FIA invites proposals to improve 2010

I'm not sure who said it, possibly Christian Horner, but it went something along the lines of "there's no point trying to fix the cars for more overtaking it's the circuits themselves that need to be looked at." Actually thinking about it, it may have been Patrick Head, a man who's opinion is one to be respected and listened to on a great many things. He went on to say that if you ask all the drivers about overtaking opportunities at each track they all say the same thing, "I think I can overtake here, here and here." all exactly the same. So making more of those opportunities or the characteristics of those parts of the tracks is probably the only way to increase overtaking.

As for what the Sepang CEO is saying, I think it's a very naive point of view. Malaysia is a, relatively, new country to F1 and in Europe the spectator may be considered more sophisticated in that the technical aspects of the sport are as much a part of the attraction as the racing itself. I, and I doubt I am alone, am interested in all aspects of the sport from the engineering, through the politics and back-stage shenanigans to the purity of Sunday and the race. I do hope his point of view is not indicative of the Malaysian fans as a whole as I suspect it isn't, those kind of people listen to marketing men more than actual fans anyway.

Personally I'm tired of seeing the cars nerfed and designers stifled with shoe-box regulations. Safety aside, the cars have become so, and it's a very relative so, easy to drive compared to cars of days gone by and the DNA of a champion is now missing that certain something that led Hemingway to include motor racing as one of only three true sports. No-one wants to see drivers, crew, marshals or spectators die but that safety fence being so far away from the edge of the cliff nowadays has diminished the completeness of today's champions and by further nerfing the cars for "the show", they do the sport a disservice in my most humble opinion.

You can't wind back the clock and un-invent aerodynamics so there will always be that "dirty air" effect. It's producing the circuits and the right kind of straight/corner interaction that's conducive to overtaking that needs to be looked at. Tilke has in the majority of cases got it wrong, they need to change their track man. Don't get me wrong, he has actually created some of the best hot lapping circuits ever. They are an immense challenge to driver and car individually and are, in most cases, an absolute pleasure to individually drive (from a sim point of view at least) but they are fundamentally flawed froma racing point of view. A greater proportion of the really great racing over the last couple of decades has been at the traditional circuits where mistakes are punished not Tilkedromes with corners that have a get out of jail free card on the outside.

Having said all that I would be more than happy if they could strike the right balance between safety, show, heritage and passion but I'm not convinced they ever will. As funny as it might sound but my ideal has already been envisioned although it was just a silly kids film and we'll never see real racing like that.
 
Cool post mate.

I would say that a good idea would be to add 3 meters of gravel between the track and the Tylke style tarmac runnofs, this will penalyze the cars going to wide and will be still safe.

Also, less dependant cars on aerodynamich and going back to floor efect.
 
I personally don't think it's the circuits, ye some are hard to overtake at of course but all the other series who race at most of these tracks have lots of overtaking and action in general, but when F1 hits the tracks they can't overtake much at all due to the dirty air and whatever else. It was better in 2009 as they could get a little closer however they still can't get close enough to make nice pass's untill the other driver makes a mistake or you have kers. I know Horner is a guy in F1 and said it's the circuits (He is the only guy though) But if you look at all the other series at at allot of these tracks they have lots of overtaking which would point the finger at F1 cars still having to much of the dirty air effect.
 
But I don't think that's anything they can ever really solve now. Not without completely renewing the formula and outlawing the rear wing or something like that. When Brawn and a few others found they could interpret the 2009 technical regulations to introduce the double diffuser they went to the technical working group to tell them. They all said this would negate most of the loss of downforce from the reduced sized rear wings and in turn would create roughly the same wake effect but they were dismissed. So if they aren't listening to information like that and acting on it then there doesn't seem to be the strength of will to properly sort it out.

In terms of the spectacle of F1, it needs wings, they can't go back to wingless cars now, they'd be simply too slow, over a lap, to be a credible contender for the apex of motor sport. Wings produce a wake and as far as I know there is no getting past that particular law of aerodynamics.

I agree with your point about the tracks but I'm not persuaded. Different classes/formulae have good racing because the formulae encourage it through homologation and restriction, not something I want to see in F1, we may as well replace it with A1GP.

The tracks themselves are driven differently, for want of a better phrase, in F1 than other classes/formulae and the creation of overtaking-friendly sequences may go some way to improving the overtaking. I think it's where they should be looking but as the article suggests, that is a long term solution and not the quick fix they seem to be seeking to find for 2010.

Another idea might be to go down a similar route to the IRL and a few other racing formula and introduce limited activation push to pass systems. It's proven technology and whilst not exactly championship defining in the IRL, it does have some potential to be that quick fix the FIA and the technical working group are after. It's a double edged sword though and without turbos it'd need to be based on allowing more revs which in turn eats into the ideal of running as few engines as possible. I suppose it could be seen as a trade off, performance over durability but the FIA has set it's sights on forcing the teams to make engines last not give them an excuse to break them.

It's a tough nut to crack and I'm sure there are lot's of different opinions out there as to what can or should be done. The bottom line is that our little debate here won't change a god damn thing but still, it passes the time and it's nice to hear each others opinions.

Digressing slightly - Does anyone know how that Handford Device works and whether that'd be a solution? I'm fairly certain the FIA would have considered it already but I've never heard them come right out and say they'd never use it. In fact I've never heard them even mention it as a solution they were looking at.

From what I understand of the theory it produces more drag and reduces downforce by breaking the pressure differentials that create downforce but that sounds like it'd be even worse for the following car. However it didn't seem to be the case when Champ Cars introduced it.
 
