F1 Fanatic

First post and need to voice this ,,,,i have been watching f1 for 35 years i have been all over the world to 90% of the track and now i find myself losing faith ,To many rules and regs are messing it up drivers are scared to go wheel to whell incase they are penalized here are my rules for f1.
no more than 850 hp all new tech must be agrred on my all team heads , stick shift 3000cc engines and also cetain diamentions ,,,, and thats it let them race let them explore new tech and race

The Stewards are investigating more because the Drivers have asked them to!

This season we have had some really good races.

We’ve had 3 classics (China, Canada, Britain)
We’ve had 2 good races (Australia, Malaysia)
We’ve had 2 races at tracks which are often processional (Spain, Monaco)
We’ve had one Ok race (Turkey)
And one crappy one, but that was Valencia.

Nuff said.

IMO the best GP’s in 2011 were (from most to least exciting):

1) China
2) Canada
3) Britian
4) Monaco
5) Malaysia
6) Spain
7) Australia
8) Turkey
9) Valencia

Although all of them were good, apart from Valencia.

I agree with you MBCWRAITH but some of the new rules have definitely improved the spectacle. I do think there are too many rules regarding design though. I don’t understand why when teams exploit rules they then ban whatever they’ve developed – double diffuser, f duct, blown diffuser…. The whole point of the millions of pounds that are spent on development is to come up with smart new technologies which improve the car. I don’t see why they are then took off the car as soon as the FIA can organise it. In the past there were some very innovative new features added to cars which people hadn’t even thought of before, e.g. Tyrrell with a 6 wheeled car (I’m not sure if they were the first but they’re the team I know), or Ferrari bringing in rear wings ages ago. Some of these amazing innovations back then are still used now but in 50 years will we be able to say the same or will we be saying “that was a great innovation – its a shame they banned it”.

Rules are definitely necessary although I admit sometimes they are a bit harsh.
I am divided on how I would have liked to have seen the blown diffusor thing play out but what I do know is the way the FIA handled it was a complete fiasco!. The FIA should have either banned it outright at the beginning of the year. The plus side of this would be that it would have saved some of the smaller teams a load of money in development costs. They failed to do this and they then should have waited until the end of the year to ban it. The attempt to ban it half way through the season just looked like an attempt to use the rules to handicap Red Bull and thus inject some excitement back into this years championship.
There needs to be rules in place as not all the teams can afford the development cost involved and we might then have a scenario whereby the top four teams are in a totally different class to the rest. That would not be good for the sport. Then there’s rules for safety reasons (the way the F-duct was operated was just plain dangerous).Yes the cars would be way more advanced without rules but just imagine, we’d have cars with active suspension, traction control, fully automatic gearboxes and other aids which would just detract from driver skill. A lot of rules have been put in place to clean up airflow behind the cars and make overtaking easier. Rules that generally bring driver skill back to the forefront are the ones I think are really needed, otherwise it becomes a procession of who has the best machinery. Rules can be interesting too. If there were no rules for e.g. on moveable aero devices we wouldn’t have seen clever engineering solutions designed at getting around these rules (e.g f-duct).
I think the exact opposite is true, less rules would ruin F1, it would become too focused on the machinery and be less about the drivers. However having said that I do think that sometimes the FIA should not be too quick to ban certain things,just let them play out, so that we can appreciate some clever engineering solutions.
They let this happen with the F-duct at it cintributed to a fantasic season

Agreed Geoffrey.
The main issue seems to be how rules are implemented, not whether there are rules or not.
For example if the FIA put a rule in place that stated the engines can only use a certain amount of fuel, which would make them greener, that would be a constructive implementation of a rule as it would force the teams to come up with new technology to make them competitive.
On the other hand if one of the teams designed a component which allowed them to gain more power from the engine while using less fuel and this was promptly banned, this to me would be a self defeating rule.
In other words, rules can both encourage or hinder development, it’s how they are used that’s important