I’ve watched the 1985 San Marino Grand Prix again a couple of weeks ago. And I really liked it. The race was entertaining and the last laps were completely unpredictable. What’s the problem with that?

We’ve seen more unpredictability in the past. I’ve seen Mika Hakkingen blowing up his engine the last lap of the 2001 Spanish GP and Kimi Raikkonen having a broken suspension during the 2005 European GP. Very entertaining and fun to watch. What’s wrong with that?

If manufactures don’t want their drivers to run out of fuel, they should make their engines more fuel efficient. If they can’t to that properly, it’s up to the drivers to cope with it and change their driving.

My message is: stop the tampering, and trying to force the best of both into one. Either pick one thing or the other. Or, and I’m sorry to keep banging my drum on this, do both. Have the WTCC where BMW/Chevrolet/Seat et al. build a touring car that conforms with the basic regs and let them race, and also have a spec WTCC-like series where everyone runs the same car. Do the same for F1 with a GP1-type series. Just quit trying to force the two aspects of building your own with spec-machinery together, because the sum is definitely lss than the parts when you do it that way.

It would be easier, cheaper and more sensible for all the F1 teams to use the same engine, put their own manufacturers badge on it, and tell noone they’d done it. It would make little difference to what we have now.

The FIA (read Max) does seem to have some ploy to “spec” at least some areas. Which, to be honest, is not neccessarily a bad thing (I’m sure people will disagree, please feel free to) but at least be obvious and come out and say it. You see, the FIA wants to have it’s cake and eat it. It wants all these powerful manufacturers, but it wants them all more or less as competitive as each other, so that the slowest ones don’t pull out becaus they spend a lot of money to get humped by their rival. So it freezes engine development after homologating them all to roughly the same level, so it’s a spec engine formule where everyone has a different engine, which makes preciesly no sense other than the aforementioned keeping of manufacturers onboard. Stupid.

The WTCC is just the extension of this engine specifying to the whole package of the car. Unfortunately, in order to maintain the carefully preserved status quo between the teams, you have to continually adjust the rules every other weekend, which is (a) pretty blatant that you’re manipulating things and (b) doesn’t actually produce very even races: what it tends to do is give a Seat whitewash one weekend, so they are penalised, then a BMW whitewash next weekend, so they get penalised, and then Chevrolet are fastest…and the cycle continues. It evens out come the end of the championship, but a lot of the races don’t feel like that (plus the reverse grid second race means slower cars can still easily win). It’s fine to an extent, if you blatantly come out and say “we’re going to continually strive to even things out”, as the FIA do in the WTCC.

It’s the underhanded, subtle, subterfugal way F1 does the same things I find difficult to swallow.

I’m really surprised the FIA hasn’t scrapped that rule and just said why doesn’t everyone run the same car on the grid?

But I do agree Keith’s point that the engine rules should be opened up a bit. When designers had the freedom to choose between a V6, V8, V10 or even a V12, there was more competition as each engine had its merits and flaws. There was a greter discrepency in power, making it more competetive – rather than similar levels in performance.

Plus, surely the proposed rule would entail changes to some engines which would go against the, obviously sensible, rule to homogenise engines?

This is an exercise in the FIA trying to get more power in F1 by increasing its predictability through artificial equality. It’s spec engines through the back door.

However I think the reason we saw races ending with drivers running out of fuel was not just because the fuel rules were challenging, but because the technology required to measure fuel use during a race was not sophisticated enough. The fuel use of a turbo powered car would vary massively depending on how high the boost was turned up.

By the end of the turbo era in 1988 these problems were largely sorted, at least by the leading teams. I think today even if the rules were changed to a maximum fuel allowance overnight the teams would have no problem coping.