No, no, no, NO push to pass. I hate these things. One of the things that made me lose intererst in Champ Cars. And I think that the Handford Device only were for the flat out ovals. There you do not need the pressure on the wings to go fast through the corners. This was also meant to make the car go slower in a straight line speed though that theory went out the window IMO as the cars behind didn't get any air resistence at all and topped over 400 at Fontana and Michigan :D Those were the times!

I would add ground effect again, on a limited basis that is. Make the wings smaller, alá early '80s or set a limit on how much wing you can actually run with (though that is not really what I want...). I would also have a bit bigger/wider rear wheels. Open up the development on engines again and go turbos.

Disclaimer: I'm might make it worse with my ideas, but it sounds good in my head :p

Edit: With all that said, there are still some tracks where the races are great (read Interlagos, Melbourne, Montreal, Spa, Monza) so I honeslty think that the problem lies, at least the majority of it, on the tracks.
 
Another thought that came up now is that they should not give penalties for every single little touch on the track. They always seem to find someone guilty. One way to make drivers that cut (thinking of Hamilton last year at Spa) get an immediate penalty instead of a crappy time penalty afterwards is to put gravel back in the run offs!

And that takes me to another rant. Make mistakes be mistakes. I remember something that Jacques Villeneuve (I think it was) once said and that "if you make a mistake it should hurt" (or somthing like that). I'm not for drivers getting injured but the last couple of years this has become silly. A mistake should mean that you suffer of some sort.

And this brings me to the next subject which pretty much makes these three things be one big issue. With all the safety tarmac outside the racing surface the drivers move over more on the other drivers trying to pass as they know they will just go off track a little and lose 1-3 secs but they'll be fine. Or if they touch or are about to they can just go straight forward and then re-join. Earlier you had to take that into consideration that if you do not give room when someone attacs you might end the race right here. IMO it is like an evil circle.

/rant
 
Its really not the circuits fault at all...

I mean take Silverstone, every year in F1 its, to say the least, a very processional GP. But, when you look at say the smaller classes of racing you see passes at every corner and maybe 5 or 6 passes a lap. Yes I know what your thinking, who cares about smaller classes? But actually, from them we realise these tracks are not the problem with lack of overtaking in F1, its the cars themselves.

Its not even the speed that creates a difficulty to overtake, as we see in the slightly slower classes like GP2 or Formula 3 etc. that speed does not result in a lack of overtaking. It is the aerodynamical aspect of Formula 1 and the technical side of Formula One that is a real let down. Commentators get absolutely overjoyed when somebody actually manages to overtakes someone on track, which really proves that Formula One is in fact...boring when it comes to overtaking. If the pitstops are the only means of the change in the lead then where's the fun in that?

Personally if we get rid of all this "double diffuser" and "KERS" rubbish and focus on the drivers and their talent rather than the car itself.
 
I hadn't thought about ground effect, you may have something there. It would allow them, like you said, to reduce the wing size and it's detrimental effects, but still maintain grip and corner speed. Interesting idea, I wonder if they've even considered it?
 
Its really not the circuits fault at all...

I mean take Silverstone, every year in F1 its, to say the least, a very processional GP. But, when you look at say the smaller classes of racing you see passes at every corner and maybe 5 or 6 passes a lap. Yes I know what your thinking, who cares about smaller classes? But actually, from them we realise these tracks are not the problem with lack of overtaking in F1, its the cars themselves.

Its not even the speed that creates a difficulty to overtake, as we see in the slightly slower classes like GP2 or Formula 3 etc. that speed does not result in a lack of overtaking. It is the aerodynamical aspect of Formula 1 and the technical side of Formula One that is a real let down. Commentators get absolutely overjoyed when somebody actually manages to overtakes someone on track, which really proves that Formula One is in fact...boring when it comes to overtaking. If the pitstops are the only means of the change in the lead then where's the fun in that?

Personally if we get rid of all this "double diffuser" and "KERS" rubbish and focus on the drivers and their talent rather than the car itself.

:plus1:
 
Ground effect that is, what I was calling by misteke "floor effect" (as we call it in Spain). The problem with Ground effect is that when the car has damaged the lateral deflectors under the car, the grip is reduced a lot and it becomes dangerous.

But being 50% ground effect and 50% wings would work, and cars will not depend on the dirty air.
 
Going back to what Ross was saying about how other series have good racing on tracks that, he sees as, being processional races for F1. I'll repeat what I posted earlier about those being homologated formulae/classes in which the formula itself controls far more of the parts (i.e. Standard wings, standard chassis and things like that) and Formula One shouldn't go down that route. It's not just about the drivers, there's engineers that have spent longer designing those cars than the drivers will ever drive them. In my mind it's the total package with F1, it's not just about the drivers or even the race singularly. There has to be scope for the designers to innovate and every now and again have those eureka moments that push the whole of motor sport forward. Rather than being a sum of all it's parts an F1 car is the sum of all a team's engineering ideas, that's what sets it apart from other forms of racing. It's not what can be done with a pre-set arrangement of parts but what can be done within a silhouette of regulations and their interpretation.

I'd also argue that it is those same designers that know exactly what they are doing when they created the dirty air zone in the first place. It benefits the car in front by impeding the following cars ability to hang on to the car ahead and get into the slipstream zone. They are not going to just stop doing this and I'd wager it is definitely a feature they work on. So it's sounds like homologation is a good thing but I don't think it is. There are still sequences of corner/straight interaction that definitely speak to the driver's ability and produce overtaking opportunities, incorporating more of those opportunities into the other tracks still allows the F1 cars to be designed individually not batch made like the homologated formulae.

In all honesty it's probably a mixture of the two and whether the FIA has either the resolve or inclination to examine all possible routes is something we will never know. Who knows, maybe one day we'll even see the return of the "Fan Car".
 

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