Actually, Tumbarello, I think this very forum discovered that no, it not always has been like this, with so few overtakings per race.
The numbers, actual figures, taken patiently by other fans, with a more or less constant methodology, are in other threads, similar to this one. If you doubt it, just search for "overtakings" in the forum.
There has been a marked decrease, over 50% if I remember well, from 1983 or so (when first data is available) to 1998 or 2000. We're talking of 25 years of numbers.
Since then, that is,
since 2000 or so, the number of overtakings is fairly constant, year by year, no matter what the FIA tries.
I think this is kind of mysterious and counterintuitive.
What exactly happened in 2000? Take also in account that it wasn't an abrupt thing, but a tendency going down that extended for many years, handfuls of them, that somehow stabilized around that year.
Also take in account that if the tendency shown from 1983 to 1998 had continued, the number of overtakings in the year 2002 or so would have been exactly zero (and, of course, to please those that find happiness in pointing the weaknesses of statistic analysis, would have been negative in 2003
).
Of course,
some fans will also point out that probably the number of overtakings these days is negative. After all, most overtakings nowadays are not of cars passing each other, but of cars being left behind when changing tyres or when breaking some delicate and very complicated gadget.
That was kind of a joke.
It's not a thing I like nor a thing I understand. There have been many theories, but many have been disproved and none proved, that I know.
So, unless we understand the origin of the problem, I think the forum sees with skepticism any solution, no matter how smart, because, how do you find a solution to a problem when you don't know which the problem is?
BTW, I think that things like overtakings in delimited areas, boost buttons, talking black cars (specially talking black cars!) and overtakings of the kind of
because-the-driver-has-to-push-with-his-nose-a-lever-to-control-the-rolling-center-of-the-main-energy-wind-turbine-while-tooting-the-horn, fall in the category of negative overtakings...
That, actually, was a joke.
The cruel fact is that no induced overtaking will be a true passing manouver for a true fan. Never. Ever.
We've seen them overtakings, we don't
forget them. We can talk about them for hours. We still remember the shivers we felt tingling down the spine the first time we saw them. Some of us actually
have overtaken a car with the heart in the throat in a circuit, competing.
The sad truth is that you cannot command a true overtaking to appear from nowhere. They are made in the heaven of racing by the angels of speed and sprinkled over Earth by mysterious forces and combinations nobody understand and depend on wind, weather, luck and manhood. They come from the heart.
When you see a true overtaking, you know it has been earned. The driver behind has tricked, mulled and pampered the one in front. He has shown not only being faster but smarter and, some times, few but appreciated, braver. If he simply overtook the car because it happened to be slower, that is not an overtaking.
So, imagine castrating all of that to create a ZONE where you actually expect overtakings to happen. It is like saying to a girlfriend "I command you to be sexy!". It kills precisely what tries to evoke.
You can paint the mule in brown but it ain't no horse, as they (I imagine!) used to say in
NASCAR.
NASCAR, a place where true overtakings are... brutal, no matter what Americans and other deranged minds, me included, try to say to you.
You know how it is: you spit your last slush of tobacco out of the window on curve 4, push the pedal to the metal and close your eyes all the way to the end. When the smoke clears, they count the cars that crossed the line. Those few, I guarantee to you, all have made overtakings. The overtakens are scrambled around the track, in ruins and flames.
It can be seen as fun and a tad cruel, kind of the feeling you have in your first bull fight, specially towards the mechanical engineers working there, I guess, but they don't seem to be inclined otherwise.
rocar with f1 drivers running identical BMW M1 was a nutcracker as well as the Renault R5 race...now what ?