Could F1 ban the aerodynamics?

Also meant to note, they can't 'ban aero' - They're moving thru the air..... And I think the Old Mans comment that 'aero is for people who can't build engines' has been completely debunked.

Reducing D/F may help some, but seems that never even gets discussed.

Cheers,
Ian

 

Please FiA, could you ban aerodynamics? Let's race in a vacuum.

 

The problem with F1 is that they have gotten themselves into a "catch 22" situation. They have promoted the sport as being the "pinnacle" of racing. Which to the public means that it is the fastest closed course racing series. For that simple reason they can't go back to low or minimal downforce because then there would be cars that were faster and that would be a PR disaster for them. I wasn't that way in the 60's, CanAm cars were faster, but with the injection of sponsorship and evolution of an "entertainment" series as opposed to what it was supposed to be, a sporting event, things changed and it isn't going to go back.

I'd love to see cars with little or minimal downforce and more passing and an emphasis on driver skill, but that's not going to happen, there's too much money riding on it to change the formula and make all this stuff obsolete. The teams are invested in aero technology and they don't want to change it either.

 

I think that many people don't understand the challenge that this is...

I've worked in the motorcycle/auto industry for the past 15 years. The future does not resemble the past in pretty much any way, shape, or form.

I'm generalizing and of course there are individual exceptions...but, for the most part, kids aren't "into" cars like we were 30, 40, and 50 years ago. I don't just mean spending the weekend working on them...I mean simply driving the damn things. My kid wasn't the least bit interested in being a licensed driver until he got a job that required a car just to get there.

So many of the things that appealed to "us" are not even on "their" radar. Conversely, many of the things "they" really dig..."we" don't understand at all.

This begs the question: who is going to be the F1 audience of the future...? As hard as it is to swallow...it isn't "us."

I truly believe that F1 (overall) has no idea how to market itself to the new generation of potential fans, but it does realize that what was formerly considered the status quo will not carry the sport into the future. I say "F1 overall" because I don't think Bernie fully appreciates this.

F1 can live in the past or make moves towards the future.

These days, being a nerd or a geek is cool...some of the things considered cool in the 60s, 70s, and 80s are jokes. Different times.

 

All true, but what happened was more that the other series folded up and went away and F1 started sucking in sponsorship money.

The world sports car manufacturers championship was floundering because of the homologation quantity rules (you needed to make 50 of that type to gain homologation) rules in the early 60's. You could race, but the championship was based on the sports car class and for that you needed to make 50 cars. Prototypes could run for the overall win, but the manufacturers points were given to the sports car class. You had the case were the car that finished 6th or 7th was the car that gained the points for the manufacturers championship.

At that point, it was looking silly so they decided to base the manufacturers championship on the fastest class and the golden age of sports car racing was born, but it only lasted a few years. When prototypes were limited to 3 liters the series started to wane. Porsche and Ferrari came in with the 5 liter sports cars (making 50 each sort of) for three or four years and then when the 3 liter prototypes got faster the series went south. It came back for a bit with the 962, but even then it wasn't as strong as it was previously.

Sports cars were always considered a lot "closer" to road cars and for that reason there has often been manufacturers willing to showcase their technology. There seems to always be one company that's willing to run the sports car series. For a while it was Mercedes Benz, and then Audi, and in between there was Mazda and Nissan... Never much competition and not much good racing. As the cars have become pretty much single place formula cars with fenders the interest from the pubic has waned.

If they really wanted to make sports car racing come back they'd reset the rules to be basically the same as they were for the sports prototype cars (room for two real people and not a driver and a double amputee), require real ground clearance (4 inches min), minimum door sizes and get rid of the tunnels and there would be a lot more interest in sports car racing. The reason being that if you built a winning LM car you could also sell the same car (isn't that a novel idea) as a high performance road car...

Unfortunately when sports car racing seems to be on the rise it gets screwed up by Bernie because he doesn't want anything to compete with F1 for the $....

 

Ah, gotcha. I was looking for technical similarities, but didn't really find any.

I'm really not interested in bikes at all, so didn't know anything about the politics of MotoGP.

All the best,
Andrew.

 

Well, the old GT1 cars were "technically speaking" road cars but actually were prototypes: they just needed to build a single unit of their prototype with mufflers, higher clearance and a license plate on it to be considered a road car; they even didn´t need to sell that unit. You can always force the manufacturers to sell x units to homologate a prototype as a road car, but then you´re kicking many people out of the competition, as they wouldn´t be able to sell 50 units of an uber expensive prototype that actually would be an atrocious road car. "Then race a road car" you may say, but any road car would be crushed by the manufacturers with pockets deep enough to build those 50 prototypes with license plate.

Anyway, I think that, for the last 50 or 60 years, prototypes always have been detached from road cars and people didn´t care.

 

A few of us have said the same about IndyCar, what a joke that's become.

Serious HP, minimal traction aids, steel brakes, and make them shift the damn things (I like the sequential shifters CART used).

 

Precisely....it does ruin the spectacle and is the cause for such gimmicks as DRS. Wheel-to-wheel action is sacrificed for max grip and stability. That makes for too-predictable racing.

 

Along with: "The horse should always pull the cart!", and his reluctance to use disc brakes on his racing cars! - Classic examples of: "Cutting your nose off to spite your face!".

As for the aero side of F1, Marin Brundle has always put it the the best way I have ever heard: "When it comes to aerodynamics in F1, the trouble is you can't unlearn what you already know!"

 

Well, you could... but we'd need one heck of a purification squad.

All the best,
Andrew.

 

That's kind of like the issue with cost cutting. It just doesn't work; if the money is there, you're going to spend it on something. Cost cutting only works if you don't have money to spend.



Mark

 

Aren't the wings smaller this year? Yes DRS is a gimmick but not as bad as the whole engine token thing from the first years of hybrids. Once down force exceeded the weight of the cars, there was no going back. Aero is part of F1 but it has it's downsides. I think it was worse in the V8 cars. Was it 07 or 08? With those funky canards sticking out of the side pods? Limit the barge boards and wing elements like all the other rules but restore testing and innovation freedom! (for everything) If you can't creatively problem solve, the sport will never be as interesting as it once was. Also, qualifying already sets the grid from fast to slow so all this talk about overtaking is not as big a deal as some may think. Ferrari lost a great start in Melbourne by making a tire strategy error after the red flag. I don't think aero had anything to do with that and it was genuine racing interest with a significant effect. I don't think I saw DRS engaged on any car during the whole coverage.

 

Exactly - It's nigh on impossible to police the teams budgets.

For example, if you tell Ferrari they can only spend $50Million on F1 per season, how does the FIA stop them spending the remaining $150Million of their previous budget on "other" projects that just happen to give useful developments to their F1 cars?

 

There's always something to spend it on unless you're in a 100% spec series.



Mark

 

The best solution for F1 is to drop all the stupid rules and let teams do whatever they want to their cars. If Trump loses the general, kick out the Bern, bring in Trump and make F1 great again.