Areas You Think F1 Is Broken...

[ESPImperium]

After reading a Round Table discussion in this weeks Autosport magazine; Christian Horner, Karun Chandhok and the jurnos at the Magazine touched on something that got me thinking. F1 has a list of things that are broken and need fixing. The list i think could be long, but id like to ask is whats everyones view on where F1 is broken and how to fix it.

The areas that i think need to be looked at and fixed are as follows;

1] New/lower teams shaking down cars at first GPs
2] Lower teams not being up to speed
3] Young drivers not having enough time in up to date cars
4] Overtaking in general and how to increase in races
5] Aero reductions
6] Making the sport greener
7] Cost reductions
8] Circuit design

How id fix them;

1] Teams have to complete at least 4 days testing with their new cars before round 1 of the season
2] Make the teams in Q1 sweat it out until Q3 is finished.
3] Limit pre season testing for race drivers and also make it that each race driver has to make his car available for a young guy on at least 8 times a season
4] Sort out the front wing and put it back to the 2008 regs for it, also sort out the centre line of the diffuser. Also make the DRS unlimited.
5] Not sure how to do this one.
6] Simply ditch the expensive KERS and give the cars a set amount of fuel for each race
7] Again not sure. I was thinking about an approved suppliers list, and those suppliers report their materials usage to the FIA as one possible thing
8] Make tracks more aggressive, less of this follow my leader, give drivers something to make mistakes on and also give them something to attack on.

The only thing that i can see isn't broken is the current breed of V8 engines, maybe give the engine guys one year to develop their power-plants power to give them more power and make the cars overpowered again, that will make the cars move around under them more. Also the Safety measures and ECU isn't broken as well, so id not do anything to them either.

Whats broken and what isn't, and how do the broken items get fixed??

[andartop]

For me the biggest issue is lack of testing. What kind of sporting spirit is that which prohibits the weaker competitors (new teams & young drivers) from practising in order to improve their form?
At the very least, allow extra testing for those that fail to qualify within the 107% rule. Give them the track for a time equal to the race distance, after the race is over. Even better, allow extra testing for all those who fail to make it into Q2.

Second thing that's obviously broken is KERS. If a team can gain an advantage by not having it, it really kind of ridicules the whole idea. Ditch it now and forget about it.

Third, implement a rule that says any change in the rules will have an effect for a minimum of 5 years. Let the engineers optimize their designs. Changing so many things every bloody year results in huge waste of resources. Might also help bridge the gaps in the long term.

Last but not least, allow the teams to differ. The cars look way too similar nowadays. It would be interesting to see how many fans would be able to tell cars apart were they all painted in the same colours.

[Pandamasque]

1] almost everywhere, it's so clogged up with rules that it's impossible to tell anymore

how to fix them:

1] start over
2] don't be silly i.e. set simple goals that aren't in conflict with each other, find direct paths to achieving them by writing a straightforward set of new rules.

[zeph]

I think that one thing in need of fixing is a more transparent set of rules. As it stands, it is needlessly complicated.

[Dragonfly]

1] almost everywhere, it's so clogged up with rules that it's impossible to tell anymore

how to fix them:

1] start over
2] don't be silly i.e. set simple goals that aren't in conflict with each other, find direct paths to achieving them by writing a straightforward set of new rules.

+1
Same with me.

[Italiano]

Idiotic rules and attempts artificialy enhance racing.

[i70q7m7ghw]

4] Sort out the front wing and put it back to the 2008 regs for it, also sort out the centre line of the diffuser. Also make the DRS unlimited.

How will 2008 wings solve the problem? It's all the moving wings about in the first place that made cars sensitive to turbulent air.

Front wings are fine and it was clear turbulent air is less of an issue this year, banning the DDD has put the rules back to how they SHOULD have been in 2009 to promote overtaking, and in my opinion they are working. DRS was in the wrong place in Melbourne, so it was highlighting drivers struggling to overtake in a place that isn't really a classic overtaking zone.

