercial vehicles and racing can keep ICEs in competition vehicles.
I'm sure ICE racing will continue in one form or another, but Formula 1 is enormously expensive; manufacturers justify it in terms of the prestige it brings them and the R&D work that can trickle-down into road cars. If the engine technology is completely different then both of those benefits become a lot more questionable.
The teams use less than $50 million on engines yearly. The remainder of the budget is spend on the cars chassis, aero, suspension ect. That cost would not go away with a switch to an electric power train.
Q: Are chassis/aero/suspension innovations relevant to ICE cars? If so, would they still be relevant to EVs given that EVs have different constraints (e.g. EVs have a different weight distribution to ICE cars, as batteries are heavy and non-moving, whereas (SPECULATION) fuel tanks have fuel sloshing around inside like a bathtub)?
Formula 1 chasses are way different to standard car chasses so presumably yes, but it really seems like an assumption to be careful about.
Disclaimer: The following is my own speculation, and not to be taken as hard facts! I don't think it's the technology in the cars that are relevant, as much as the tooling around developing the car is. For instance advances in CFD simulations will help in developing cars, ICE and EV. In any case, road relevance is an odd reason to do racing, as rarely do anything directly trickle down to the road car division.
The issue is going to be that racing is where vehicle manufacturers go to push the limits of their cutting edge technology. Which they don't fundamentally create for racing but for the versions of it that trickle into production vehicles. If everyone starts expecting the decline of ICE vehicles in the market, who is going to be putting a lot of resources into continuing to improve them?
> their cutting edge technology. Which they don't fundamentally create for racing but for the versions of it that trickle into production vehicles
Nah. Open-wheel racing has not been about actual research, already, for more than 20 years. The standard-bearer itself, Ferrari, was a racing team first and a manufacturer later; even today they are not in F1 for research but for marketing purposes (merchandising is basically their prime source of revenue). Open-wheel is largely a show, and it will continue to run as long as the show gets viewers, one way or the other.
The big one is that all drivers drive the same chassis and battery, and with strict regulations regarding the engine. Pilots may as well all drive the same car. They also added Mario Kart style boosts. This is a game, mostly intended to provide entertainment and show off the pilot skills.
F1 was as much about constructors as it was about pilots, and in fact, being a pilot was as much about tuning and working with engineers as it was about driving. Technical advances driven by competition between constructors made the sport.
To replicate that with Formula E, constructors should be able to make everything from aerodynamics to the batteries. Have regulations that allows for technical breakthroughs to happen, with the minimum amount of limitations to ensure the competition still looks like car racing and to allow pilots to get old.
They have continued to open up the car each season, and there are real differences between them.
The "Mario Kart" style boosts serve a functional strategic purpose that is similar to the strategic elements involved in pitting in F1.
FE is the racing series driving things forward technologically now. This is why F1 can't attract new manufacturers to the series, and why FE has attracted several. There is a serious interest in EV tech now and the EV tech lives in Formula E.
Also the racing is just flat out better in FE. The last 5 years of F1 have been largely a parade. This year has been more interesting to be fair, but still, the racing just isn't as good.
Formula E also has a monopoly on FIA sanctioned all-electric single seater racing for 25 seasons, so F1 cannot go full EV until 2039 at minimum unless contracts get renegotiated.
Will be interesting to see what happens to F1 as a result, Indycar as well. Petrolheads can whine about electric racing all they want, but engine suppliers are losing interest in making gas engines when the consumer market is in a shift away from them. Even Ferrari will have to adapt to the times at some point.
So, right now F1 has hybrid engines. Is there a power mix they can't cross before they infringe on Formula E? Or is it just literally, has to have an engine on board? Racing teams have never been shy about running right up to the edge of defined rules, and also running wild in undefined areas.
Well that is exactly what Formula 1 is. Unlike NASCAR or Indycar where everything is prescribed, there is a formula which sets the outlines of the box and teams are free to play within that box. The box has just gotten really small in the past couple of decades.
This is what I've always been curious about. I've never been a massive F1 fan or followed it closely, but I've always viewed it as being the absolute pinnacle of what can be achieved with a racing machine. So to me, it seems odd to add all of these extra rules and regulations that may stifle reaching even further.
I'd love to see a motorsport where there was maybe one rule where you have a budget within $X amount of dollars, but other than that, go nuts, come up with innovative new technologies and racing methods and see what happens.
I don't know, I stopped watching it when Barrichello and Schumacher deliberately swapped places on the penultimate lap of a race. It was always clear there were team orders but that incident was so egregious that I just stopped watching. Also it was getting a bit soporific.
F1 has had very few years where one team didn't totally dominate. Some of those years were the best ever and showcased the drama, technology, power and talent which makes this such a great sport (88-89 is one example).
