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Three races into the Formula One season, the overwhelming majority of fans, experts and drivers are against the new rules and the chorus of angry voices is only getting louder.
Even F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone is against the changes and Red Bull owner, and close friend of Eccelstone, Dietrich Mateschitz is threatening to withdraw his sponsorship of the sport.
I outlined the new rules and what the changes meant for the cars prior to the season kicking off and what we have seen so far is worse than most could have feared.
At least, as yet, we haven’t seen a race in which more than half the field fails to finish. Oh sorry, yes we have. These changes really are bad.
What confounds me, and most people I know, is why the FIA continues to make changes to slow the cars down when most Formula One fans are watching because they want to see speed.
Yes there are safety concerns, but we haven’t had a death in a Formula One race since Ayrton Senna tragically passed away in the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix. It’s not as if the FIA was responding to a tragic accident in 2013 by making a whole raft of drastic changes, such as changing the engine from a V8 engine to a V6 engine.
To put this change into perspective, 20 years ago, Formula One cars were using V12 engines with up to 950 horsepower. The V8 engines could attain up to 750 horsepower at up to 18,000 revolutions per minute and the new V6 engines can reach 750 horsepower thanks to the increase in turbo, but they cannot pass 15,000 rpm.
Prior to the season starting, we were promised that with horsepower approximately the same, the cars would be just as fast and the racing as unpredictable as ever. Three races in and those promises couldn’t be more wrong.
Nico Rosberg’s winning time from this year’s Australian Grand Prix is two minutes slower than Kimi Räikkönen’s winning time from a year ago and this difference remains the same when you compare the results from the 2013 and 2014 Malaysian Grand Prix’s, even when you consider that this was the infamous Multi-21 race.
Heck, even the Formula Two cars are only slightly slower than this year’s Formula One Cars.
The FIA claims they are attempting to make cars with engines that will likely see their way onto public roads in the coming years. The new engines are effectively hybrid engines but a major mind shift will have to occur if we are all driving around in Toyota Priuses in the next five years.
On top of this, while V6 engines are now much more popular with both carmakers and drivers alike, many models do not even come with V8 engines anymore. There comes a point at which we are sacrificing too much performance just to replicate public cars. Surely a hybrid V8 engine could have been created to maintain the best of both worlds?
If the races were still unpredictable I don’t think the majority of fans would be overly bothered by the two-second decrease in lap times, but the first two races have been anything but.
In both races, the Mercedes drivers got to the front and pulled away. If it wasn’t for a split in a tiny rubber tube surrounding the spark plug in Lewis Hamilton’s engine in Melbourne, Mercedes could very easily have finished one-two in the first three races of the season.
Hamilton and Rosberg have cruised to the finish unchallenged from the opening lap in every race this season. The only thing that made Sunday’s race thrilling was a late safety car, which created a ten-lap sprint to the finish. Even then, the two Mercedes’ put 23 seconds on their rivals.
This is not unpredictable racing and it seems Mercedes have got a huge jump on their chief rivals at Ferrari and Red Bull. The problem with the new rules is that the FIA has implemented so many of them this year. These cars are completely different from last year and it is just so difficult to have your car in perfect racing condition in time for the start of the season.
Many of the FIA’s changes in the past decade have been implemented to make races more exciting and to increase overtaking, the implementation of the DRS is a successful example. But if one team is leaps and bounds ahead of the competition when new cars are introduced, we have the current scenario – a reduction in overtaking and increasingly boring races, which is turning viewers away in fringe F1 markets such as Australia, America and South America.
It is clear that if just one team is fully prepared for the start of the season, too many rules have been implemented in one go. This is not the 2009 double-diffuser controversy in which Brawn, Toyota and Williams found a loophole in a new set of rules, this is the most professional teams in the competition not having enough time to get their cars ready for the most advanced auto racing series in the world.
Mercedes is producing much more power per unit of fuel than their competitors, most notably Ferrari, and the results of this have been clear. As we saw in Melbourne, there are now strict rules on how much fuel can be used per race and Ferrari cannot just increase their fuel consumption to compete with Mercedes.
I’m all for allowing engines to be a performance differentiator, it encourages innovation by the teams to see who can come up with the most efficient engine, but as I said earlier, when just one team is prepared for the start of the season it is a clear sign of too much too soon.
Many of the FIA’s new rules implemented over the past decade have had the effect of creating equality by bringing the leaders back to the field, with the result of slowing everything down. This has happened in 2014 as well. The new rules have brought Red Bull, who have dominated the sport in the past five years, back to the field.
But why can’t the FIA create rules that enable the field to catch up with the leaders. Instead of closing loopholes, why don’t they encourage the other teams to exploit them? Instead of creating equality by limiting the speed of the leaders, why don’t we create equality by increasing the speed of the pack? This can only be good for the sport.
Granted, there is a line at which safety becomes an issue, but the FIA is well behind that line at the moment. And they have addressed safety issues by lowering the nose and chassis, reducing down force while reducing the risk of the car flipping. But the engine changes have not caused any noticeable safety improvements.
Fans watch Formula One to see the most advanced cars in the world race at speeds not that no other race car can achieve, this is a key point of difference for F1, it separates them from the market. F1 is faster than the IndyCars and NASCAR, and V8 Supercars do not possess the innovation present in Formula One. But the FIA continually tries to stamp this innovation out by reducing speeds.
The most-hated aspect of the new regulations is the new V6 turbo-charged engines produce a much quieter sound. This sound has been blasted from pillar to post, so much so that the Melbourne Grand Prix organisers have threatened to sign a new contract with the IndyCars when the current F1 deal runs out, and some race organisers have threatened legal action against the FIA for breaching their contract.
This indicates how much hearing the roar of a V12, V10 or V8 engine is intertwined in the sport of Formula One. Some spectators go to races just to listen to the engines and many fans do not want to hear an electric-sounding engine driving around.
This is especially important in marginal markets, such as Australia and North America. American F1 fans can very easily switch to supporting NASCAR or IndyCar racing and Australian fans have the V8 Supercars to turn to if they become disenchanted with Formula One. What’s worse is that the FIA is alienating their most faithful fans in Europe – lose them and things could definitely turn ugly for the FIA.
The sound must be rectified as soon as possible, unfortunately it is not possible to implement a quick-fix in the coming weeks. If a change is to be made, it will likely be made at the end of the season and even then, the FIA will be hesitant to make changes so soon after the implementation of such a large number of new rules and regulations.
While the vast majority have dubbed the new rules a failure, I can’t see widespread changes any time soon, the FIA are too proud an organisation to admit failure so soon.
These new rules will be around for a few more years and we can only hope that McLaren, Red Bull and Ferrari get their engines and cars in order in the coming months and years so they can challenge Mercedes.
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