[bgroovers]

Red bulls flexing wing
Everyone else having to develop a flexing wing to circumnavigate the weight tests!
Too much wake from wings but i'll take the DRS till rule changes in 2013 hopefully bring more under body downforce enabling closer following.
crap commentry by lagard, oh sorry thats been fixed by great bbc coverage. What a reflief.
Haters! These are the worst thing with f1 and being a lover of racing and the sport of f1. Totally biased and opinionated posting and views with no facts to back them up and toatlly closed to any view but there own. Why engage in a forum to discuss if you just want to spout your own biased and uneducated crap!
Looking forward to reading others posts.

[i70q7m7ghw]

Actually good point bgroovers, I would also like to see more ground effect in F1, and would happily trade that for smaller wings etc. I just don't want to see F1 getting slower because people think it will improve overtaking, only for it to not make a difference.

F1 cars should be maximising mechanical grip and ground effect, and then some downforce from wings to make up the difference. If we can achieve current laptimes of today with those changes I think it would be a good thing for F1.

[Ciro Pabón]

Well, you know, if Formula One is broken, then you cannot fix the rule changing without changing more rules.

This will cause a complex continuity change in logic, which will, of course, imply a huge time storm around Earth planetary continuum. Everything will be consumed in a temporal hurricane that will bring an end to the world as we know it. All cars will be transported to Jurassic, or even worse, perhaps Triassic time, where they will crash with dinosaurs and start a causality change that will make FOTA to change even more rules. In the end, Fukushima will be transported to Montecarlo in a chaotic vortex that will cause the Bahrain race to occur right there, only 107% later in time. Pérez will be declared the winner but then Sauber will not exist anymore, as dinosaurs will be still there and they will be faster (and smarter!) than FOTA technicians. Worse yet, drivers, logically, will evolve into bipeds with ARS, not to mention that this evolution will cause their gases to push back into the rear tunnel, some laterally, some frontally. All aerodynamicists will die horrible deaths after watching this spectacle, some of them smiling towards the crowd of F1 haters, which I hate, while they make models of rear wing curvature in a new "Hamilton curse", one second behind. Salamanders will flex their wings while they loom in dark alleys (and everywhere!), like they did in Jerez 94.

That cannot be good.

... oh, and I don't agree either with more "aggressive circuits". They could bite some spectators.

[Ciro Pabón]

+1

I agree with him, it sounds like a conspiracy to me.

[beelsebob]

The biggest area F1 is broken:

People continuously trying to claim it's broken.

The worst offender on this front – people continuously trying to claim there isn't enough overtaking. You know what the most exciting bit of the australia race was? Button trying desperately every lap to get past massa and getting more and more desperate every time round... I'm pretty sure DRS robbed us of a few more battles like this one.

[noname]

6] Simply ditch the expensive KERS and give the cars a set amount of fuel for each race
7] Again not sure. I was thinking about an approved suppliers list, and those suppliers report their materials usage to the FIA as one possible thing

2011 KERS are bargain compared with 2009, even if they are almost the same. They also fit well in the marketing strategy of the big players (energy recovery systems are just "trendy" today).

Finding the right suppliers, working with them and keeping them away from competitors (some of F1 teams are paying their suppliers just for not working for competition) is an important factor of F1 business.
I would say it's heavily underestimated here - it's much more than engineering to have the parts on the car.

Just one note - scrap rate in motorsport is insanely high... material usage reporting may not be good way of tracking the costs.

[Dragonfly]

If I have to be particular, IMO the thing that spoils the races is the RPM limit on the engines, combined with all the rest of limiting rules about them.
Now that they have a limited number per season (which I have been suggesting on the forums long before they adopted this approach) I was expecting that most of the other limitations will be scraped. Max RPM included.
The teams should be left free to chose how they manage heir engines and that would be a part of the competition as well. With a limited number no one would risk exhausting their resources by running constantly at higher revs. But depending on a given track, championship standing and importance of good results at a particular race, they could allow short time bursts to allow for a speed difference, which would enable a driver to to make an attack and a pass.
KERS (and DRS) give an advantage in acceleration, but once the revs hit the limit even with KERS active no more speed is gained. And because all teams optimize their ratios almost identically, there's not much to do.
A fixed number of engines per season is a global limitation, which makes all the remaining small and unnecessarily detailed limitations redundant IMHO.

[i70q7m7ghw]

Agree about the RPM limit, it's silly really. The engines are homolgated, and they are forced to make them last several races, why do they need an RPM limit on top of that?