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In what was billed as a pivotal meeting for the future direction of the sport, the Formula One strategy group met on Thursday and decided to accelerate Formula One’s demise.
You really couldn’t write this stuff. In an age when Formula One’s bosses – and there is far more than just single person at the sport’s incoherent helm – are being implored to be more consultative with each other, the sport’s stakeholders and the sport’s fans, decisions appear to have been made based on exactly the opposite of the given criteria.
Yet in a joint media statement released by the FIA and the commercial rights holder, they boldly proclaimed that that “Formula One plans faster cars and thrilling races”.
For 2016
– Free choice of the two dry tyre compounds (out of four) that each team can use during the race weekend.For 2017
– Faster cars: five to six seconds drop in lap times through aerodynamic rules evolution, wider tyres and reduction of car weight;
– Reintroduction of refuelling (maintaining a maximum race fuel allowance);
– Higher revving engines and increased noise
– More aggressive looks
As an afterthought to its grand proposals the statement added that it was also considering costs, with the group’s teams to clarify their strategies for keeping a lid on costs within the next week. These are the same teams that threatened to quit the sport in 2009 at the mention of a cost cap, and have since voted down cost capping twice. Right.
It is unsurprising, then, that this group comprised of the FIA, the commercial rights holder, Ferrari, Red Bull Racing, McLaren, Mercedes, Williams, and Force India, failed to pass a single credible idea to improve the increasingly ailing sport. Indeed, it has created a formula for less exciting racing.
Far from these ideas being given time to ventilate before being sent up the decision-making hierarchy for approval, the first change has been slated to come into effect in 2016, requiring Pirelli to make available any of its four dry weather compounds to the teams for their selection of their preferred two.
Paul Hembery, motorsport boss for the sport’s sole tyre supplier, labelled the idea as having “reckless” outcomes, and he shot it down – or so he thought – when it was floated last week.
“We’re not going to be doing that, it would be a no,” Hembery told NBC‘s MotorSportsTalk. “You can’t because you’d have some idiots making decisions to run things to try and get performance.
“If it was 50 degrees like [in Spain] and they were on super-softs, you’d have a car sat in the garage with either no tires left or tires breaking on the track.
“It will never be the team that chose the wrong tyres, it will be Pirelli’s fault.”
We almost have a case study for this already. Who can forget the 2013 Silverstone tyre scandal? Some teams, unhappy with Pirelli’s selection of fast-degrading rubber – for which the sport asked in the first place – ran the tyres outside their setup windows and manufactured a disaster for the supplier.
The strategy group has now sanctioned such risky behaviour. Strike one to the strategy group.
That’s before we get to 2017, when the headline change will be the return of refuelling.
I implore anyone heralding the return of the splash-and-dash as a return to some halcyon era of the sport to re-watch races between the mid-1990s and late 2000s, when it last featured. Anyone who does will note that this period of time represented a historic low for overtaking in Formula One.
And in addition to developing a formula for boring racing, refuelling will also require teams to re-acquire refuelling equipment and have it shipped around the world, adding to the cost of racing for the sport’s smallest teams.
Strike two for the sport’s saviours.
Then there’s the final silent assassin in the 2017 regulations: the method behind the “five to six seconds” faster car madness.
No motorsport fan is about to turn down a proposal for faster cars, and similarly Formula One should be the domain of the world’s fastest cars, but the strategy group’s satisfaction with this being achieved principally through an “aerodynamic evolution” is deeply concerning.
Aerodynamics is the field on which the sport’s cost war is being fought. Moreover it is complex aerodynamics that prevented Lewis Hamilton, as they do for countless other battling drivers on all circuits, to get close enough to Sebastian Vettel toe execute a pass.
While there is no doubt that the aerodynamic genius of these cars enable them to pound around a circuit faster than their competitors, it is also what is actively hindering close racing while simultaneously creating a performance divide between the rich and poor teams. To place emphasis on this area as one of growth is madness.
Alienating key stakeholders, engineering boring racing, and discriminating against the small teams: three needless strikes against the strategy group – and that’s before considering that proposals to save costs are tipped to revolve largely around the introduction of customer cars or third cars in an effort to destroy independent teams, which have been the lifeblood of Formula One from day one.
But then this is par for the strategy group, which has consistently failed to make any meaningful decisions as its respective parties wallow in self-interest. The only truly surprising thing about this press release is that double points weren’t re-introduced as a matter of urgency.
These absurd transgressions of common sense are made only more inflammatory by each successive ‘strategy’ being more heartily claimed as a response to the demands of fans.
Fans want none of these things. Fans want close racing between as many different teams as possible. Fans want to be able to watch international races on TV without having to incorporate it into their yearly budgets. Fans want to be able to buy affordable tickets to local Grands Prix.
‘Aggressive’ looking cars that make more noise are all well and good, but it is folly to think eight of such cars circulating a procession will attract new generations of supporters to Formula One.
So I make this plea to the sport’s rulers, mired as they are in self-interest and self-preservation: stop killing our sport. The time to be brave is now, or the only thing spectacular about your show will be the speed with which it burns.