I haven’t been able to watch Champcar for the last couple of years but I don’t remember it helping the action much back in ’04 when I last saw it.

As has been seen in A1GP and Champcar plenty of times, not very much at all. Push-to-pass becomes just as defensive a move as it does offensive.

KERS is not a bad thing, in my view, but it is bad if you want to sell the cost-cutting basis. With F1 trying to be low cost yet high “green”, it’s gotten itself in a bit of a spin when at the moment they seem to be mutually exclusive. Forgetting that, I’m quite a big fan of providing teams and drivers with as many options as possible. So if the energy from KERS could either be saved up over a period of, say, 5-10 laps and released in a long powerful burst, or multiple short powerful bursts, or an even longer but weaker burst or literally used up corner-to-corner as it’s generated(etc.) I would be happy. If all the KERS systems are designed to do the same thing in the same way that is less interesting. It’s a bit like the turbo analogy mentioned before.

Push-to-pass is in itself (the A1/CCWS model) is just to generate more overtaking in a not-neccessarily “pure” way. But the KERS aspect could be engineered to try and get cars round race distances faster, and if that results in them overtaking more people then that would be a bonus. But it’s not clear to me that the FIA are going to give the teams the absolute freedom to maximise the technology. Why 80bhp, for example? Why not just remove the limit and say what you can generate you can use? why all have a different system to achieve the same thing? It’s like the engines. Max can get away with homologating them because they are all relatively equal. They may all as well be running a “spec” engine that has a differen manufacturers badge on it for all the difference it makes. I suspect KERS will be the same, unfortunately.

F1 has lost sight of what it needs to be doing. The 4-way balance of keeping the major manufacturers interested with technology, yet keeping costs down, whilst maintaining the “spectacle/show” for the fans, at the same time as being seen to go “green”, are too disparate for them all to work. F1 needs to sit down and focus on just a couple of those things, I think. Sorry, that turned out to be a rant on the state of the sport as opposed to push-to-pass discussion

The only way to create overtaking is to reduce the aero grip and increase the mechanical grip. This is not rocket science. The reason FFord and touring cars consistently produce close racing is because they don’t have unnecessary aero devices.

I think if Max is serious about making the sport green he should not simply allow KERS. He should allow heat recovery from brakes and radiators. It must be possible for the air that flows over the car at 200mph to be used to generate power. Open up the rules to any energy recovery device.

Of course McLaren had energy recovery 5 years ago but it was banned for no obvious reason. If it had been allowed everyone would have advanced energy recovery devices now. I wonder if it would have been banned if it had appeared on a red car?

Of course, it won’t be F1, any more than it would be with a push-to-pass button.

A ‘push-to-pass’ definitely doesn’t sit right with me for one reason – it implies that the engine is artificially restricted otherwise. While we all know the engine is restricted… it’s only the means which is restricted, not the end result. Perhaps I would feel differently if the restriction was to “remove the 19k rpm limit for x number of seconds total per race”, but certainly not if it’s “max 800hp except for x seconds where 900hp is allowed”…. but unfortunately my faith in the FIA tells me it will be implemented in a worse way than either of these.

F1 is the pinnacle of motor sport because it is the best of the best of everything. The day IRL cars lap the same track quicker than an F1 car, is the day I switch my allegiance. The more they limit the engineers, the quicker this will happen.