New Qualifying Format 2016

CVC need to sell up and soon, their investment is becoming less valuable with each passing day, it's not like it's even their money they're losing though so I suppose do they care? Isn't the teachers pension fund of the USA a huge chunk of CVCs fund?

 

They don't pay anything to watch the races but they are the target audience for the marketing. Sponsors only care how many are watching the racing because they care how many are exposed to their advertising. If 80% of the people they are advertising to all piss off, they will most certainly care about it.

 

That is the problem. It's the teams that mainly loose out on sponsorship money and it's CVC and Co that gain from TV contracts. They may only get 45% but they get 0% from teams sponsors!!!! So CVC & Co only care about their income!!!!!!

 

Do you think if we went back to the rules from then we'd get great racing? I can't see any reason that would be the case?

 

But without sponsors there are no teams. Without teams there is no racing.

 

That's a longer term issue as teams committed till 2020!!!!!! CVC hope to have sold up asap!!!

 

How are CVC going to stop all the teams going out of business?

 

My guess is CVC will have sold F1 within the next 12months so they wont care!!!!
It's a very sad state of affairs.

 

Oh so, very, very true, I work for one of the biggest food companies on the planet, and they have managed to create a £850 million shortfall in the pension fund over five years, now they want to re-negotiate the terms, the shareholders are complete and utter selfish tossers, and we even have a lying public schoolboy for a PM and the Arch Bishop is an illegitimate child ffs,

 

Presumably from your comment you were not fortunate enough to be around during those days.

 

Not quite and not watching F1 for the years I was, but - perhaps because of my tender years - I don't understand why that matters?

Reintroduce those rules today and it wouldn't give you the cars you watched. They'd be much more reliable. They'd be made of carbon fibre and have much more efficient aerodynamics. The tyres would be much more grippy, consistent in construction and the suspension much more controlled. Centre of mass and gravity would be better optimised giving the cars more consistent performance through the stint. The engines would be considerably more powerful and driveable due to better mapping, fuel chemistry and computer control. They'd also be bristling with electronic aids, like ABS, launch control, traction control and they'd have semi automatic or CVT gearboxes. The drivers would rarely make a mistake and would have very limited opportunity to do so.

Getting all misty eyed about the good old days, is absolutely not the right way to solve this problem. We need a 21st century solution, otherwise we might as well just watch modern chariot racing - I hear it's quite exciting.

 

If it was Ben Hur-esque there wouldn't be an empty seat in the house.

 

The engineering side of F1 moves relentlessly forwards, the sport needs technical regulations that accept that and plan for the way the cars will evolve. The current proposals for 2017 appear to be based on the idea that "if we make the cars quicker and with an 80s aesthetic, we can use nostalgia to generate viewers", it's obviously not going to work.

The biggest thing F1 needs to do is realise aero is pointless. Aero development is expensive, difficult, and has negligible applications beyond the particular car it was designed for. But the sport has allowed teams to build large, lavishly funded departments around this pointless pursuit. Such a system keeps the best funded teams at the top because they can afford to fund this farce.

For F1 to be sustainable it needs significant manufacturer interest, and that only materialises when the offshoots of motorsport technology have tangible benefits. For that reason, rather than make F1 engines more simple to return to "the good old days", you allow manufacturers to make them as complicated as they like. It should be the testing ground from which engineers can aim for engine utopia of 1oo mpg, 1000 bhp and bulletproof reliability.

Now obviously that keeps the manufacturer teams at the top because they've the budget to develop the engines, so this is where the regulations need to step in and set a price that the engine can be supplied at. Keep that low enough, and the privateer teams can afford the engines at a sensible price which leaves them an R&D budget to focus on other areas. Having agreed aero is pointless, you set a spec aero configuration (which encourages overtaking when cars are running close together), and let the teams develop areas which are currently taboo. Why do we need a minimum weight? Prescribe a minimum driver + seat weight, and let the teams run wild with exotic alloys and carbon fibre layering techniques. Suspensions, batteries, brakes, are all areas with technology transfer. Ideally, this creates technologies that the privateer teams can license to others, and so make a profit off them, and be less reliant on pay-drivers, sponsors and a benevolent Bernie to keep them going.

 

We already have all these silly 21st century solutions, that's precisely the problem, they are problems not solutions.

F1 is chariot racing, its gladatorial, its been going on for centuries, slightly different twist but essentially exactly the same, humans have managed to introduce rudimentary technology into the sport and ****ed it up, as they have almost the entire planet.

Gotta go now, I'm getting all misty eyed.