Re: Formula 1
Don't get me started.
The FIA is just meddling too much, all in the name of keeping the small budget teams competitive. But they're strangling the sport. All they've ended up doing is creating a spec series with cars that are too closely matched and so overdependent on clean air for their downforce that there's no overtaking anymore.
Last year they tried adding an enchanted drag-reducing front wing, to be used at driver's discretion but no more than twice a lap. Still no overtaking.
So this year they moved the magical drag-reducing wing to the rear, but it only can be used when the stars are properly aligned and on laps that end in an "R."
Just for good measure they threw in the disintegrating tires. As a bonus, these tires shed so much tread that by the end of Q3, off line the circuit is buried in marbles the size of golf balls, rendering it unusable for overtaking under braking.
And what about the return to turbocharging, only this time it's mandatory? And with double the CURSE. The rules say it has to be a 4-V piston engine with round cylinders. Very well, I can see that much, but all else the FIA should do is specify a displacement limit, then get out of the way and let the teams innovate.
Nobody in F1 was as married to the 12-cylinder engine as Ferrari, yet even they relented and switched to a V-10 when it became clear that, at that displacement, the 10s had an insurmountable performance advantage. But we'd never have learned that if they hadn't been allowed to innovate and explore the different designs.
Innovation is so retrained now, the only innovation that's available is to exploit loopholes in the rules, like they did with the double diffusers and hinged tea trays and flexy front wings, and like they're doing now with the exhaust overrun and blown diffuser. But under these circumstances, what one team calls "innovating," every body else is going to call "cheating."
I blame Ecclestone for most of this nonsense but you can't tell how many others in the FIA he's managed to brainwash. I'm eager to see him gone but it might not make any difference. I used to think Charlie Whiting was a stand-up guy but he and Jean Todt behaved so stupidly trying to ban the exhaust overrun, when any idiot who knows just a little bit about fuel injected engines could tell there was no (meaningful) method to verify compliance.
Excuse me. I need to go take another bloodpressure pill and lie down for a bit.
