Originally Posted by Woodentop:
“So here we go. Now that Bahrain has shown us all the wonder of the new regulations and how excited we should be(?) Surely the team mate fight at Mercedes and the back marker headless chicken squabbles is enthralling enough to encourage anyone to be glued to every exciting moment from now on!
Never more to witness or hear those dulcet tones reporting the need to drop back to 2 seconds and save fuel and tyres or perhaps let your team mate through.
Truth is, bar the safety car, the race was all too much of what we can expect again and that it will stretch out into a procession of two by two, with the exception of the odd DRS pass in mid to back of the field racing. Don't know why but this just ain't doing it for me anymore.”
Oddly enough, I recall hearing Ricciardo (I think) being told to maintain a 2 second gap to somebody or other in either Oz or Sepang and I thought "Oh lordy, here we go again".
If the new, improved eco-F1
does turn out to be boring I'm prepared to admit it but I don't think there's much point in suggesting it's boring
because the cars sound different.
I guess that, at worst, there's
some consolation in the fact that Rosberg and Hamilton seem to be fairly evenly matched, even if they
are both streets ahead of everybody else so we're likely to end up with a 2-horse race for the championship rather than the 1-horse race we had in the Vettel era (due to his abilities with that particular car) or in the Shuey era (due to team orders).
On present form, it seems like Merc' is going to clean up in the constructors and one or other of their drivers is going to win the WDC and chances are that they'll
both be so far ahead that there won't be any threat from anybody which might make the team think about applying team orders to protect either of the drivers from a 3rd-party.
Seems like the main difference is that we
did have one team dominating a formula that was irrelevant to most of the engine suppliers whereas now we've got the situation where one team are dominant in a formula that
is relevant to the engine suppliers and is likely to encourage their continued participation in the sport so, even though nothing has really changed on track, the sport, itself, is healthier as a result.
Course, having said all that, I'd still be up for the idea of plenty more of what we saw in Oz, with the cars having
much more power than grip so that the driver is
always the thing that makes the difference between smashing the lap record and smashing the armco barriers.
And, of course, these hybrid turbo' engines, with their gouts of torque,
are actually ideally suited to that sort of action.
Like I've said before, they need to get a car from the 1980s into a wind tunnel, figure out how much turbulence it creates then compare it with how much turbulence a modern car creates and find ways to reduce the turbulence back to the levels when wheel-to-wheel racing was still possible and if, in doing so, they reduce the levels of aero' grip even further, bring it on!
Kinda related to that, a lot of the fuss seems to focus on the idea that F1 cars
should be faster and louder and angrier than GP2 cars or other categories so we shouldn't reign them in too much.
Thing is, F1 cars are currently about 5 seconds a lap faster than a GP2 car so there's still quite a bit of scope for tinkering with stuff like downforce, and that's before you consider applying similar rules
to GP2 as well.