Throw the Formula One radio ban into the bin before it's too late

With a lacklustre Formula One weekend behind us, it’s with a heavy heart that I revisit the issue of the driver radio ban. Fans were left with little else to mull over after the 35th running of the Hungarian Grand Prix.

The radio bans were introduced to reduce the help from the pitwall, and prevent drivers from achieving more than the optimum performance they could achieve while driving the car on their own. When mechanical gremlins strike, however, anything the team tell the driver that helps them without the car going faster than it could when it was running at its peak should be allowed.

This year we’ve had a number of high-profile incidents caused by the ban.

Lewis Hamilton, Nico Rosberg and Kimi Raikkonen switch their cars into an engine mode that is less than optimal in Baku and two of them have heated arguments with the pit-wall trying to determine how to get themselves out of it.

Nico Rosberg has a gearbox issue at Silverstone and is given a legitimate team instruction to fix the issue followed by another one that is deemed to be against the regulations (albeit in order to resolve the exact same issue).

In Austria Sergio Perez retires on the final lap and retires on the side of the road after the team cannot warn him about a brake issue that wasn’t deemed important enough to be fatal until it was too late.

At this weekend’s Hungarian Grand Prix Jenson Button’s brake pedal falls to the floor and is rendered as useless as Pastor Maldonado at a safe driving instructor’s course. In their haste to regain hydraulics to his braking system, the team instruct him to avoid changing gears while he is on the track – as opposed to having him pull in to the pits to receive the instructions. He is given a drive-through penalty which he serves before having to retire.

With all that in mind, can anybody name a single positive thing that the radio ban has achieved?

At best you could argue that the audience no longer hears the team coaching the drivers to brake later or “respect the beeps” when changing gears and so on. As I’ve argued in this column before, this could have been easily rectified by not broadcasting these radio messages in the first place.

There’s no more than enough evidence to demonstrate that the radio ban not only isn’t fit for purpose but is actively harming the sport.

If you add the radio ban to the ludicrously inept attempt to police track limits in recent weeks and the atrocity that was elimination qualifying and you’d have to agree that the FIA haven’t showered themselves with glory on too many fronts.

Only the introduction of the new Ultrasoft compound tyres and the switch from two compounds per weekend to three have been successful. Even then they are simply addressing the damage that was done by relying so heavily on the tyres to generate strategy variances in the first place.

Having Pirelli focus on producing tyres with less degradation in the pursuit of speed for next season is a double-edged sword. Tyres that artificially degrade have led to the kind of pedestrian, conservational driving that is despised by fans and drivers alike.

Without reintroducing refuelling (which wouldn’t be a good move in my humble opinion) there won’t be much left to set a lot of the cars apart.

Perhaps it’ll produce racing so boring that all of these issues are fixed. Maybe we need to burn it all down and raise it to the ground in order to see the actual change that we truly need.

All the engineers know exactly how to do it, so it’s no secret. And the sooner the aerodynamic profiles are changed and closer racing becomes achievable the better.