The rules being made have little to do with racing compared to a PR Program put in place by a business. How many times since its inception has reducing drag, if 1 second or less behind the car leading you, had an effect on the outcome of an event. I guess it is possible for a car/driver .99 seconds per lap slower than the fastest driver could win the race if they were 2nd when hitting the last zone on the last lap.
Changing Specs ever few years doesn't help the new teams but the teams with the largest budgets. We can go back to the time when MB was a force over half a century ago and compare the price of building a car. Most teams that ran F1 are no longer around; but MB spent more per car than anyone else and by a factor of 3 or 4.
F1 is a business first and a race group second. I found the racing to be much more 40 to 60 years ago interesting than it is today. I miss seeing teams like BRM, Vanwall and Cooper. The sounds of the different allowed you to know which car it was. The cars were different, the sounds were different and the drivers were much different.
At least this weekend I can try to sleep normal hours as I prefer to see the events live.
Hello g4racer
welcome to the forum. It sounds as though you have a rich history of GP watching.......hope you'll share some of your stories with us. I'm appallingly bad at acronyms, who are MB?
I agree with much of what you say, F1 is big business and silly decisions get made because of that, which interfere with pure racing.....last years tyres being a recent and prime example. I think this year we are better off despite there still being some issues, and I think that because the cars now require more driver skill....they are harder to drive, which I like to see. The drivers are limited by their ability to get traction down and control it rather than by a tyre that blows up if you drive too fast.
Though there are strict rules in place for what you can and can't do, we have some very clever engineers , and so we still see big differences in how those rules are interpreted, and therefore in now fast the cars go. In a way the engineers have to be even clevere to extract an advantage when the rules are so prescriptive. And whilst money clearly helps develop a fast car it isn't the only factor. RBR, Ferrari and Mercedes all have a big budget and Ron Dennis said recently that the budget for the McLaren F1 team is the biggest it's had in its history. And yet amongst those four teams...eight cars, we see differences.
It's still f1, it's what we've got and I love it. I think it's easy to remember the past with rose tinted glasses. The good bits stick out but the bad bits we forget.
On viewing tImes. I don't care when it's on I'll watch. I think having decided to run a race in a certain country( not always wise choices in my view) then it is curtesy to that country to run it at the same time as it is usually run. 1pm local time.
Welcome again g4 racer. I hope we hear more from you
but we're still here aren't we
