F1 has been through a lot. I loved a lot of things about it. They used to have wonderful screaming V12 engines, and stop for a splash and go of fuel and tires every 15-20 laps. Accidents in the pits happened, but it was racing. They had fire extinguishers and ambulances. F1 has gotten a lot safer over the years. A crash at nearly 200 mph lets the driver get out and walk away afterwards. That's great engineering. The problem today is they've made the engines too small and unreliable, and shoved a couple hundred pounds of lithium battery right behind the driver's back, leading to actual burns from the heat according to live driver reports. They have these batteries to give a torque boost so the F1 cars can pass each other under certain circumstances. Its hackneyed. They also force drivers to be starving in order to win races.
They've also removed cylinders from V12 down to V10, then V8. Now they're V6 engines, and severely limited in capacity and RPM and fuel supply. Its not as fun as it used to be. Modern drivers with a simpler V8 or turbo V6 and no hybrid and bring back the variable geometry aerodynamics (moving wings and flaps) would return straight line speed and better cornering, and when the flaps fail, a wreck.
In 2014 after years of good safety, following decades of two deaths per year in F1, a driver died in a freak accident of extremely unusual circumstances. There was a typhoon, the track got flooded, a car slid off the track and the tractor came out to lift it off the course. Under Yellow, a driver going around the corner lost control and hit the tractor in a really awkward angle and died when his head hit the boom in JUST the wrong place. Its a million to one accident, if not worse odds. Ridiculous, really. F1 has responded to this accident and lawsuit by the drivers family by ruining the cars, adding a roll bar to the top of the car. Alternative option is a windshield, which has more drag. Both options are ruining the car. F1 is OPEN TOP racing. Open top, open wheel, no fenders, maximum lightness, minimum safety. Like bullfighting, F1 racing is supposed to be risking your life. It isn't supposed to be safe. I suspect the drivers ghost is pissed at his family for ruining the sport he loved.
If you want to race under a roof, go to Le Mans. Or IMSA, which came back after a couple decades rest. There's even a series based on it, called ALMS (American Le Mans Series). The high end of computer simular racing is the game Forza (versions 3-6) racing. The video game is based on ALMS, and the cars are licensed through the series. Those are fun to drive in a simulator, and the race tracks are interesting, what you can see of them. IMSA has been around for decades. I used to watch IMSA races with my Dad, and they were fun. Paul Newman raced in IMSA at Sears Point, which is the name of the track near Sonoma, CA. They gave it a bunch of different names since then, but its always been Sears Point, named for the rancher who sold the land at the south end of the Sonoma Mountains. Its a hard track to watch a race because its a road course, and somewhat narrow. IndyCar finishes its series at Sears Point in September/October. I think they'd benefit from a few more races in the series, and more of the tracks getting smoothed so speeds come up. Some of the tracks are pretty bumpy, and that hurts the racing. This is a really good idea, track owners. You can then sell more race day tickets to private car owners who want to see how fast their M6 goes. The Nurburgring isn't the only place to drive really fast. We could do more of that here. Willow Springs has track days.
If F1 is going to become IMSA with smaller engines and international courses where they demand a billion $$ in fees for the right to have the F1 circus race on your track, I just don't see much of a future for the series. It got bought out by Liberty Media but they haven't fixed all its problems. They're keeping the batteries. They're keeping the high ticket prices. They added rollbars and ruined the spirit of the racing series. The haven't even considered returning to refueling and getting back better engines. Its all about the tire compounds and pit delta. Boring!
F1 could save itself if it did the following:
- No Roll Bars. Death is always a possibility.
- Active Aero, not just the rear wing.
- Refuelling.
- Choices of engine format: V8 normally aspirated or V6 with turbo, and increase to 2 L. Possibly more to get the torque back.
- Allow drivers to have healthy body weight. Most are starving.
In comparison, for open wheel racing in the Americas, we have IndyCar. IndyCar is also a cart racing series, and use bigger enginers than F1, which also means they're faster, despite not looking like it. They have better aero downforce so can pass easier, and go faster on the straights than F1, a fact which is embassing to the World Motor Sport FIA bosses. The problem with IndyCar is their ability to promote themselves isn't as good, and their camerawork isn't as good either. These are fixable problems and will probably continue to improve in time.
A local boy from the town where I live won the Indy 500 race in his rookie year after a couple years being 3rd fiddle in F1. He convinced Takuma Sato to join him on the Andretti Team (Michael Andretti is the son of legendary F1 world champion Mario Andretti) which runs something like 6 cars. Sato won the Indy 500 last year.
IndyCar is also a business, and the cars have hilarious sponsors specific to the USA or Canada. In the old days they used to have some races in other countries, if I remember correctly, but most were here in the USA, within reasonable overnight driving distance of most of the population for at least one race. That and all the TV coverage has kept the series alive, even through its problems with Indianapolis Speedway suing the series, and drivers refusing to compete in unsafe cars. Stuff has happened which hurt the series. The current limitation for IndyCar is all of them race on a single-maker chassis, and a choice of maybe 3 engines. Its not as interesting as F1 used to be, back when there were more choices and not so much obvious and boring cheating, though to be fair, F1 has always had cheating. And some teams become dominant and stay there for years. Red Bull used to win all the races. Then it was Ferrari. Now its Mercedes. It isn't fun to watch and the cameras have been ignoring the leaders of the F1 races til the final lap. This is a clue that the interest in F1 is waning.
