Spurious electronics... Ban the lot.

All ABS does is prevent lock up; it doesn't reduce braking distance.
ABS allows the tyres to maintain grip and not slide hopelessly, leaving the driver without any control. It would make braking safer, mostly in the rain.

I am a great believer in ABS; it saved me from certain crash on bikes; probably from severe injury, if not worse, I think.
Several times, it happened that I grabbed violently the brake lever in emergency in the wet and the bike stopped without loosing stability and throwing me out.
Before, it was a dead certain smash in a car or a truck, followed by a trip in the ambulance.

 

I gotcha and agree that challenge is largely lost now. But couldn't one also argue that there are now different challenges to replace that challenge? For example, the g-forces now pulled are much greater. The braking is now so intense, that you actually cannot expand your lungs under braking to breath : ) Even a high-speed corner can make you pass out if you don't control your breathing. That is a different kind of synchronization.

For the record, I love the exact kind of shifting and racing you are talking about, but I've never driven the more modern cars we are debating either (aero; high-tech;etc).

 

Alboretto died on an AUDI at the Lauterizring (not sure about the spelling) because of a tyre blow out. His car flipped and came down upside down on the guardrail, killing him instantly.

His car wasn't an LMP1, but an open-cockpit sportcar, with not driver protection apart from the rollbar. The driver had no head protection of any kind.

That was a few years ago, and LMP regulations have been revised since, making a full safety cage, and closed cockpit mandatory. So it was a different.

 

A properly tuned ABS computer will always beat even the best racing driver today. Always man : )

You are talking about a computer doing millions of calculations per second and it has more feedback via sensors than our brain cannot possibly comprehend in the same amount of time. The real systems will lock up the tires in the dry - just for a split second and catch it much faster than a human. They are not just useful in low-traction conditions.

The best a driver can do is tie it in a competition and that would be quite a feat. To do so consistently across many corners, and over an entire race - no way. So I think it does actually reduce the braking distance because a human cannot perfectly execute threshold braking as effectively as a modern computer.

 

Thanks for the info/correction!

 

I can't believe there is an actual discussion going on whether we should have abs and whatnot. I must've wandered into the wrong forum.

 

I would say that, even worse than boring, it is frustrating. Because of the silly rules, there is precious little a team can do to make significant strides in performance.

It is one thing to see the same team winning, race after race, quite another to know that there is nothing that can be done about it. That means that tuning in for the next race loses a sense of anticipation because catching and passing the team ahead is impossible. And that accounts for the decline in viewership.

 

If ALL drivings aids were banned, I would agree.

But under the present system, some are allowed, and some are banned.

There is no consistency, and that's what I find puzzling. But that's F1 halmark.

Banning ABS and TC, but allowing launch control clitch, radio communication, paddle shift in the same breath doesn't make sense.

Team coaching, telemetry are also drivers' aids.

 

Agreed.

 

I think Alonso and button have a spurious 'self parking' feature on their mclarens, someone needs to get Honda to switch it off !