Dembo

You want them to drive badly just so that it looks more impressive? What happens when a driver comes along who can drive properly and therefore trounces all of them?

These cars with more torque do move around more. Go back 10 years when they had traction control and the cars really did look like they were on rails.

I agree about longer braking distances, and it may actually be safer in reality (because they start braking earlier they've got more time to lose speed in the event of a brake failure).

Shiskine

Reverting to steel and not carbon brakes would be good step for F1 except it's what the Yanks did in Indycar and we can't have F1 following them, can we ...

Perhaps another material ... like wood ... or cheese


(I've stopped taking this seriously)

BenRNBP

Hang on, I think I know where all these suggested formula changes are going....

lower

An F1 team did an experiment with iron brake discs instead of carbon a few years ago. The braking distances were longer, but not enough to make it worthwhile.

Dembo

When Zinardi made his hopeless come back Williams put on steel brakes for a race out of desperation as that's what he was used to from Indycar. He was just as hopeless. Which turned out to be good news for Jenson Button.

The could limit the size of the brakes but perhaps that would cause too many heat problems.

Nigel Mansell Staying on Track: The Autobiography just turned up. I'll tell you all if it's any good.

s2k_Nut

Manual gear and clutch changes huge fat tyres, problem of boring races solved.

[media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTJZTc1U1tM[/media]

Ultra_Nexus

Yes but that's not F1.

The only thing that is going to work is the budget limit and then go Carte Blanche with the design. And if they are going to have a budget, it should include the drivers salaries.

Active suspension and skirt should definitely make a reappearence.

But the one thing I think would really work is to make 50% of the front wing a positive lift generating device. This wouldn't detract from the look of the cars, nor the advertising space, but it would mean that when the cars got close, not only would the downforce diminish, so would the lift!

imc27

A budget cap is completely unworkable, because it ignores the infrastructures which the teams already have in place, and the fact that some teams manufacture their own engines and, even though this in itself could be catered for, it doesn't take account of the fact that a team making their own engine can integrate it into the basic architecture of the car better than a customer team. Mercedes, for example, didn't supply details of their 2014 power units to their customer teams until the Autumn of 2013, when the car designs were already well advanced. The Mercedes unit had the "cold" side of the turbocharger at the front of the engine, which meant shorter intercooler pipe runs and smaller radiators and intercoolers could be used, so packaging the engine meant the customers had to hurriedly redesign significant areas of the car.

Sliding skirts should not return under any circumstances. Any failure of the seal between the skirt and the ground results in a sudden and catastrophic loss of downforce. Which is why they were banned.

And any time the FIA have mandated changes to wing design the designers have recovered most of the lost downforce within a season or so, having spent vast amounts of money in order to do so. Or at least, the designers working for the front-running teams have, because they can afford to throw money at the problem, thereby increasing the gap between the "Haves" and the "Have nots".

The problem of single-team domination has been present ever since Formula 1 has been around, and people have always complained about it. Yet the circus continues, and FOM, in the guise of Bernie Ecclestone, can charge extortionate hosting fees and television licensing fees. Until somebody breaks the circle and devises a means to level the playing field, we will always have larger teams dominating the sport. The FIA may tinker with the rules, but Formula 1 employs some of the smartest brains on the planet and it's their job to find a way to defeat them.

I quite like the idea of smaller teams having greater technical freedom, in a similar manner to MotoGP, which places more stringent restrictions on the big factory teams. Although Yamaha and Honda have dominated again this season, it does give the privateer teams a chance to close the gap - perhaps the twin turbo V6, without any hybrid systems might have appealed to such as Caterham and HRT who entered F1 in 2010 on the promise of a budget cap which never materialised.

Ultra_Nexus

A budget cap is entirely workable. I work to a budget in my life, every company in the world does, so can the F1 teams. Your argument about the infrastructure with the engines doesn't hold water. These are separate entities from a budgetary point of view.

They were banned in the early 80s. Technology has moved on since then. Infact I have given it 60 second of thought and have come up with a vastly improved version based on segmented skirts that would follow contours. A bit like roller camshaft followers. Cars suffer from catastrophic losses of downforce now. Any time they get slip, the downforce goes. The plank on the bottom of the cars would definitely have to remain though.

And... F1 one has always been about the haves, and the have nots. The positive lift device allows closer running. Again, the way I would combat this is to build an air dam behind the foil to try and stall it. So you could asily adopt the rule to include a certain amount of space that must be clear infront and behind. Yeah, they would come up with tricks (coanda etc) to minimise the lift it generates, but they'd never get rid of it all, and it would still be effective.

Leveling the playing field isn't Formula 1. Again, the only way to do it is via budget restriction. Yeah, you'd still have some dodgyness going on, but the window would be smaller for it to happen

No. Having a two tiered formula is ridiculous. MotoGP have messed up with that idea. It was bad enough when F1 did it with the V10 to V8 change.

Dembo

Budget engines have been dropped already:

http://www.espn.co.uk/f1/story/_/id/...ve-engine-plan

Couldn't see that coming.