IndyCars have largely identical cars, but different drivers. They have a running start rather than a standing start like F1, which is less exciting, but also less likely to cause a crash. Identical cars keeps the cars close together. Winning is based on driver skill and mechanical circumstances like damage or blowing an engine or using too much fuel. Rossi won at Indy 500 because he did an economy run and coasted to a stop just past the finish line, which is what matters. Being first is still being first. There's also tire wear and fuel stop dropping your position, since the stops are relatively long compared to the 2-3 SECONDS in F1, which only swaps tires and sometimes a nose.
Indycar is a different sort of event from F1. When you watch IndyCar they basically throw a big concert and party first, then you watch the race, then there's another party after. In comparison F1 is almost religious. Before the start it has a model-holding-a-number-sign by each car, and the crews of mysterious mechanic-priests in their identical uniforms scamper around doing mysterious priestly mechanic things. News crews from around the world circulate. There's announcers for the major languages there. This being the USA, we see the English language broadcast, which is mostly English announcers in their booth, and their lad on the ground with a camera crew, chasing down drivers after their car breaks during the race. Then the drivers get in and strap on all the safety harnesses. A mechanic with a battery and spinner rod starts the car, which has been running preheated cooland fluid to warm up the engine and get the parts to unseize, since at room temperature they are locked up. They have to be hot to move. The cars do a parade lap, and the tires previously under heating blankets get cold. That part is important.
Then they line up the cars in order and some officials certify they're lined up right for the start. Then red lights glow one after another and when the red lights vanish, the race starts. This start is unique to F1. They go from a resting stop to 100 mph by the first corner, sometimes even faster. Their tires try to warm up in that distance so they are sticky enough to grip around the corner, but by the first or second corner, several cars will be wrecked. This is very typical, that first corner wreck. It has to be heart breaking for all those teams having gotten to this point and then the driver either hits or gets hit by some other driver with a similar problem or minding their own race. The course often goes to yellow behind the relatively slow AMG Mercedes pace car. The cars line up behind it, in order. Some pull into the pits to change tires and go to the back of the column and will need to pass cars, who will also eventually pit and lose positions. Then pace car goes off the course when those first wrecks are cleared and then they race again, until the next wreck leaves debris on the track. The debris is sharp, and punctures tires. Race series are LOST on getting a flat tire, or that first corner wreck. At Singapore last year, Vettel and his teammate Raikonnen drove around a slightly slower car and wrecked all three, removing Ferrari from contention in the series for the remaining two dozen races. Hamilton, ahead of them, won.
This is the crash that prevented Vettel from having a chance to win the world F1 championship. He tried. He got close, but Hamilton won by not being in this wreck.
Not all car racing series start the above two ways. Le Mans used to have the drivers RUN to their cars from the pit wall, jump in, start the car, and put on their belts as they drive. Le Mans is amazing, and dangerous, and the track has been slowed down but there are American tracks with a similar layout where the cars hit 170 mph for a minute and then slow WAY down to make the turn. Le Mans actually used some farm roads closed for the race day, and the houses it goes past are actual people's homes, not set decorations. Its only two days a year, so why not? Lots of racing series have some city street courses, including F1 and IndyCar. Le Mans is one 24 hour race a year. F1 drivers who are getting mocked in F1 can win at Le Mans and shut down the complaints. Sometimes cars aren't very good. Fernando Alonso has been suffering through Honda's engineering problems with the Hybrid engine. Keep in mind that Honda won F1 with its first car engine because Soichiro Honda liked racing. He also built scooter motors for the SuperCub and the CVCC engine and later 4-cylinder that made his car company famous. But his first engine was for F1, and they won for a long time with variations of it. A great engineer can do that. Not so much today. With Soichiro dead, Honda is full of apologies and excuses and their engines have to be detuned to "slow" or explode. That's not good engineering. Alonso has paid the price, and in non-hybrid Honda engines he's lead laps at 240 mph at Indy 500... at which point the engine exploded. So did another Honda on that same team. Sigh. At least it didn't just stop because it was tired like in F1. When a car stops for no obvious reason during an F1 race the audience jeers and boos. This is another thing F1 organizers should pay more attention to. So far, F1 has been a negative demonstration of hybrid car technology. It has shown it to be unreliable junk most of the time.
F1 has become about tire wear and pit Delta. They don't refuel. They rarely pass. It isn't interesting enough. Bigger engines and refuelling would restore the fun of the series. Active Aero would help a lot too. Even supercar makers have that now. Why not use it? Its neat, and it works reliably enough. Maybe ALMS will use it first. I hope so. It is interesting. I don't see Liberty Media caring about all the different fans writing to protest the boredom of F1 racing today. It used to be better, more fun, louder, more exciting. It used to be a sport.
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