F1 Fanatic

if they want cars to overtake so badly and they put so much emphasis on slow corners before long straights, why don’t they get 4WD back in the sport?..it would improve the traction by a whole lot and it seems to be more handy than self-folding rear wings or whatever nutty idea they might come up with

Overtaking is over rated. These cars are at the pinnacle of motorsport and thus should be really slogging it out. 4WD would indeed improve traction..but if it’s imporved for everybody then you’re really no better off.

I enjoy a good over take, by no means do I want a procession. But it shouldn’t be made easier just to improve the spectacle to the casual watcher. Seeing someone drag out a lead or hold someone off is just as exciting for me.

What they need to do is get rid of the different types of tyre and make them really really super soft so they don’t last the whole race. That way those drivers who take more care of their tyres will make less stops. Some drivers then may push their tyres more and make more mistakes allowing oters to overtake. Those needing to make more stops will then push to overtake more to give them the time to stop.

<i>I like overtaking but personally I still think it should be very hard to do as F1 has never been about masses of overtaking anyway.</i>

I hate to disagree with you Steph but there was an awful lot of overtaking when I started watching F1 in the early/mid 1980s and if you watch videos from the 1950s-1970s you’ll see quite a few races where the lead changed every couple of laps and loads more overtaking than we get these days.

The advent of effective front wings was the turning point for this, I can’t find the quote but I’ve heard Jackie Stewart say that the day they introduced front wings was the day they ruined the racing aspect of F1 as it meant that drafting became an awful lot more difficult because whenever you got up close to the car in front you started to lose front end grip and the car becomes unsettled.
These days front wings are so important to the cars handling that it’s become even more difficult to attempt an overtaking manoeuvre unless you’ve got a much faster car or the guy in front makes a mistake.

I’m not saying everything was perfect in the old days or that every race was an edge of the seat experience with constant overtakes and I hate to keep banging on about the uselessness of aerodynamics but the fact remains that as long as the modern obsession with aerodynamic down force continues, the more dull the sport will become and the more ridiculous the rules will be as the FIA try to artificially prevent processional races.

Aerodynamics may be a wonderful technical and engineering exercise but it is an expensive and ultimately worthless route to follow as there are very few real world applications and every time an improvement is made it only leads to the banning of other, more relevant, technologies in an effort to keep cornering speeds down as well as making the cars more aerodynamically sensitive and therefore more difficult to overtake.

Over the years we’ve seen turbo chargers, active suspension, laser ignition and many other technologies banned in an effort to keep speeds down when what the FIA should have done was limit or ban devices that create down force. Not only would the teams have been able to develop many technologies that they could then sell to car manufacturers but it would also mean that we wouldn’t have cars that are almost impossible to overtake in normal conditions.

Being honest, when was the last really great F1 race you watched that wasn’t either rain effected, Safety Car effected, the result of irregular tyre wear or a top driver qualifying lower down the grid than normal ?
A race that was great because of the racing not because of some external factor or freak occurrence ?

Take a look at these statistics (You will have to register but it is free):

http://www.cliptheapex.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=51&t=822

They show that the average number of overtakes has reduced from over 40 in the early 80s to below 15 for the 2009 season, we’re on 28.75 so far this season but obviously there are now more cars at each race, it’s not been a full season yet and there are still a few bore-fests to come. Amazingly it went down to just 10.74 overtakes per race in 2005 !

Thanks for the link BB.

I know wings ruined a lot and that there were masses of overtaking at times. One of my favourite races had one of my heroes, Hawthorn, changing positions with Fangio at France constantly.

Before F1 racing, Nuvolari would be swapping places with Varzi even around Monaco!

It’s clear there’s been a decrease but I said that F1 has never been about masses of overtaking for me at least. It’s had it at times yes, but it wasn’t about it for me. I*t was about pushing technology, engeineering and having the best drivers.

I think the racing skill involved hasn’t decreased but changed. I much more value an F1 pass if it is damn hard to pull off. Waiting in suspense can be just as fun; Spa 2009 with Rai vs Fisi was fascinaing to watch, I liked 2007 USA Alo and Ham for similar reasons.

In 2008 Hamilton drove a 1950s Mercedes around Goodwood and commented on how hard it was to drive. After racing in one on TOCA 3, I can believe it, and that’s just a video game.

I’m like a broken record with this, but the problem really is aero. It’s not that mechanical grip should be increased, because that will reduce braking distances, but it’s the balance between the two that needs to be redressed. Simple aero, hard tyres, freedom in power and other mechanical grip (things like traction and whatnot), and we could see a lot more battles for positions, with inventive racing lines and multiple swaps (like Hamilton and Button in Turkey) rather than people being stuck or just waiting for a slipstream.