I'm going to keep banging on about my idea to drastically reduce the cars' overall surface area. I'm sure the designers already know the car's surface area down to the last mm², and if there isn't a 3D scanning technology that would allow the FIA to check that figure, then I'm sure one could be produced. Cut the car's surface area, and hence aero performance, by as much as 30-50%, but don't be too prescriptive about where they lose it, giving the designers some freedom to innovate.

Make the sport more about mechanical grip and driver skill, and less about aero performance. I suppose the only question would be the extent to which a reduction in aero performance would impact on lap times. Even if less aero made for more exciting racing, would the fans support it if it meant the lap times suffered?

 

I'd like to see less aero dependence and better HP/TQ numbers and some frikkin tires that won't dictate a delta. You can get healthy racing and still go after fastest laps.

 

It's so simple, everyone knows the answer, but they seem hamstrung either by politics or a method of regulating it. I think they need to rip up the rule book and start again. Start from a principle of 'What do we want F1 to be", then create the simplified rule set that achieves it. Every time some team innovates, they add another rule to close the loophole. The resulting rule book is humongous!

 

How do they reduce the surface area? Could simplify the wings but unless you mean make the cars much smaller, or make them one big rectangle, then the surface area is going to be pretty much as it is now.

Reducing aero sounds good, but unless you can make up for it in other areas it's just going to make the cars slower. Do we want F1 to be slower than GP2? They need to keep the aero but find some way of making it less dependent of running in clean air, which you'd think with all the brains in F1 someone would be able to figure out.

Reading about the new regs they're trying to increase the downforce from under the car and from the diffuser, as well as increase the sizes of the tyres for more mechanical grip. I doubt it'll solve the problem but it may be no worse than now (if you call now bad, which I'm not sure it is).

 

They can increase other grip/downforce, but it will only reduce the problem slightly. They need to reduce the amount of downforce generated by increasingly convoluted wings, as they're more and more finely tuned and more susceptible to turbulent flow from the car in front.

Surface area might work, but they could at least rule that a wing can only have a certain number of elements, and get rid of all the add-ons. Would tidy up the look of the cars too.

 

My surface area calculation includes all of the surfaces of all those little winglets and barge boards. I'll bet they add up to quite an acreage. We want F1 to be not only the pinnacle in terms of driver ability but of engineering and innovation too, so that's why I liked the non-prescriptive nature of my rule. Leave it entirely up to the designers and engineers to decide how they "spend" their greatly reduced aero allowance. They can blow it all on front and rear wings or perhaps make better use of the side pods etc..

However, you have mentioned what I think would be the biggest problem with my rule namely that the cars might be too slow by comparison with what we have today. If they could be made exciting enough to watch and clearly a handful, worthy of only the best drivers in the world, then I'd like to think I could look beyond a few seconds off some lap times. In any event, weren't some of the old ground effect turbo cars quicker than today's cars on some circuits?

 

Most of the lap records for the current circuits are held by Michael Schumacher and others from the 2004 season.

http://f1.wikia.com/wiki/Lap_Record

A quick look shows that they are roughly 5-6 seconds a lap slower this season than the lap record times. Having said that, a deliberate decision was made in 2005 to slow the cars down.

 

I do kinda like that, because wingless would effectively use double the budget, being 2-sided. So they'd have to give a huge performance gain to warrant inclusion. The other idea a friend of mine had was to require that the cars had a continuous surface (difficult to write regulations for), so there were no winglets. I guess you'd have to define a minimum radius that was counted as a discontinuity. Not sure it would work.

 

Yes they could opt for more front wing elements over a monkey seat, but then they can make those sorts of decisions already so I'm not sure it really changes anything from now. Plus part of the reason for the proposed new rules is to make the cars look more aggressive and if you take away all the little winglets and wing elements you could make the cars look rather plain.

It's the cornering speed that makes the cars so impressive. There's always the argument that there might be more action with bigger engines and less grip but that would make the cars slower in the corners even if the lap times remained the same.

I'm sure we all remember how boring those years were.

 

Ground force: not as affected following cars
bigger tyres
smaller wings

job done