Sensible ideas for future technical regs anyone?/Rule changes - more to come [merged]

[AMT]

The current structure of F1 means that no-one's going to be first to move in case they lose their little corner of the very cosy duvet, so the FIA resorts to cartoon ideas. There's no-one with any vision of what F1 should look like, and what its unique selling point is. It has always been about mind-blowing machines and driving talent, not often about close racing: there has almost always been one dominant team. Here are my ideas, maybe to be introduced in 2007 to allow for development and harmonisation of the necessary control technology.

1. Restrict the power to say 500bhp. This can be done by fitting a torque sensor to the input shaft, linked to the engine ECU.

2. Reduce the downforce by at least 75%. Currently huge sums are being spent on building more and more sophisticated wind tunnels, to look primarily for downforce, which doesn't have, and will never have, any relevance to road cars. Everyone knows that the aerodynamics of the current cars is eroding any potential there may be for close racing. The emphasis should be on reducing drag.

3. Eliminate all electronic communication (including voice) from pits to car. That would ensure that team orders were more difficult to engineer, and it would mean that the driver would have to concentrate on nursing the car, not having the telemetry geeks to monitor every function.

4. Allow any power plant, providing it used the specified fuel. That would mean the manufacturers concentrating on efficiency rather than power - saving weight by carrying less fuel.

5. Allow energy recovery systems, such as regenerative braking: again, relevant to road cars.

6. Allow control of car functions by on-board computers: these are a feature of current road cars, and provided there was no communication with the pits, any programming would be just an extension to the set-up procedure that happens to the car prior to the race. Anyway, there is always a trade-off between sophistication and simplicity that means that it's often not the most sophisticated car that is the fastest. I don't see that a car with a plane-load of control electronics will be less interesting to watch than a car with a plane-load of downforce.

7. Allow any transmission. Efficiency would again be key.

My starting point is a strong belief that the supply of money to F1 will not be limited by tinkering with the regulations - limit testing, and the rich teams will simply build bigger wind tunnels and more sophisticated simulation rigs Therefore give that investment some real value, make it relevant. Neither should we be Canute about technology: F1 should remain cutting-edge. And of course, the other basic problem with F1 now is that it's up its own arse, and that isn't an attractive posture.

Andy