As detailed in this column last week, the deadline for 2017 regulation changes is now upon us.
Regular readers of The Roar will be intimately familiar with the various travails of Formula One’s regulatory process.
They know the FIA, the governing body, is not allowed to govern, that power has been in the hands of too few players, and that the smaller teams are allegedly unfairly cut out of the regulatory process entirely.
For new readers: welcome.
All that considered, it should surprise no-one that another hard deadline is passing without any real meaningful change to any of the problems plaguing Formula One.
Let’s be clear, the Formula One strategy group has long been tasked with the broad brief of improving the sport, which is itself the first problem given the subjectivity of such a mission.
Given its composition of the FIA and FOM, each of whom holds six votes, and Mercedes, Ferrari, Red Bull Racing, McLaren, Williams, and Force India with one vote apiece, the second problem the group was always going to have was agreeing on more than the day of the week.
That is as much back story as is required to understand how it is that on the week the 2017 technical regulations are supposed to be confirmed, despite months of toing and froing between proposals ranging from sensible to absurd, no such announcement has been forthcoming.
Instead, a short press release published on the FIA website proclaimed happily that “potentially as soon as the beginning of the 2016 season” the qualifying format for race weekends has been tweaked.
I use ‘tweak’ deliberately, because the format remains broadly similar, with the only difference being the progressive elimination of cars in each of the three sessions every 90 seconds until just two remain in a pole shoot-out scenario.
The aim is obviously to create more potential for qualifying upsets – which is fine pending the resolution of how you would prevent eliminated cars from blocking those still running and other potential timing problems.
But if the best Formula One can do in the face of what Bernie Ecclestone himself has called a “crap” sport, for which he would not “spend [his] money to take [his] family to watch”, is make a distracting tweak to the one part of the weekend that was already exciting, we’re in seriously deep trouble.
The most the 2017 technical regulations get is an unfinished draft and an undertaking to complete the relevant research by April 30, by which point the first pre-season test for next season could be as soon as nine months away.
The draft itself is uninspiring, returning previously floated ideas heavy with buzzwords like “dynamic”, “faster” and “more spectacular” cars but light on ways to improve the racing.
Craig Scarborough captured the mood in Autosport when he summed up in his analysis that: “the stated intentions do not included improving overtaking, and many of these changes reverse the work done by the overtaking working group back in 2009.”
And if not his word, consider that Lewis Hamilton, Daniel Ricciardo, Carlos Sainz, Felipe Massa and Williams chief technical officer Pat Symonds all have a range of serious problems with the way the decision-making process works and the changes the authorities have produced.
All this is not for a lack of trying, it must be said. Every individual party in the strategy group is agitating for change, but all with a variety of vested interests.
The FIA wants long-term health, which is why it periodically but generally unsuccessfully proposes a form of cost control.
Ecclestone is only concerned with maximising the sport’s entertainment value, a position that gifted us such ideas as random sprinklers, double-points rounds, success ballast, and reverse grids.
Each team, meanwhile, brings independent desires.
Red Bull, backed by aerodynamic genius Adrian Newey, perpetually pushes for more aero freedom at the expense of power unit performance. McLaren wants more testing to ameliorate its Honda-related woes. Ferrari wants to ensure it has maximum regulatory control, and it maintains its historic (and ludicrous) veto to this effect.
It’s 12 Angry Men on steroids, backed by billions of dollars, and with more colourful outfits – except there’s no satisfying resolution at the end, just a pencilling-in of the next day of meeting.
Ecclestone has been right all along to say that democracy is overrated. While his taste in world leaders may be questionable, the application of his political philosophy rings true in the Formula One world.
But install Bernard Charles Ecclestone as a benign dictator we must not, for he is as partisan as any other in the desperately dysfunctional strategy committee.
There can only be one man for this job. He’s a man with deep technical knowledge and proven political nous. He’s played the game before and has invariably come up the winner.
Only a dispassionate approach free from the bias of being a competing party or invested stakeholder can sustainably solve Formula One’s ills.
To misquote a phrase, Ross Brawn is the hero we need – but the way Formula One is behaving, he mightn’t be the one we deserve.
Follow the disgruntled @MichaelLamonato on Twitter.
Team Penske is under the same umbrella of ownership as the IndyCar Series itself, so it was imperative for to drop the hammer and protect their integrity—which, thankfully, they did.
Red Bull can’t rest on its laurels and if Perez can’t provide them with cover on the rare days that Verstappen is having trouble, it's time to look elsewhere.
The absolute vitriol against the Canadian that has come from the incident is beyond reprehensible.
The Long Beach Grand Prix is the Monaco of American motorsport, and this past weekend, the IndyCar Series reminded everyone exactly why. We witnessed…
New Zealand made a triumphant return to the Supercars championship calendar since the demise of the much-loved Pukekohe Park Raceway – as Taupō delivered…
It’s time that serious questions are asked of his Lance Stroll and his future in the team.
