[Richard C]

Originally Posted by bjohnsonsmith

I thought the idea was to do both.

I looked back at news items from a year or so ago when they were talking about this. My opinion it seems to boil down to...

* Removal of token system
* Increase the speed of the cars
* Better aesthetics

IMHO, while people (rightly so) complained about quality of racing, it seemed that the larger topic was that everyone was loosing their minds around the sound of the cars, that the speed didn't allow them to stand out from the GP2 cars and that the cars remain ugly. There was also the ongoing dominance of Mercedes and the (probably correct) feeling that with the token system the others were really prevented from catching up (with respect to the power unit design)

Here are some random news articles from a year or more ago about the 2017 changes...

http://www.skysports.com/f1/news/124...nging-for-2017

https://www.motorsport.com/f1/news/f...r-2017-675381/

https://www.formula1.com/en/latest/h...017-tyres.html

While they may occasionally touch on the topic of close racing, they clearly focus on the increased speed and new look of the cars. The Sky article has some interesting discussion including frank talk about how the 2017 cars may in fact NOT help with the quality of racing (such as the difficulty of following the car in front of you). The Autosport article link directly below from about a year ago is more telling IMHO. It talks about the "roll of the dice" to improve overtaking and that the design by committee nature is clearly a non-optimal way to do things. The result is that maybe nobody really agrees on the approved solution, but it was what could be agreed upon. It all points to why we now have Ross Brawn and his team to try to be a single voice on how things should be done in the future.

http://www.autosport.com/news/report.php/id/122916

Also, the last line from the article linked below (late 2015) is interesting. It is a quote from Pat Symonds...

The brief from the Strategy Group was to make the cars quicker and to make the styling a bit better, I think we've done those two.

Nothing about quality of racing.

http://www.autosport.com/news/report.php/id/122342

Richard