F1 Fanatic

I’ll admit it’s helped overtaking, but I still have reservations about it because it is very gimmicky and arbitrary. I know all rules in F1 have elements of this, but at least they’re fair to all drivers.

I suggest instead of renewing the KERS boost every lap, renew it every 2 or 3 laps (and adjust the amount they’re allowed). This means drivers wouldn’t be able to defensively use it in the same places each lap successfully, and trailing drivers could be able to make a move if they are really on another car’s tail, and not just lucky enough to be in within one second in a certain part of the track.

personally I would go to completely the opposite end, and just give the drivers a far more powerful KERS system. I think (but am not sure) that come 2013 the rules will give greater reign to the teams to make KERS more powerful, in which case a dose here and there really could cause an overtake. The teams were keen to do that, because currently the penalty for carrying the extra weight is not really that great compared to the benefits. There are, of course, benefits especially off the line, but if they had twice the power at their disposal, it would be great.

I think you’re onto something, but I would also say to make KERS more powerful too, otherwise the CoG penalty would be too much just to overtake someone occasionally. So they’d have something like 180 bhp ever 3 laps, or we could be even more interesting and say 60 bhp per lap but you can store it for 3, that way you’d keep catching a slower car which is using its KERS to keep away and then zooooomn. We’d see some rocket starts too and teams without it would absolutely have to, thus actually fulfilling the point of KERS in the first place (developing green tech).

But I think it’s a clever approach to the problem and much more like the turbo boosts of old.

Fans have moaned for ages about ‘dirty air’ and now they’ve done something about it they are still moaning.

I’m not sure we’re hearing all the same fans moaning both ways. Fans who are contented tend to be quiet. The ones who are moaning are the ones you hear. So whatever happens, you’ll always hear someone moaning :)

DRS isn’t gimicky.

To me, a standardised system that can only be deployed under specific conditions a maximum of once a lap is precisely an example of a gimmick.

I’m not a fan of heavily restrictive regulations; the rules should be guidelines, primarily for safety, with the teams given freedom to innovate within them. For that reason I don’t think moveable wings should be allowed at all, because it would be difficult to relax the regulations on moveable wings without introducing safety concerns.

I’d agree with some of the points made earlier; allow teams to have KERS but place no restrictions on how much energy can be regenerated or how it can be deployed.

Instead of it recharging every lap, you should be able to store the unused KERs energy for say 1 or 2 laps but never have more than 2 laps worth available (or something), this way you would have different drivers having different amounts of KERS available depending on how conservative they were with it on the previous lap and it’s use would become much more tactical in both attack and defence.

The F1 teams have been able to produce KERS units which provide more than double more power since the moment they were mentioned.

“I don’t understand why they didn’t just mechanise a flap to cover the opening for FDuct to replace the rather unsafe driver hand off wheel method.”

because movable aero pieces or devices are/were banned is exactly why the driver operated the system with his body, combined with a very generous interpretation of “fresh air vent”.

i think they should stop screwing around and do it right – more powerful and varied use of kers and adjustable aero. the baby steps taken have proved the concepts, now open it up for progress.

if a car can save fuel weight by leaning on batteries for the full lap, i don’t see a problem. why shouldn’t a driver be able to tweak the front and rear wings to tune the car, or switch into low/high downforce mode? also needed is the ability to alter car settings on demand, instead of the once-per-lap sillyness.

Well, the other obvious solution are standard wings with a considerable lack of aerodynamic efficiency compared to todays wings, done by an enterprise under FIA’s orders. I don’t think I have to explain how happy people would be about that one.