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Originally Posted by chillibowl
as for Richard's question about what can make F1 more difficult. this is the hard one and i spent some time thinking about it last night.
for me the races/drives that stick out in my mind the most are ones where the drivers ability to feel their way around the track is made apparent. Senna or schumi in the rain, inspired pit stop timing, starting at the back and methodically moving up the grid. for me i think its always been more about racecraft then physicality.
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It's maybe not fair for me to ask the question without offering up my own answers. I will say that I am not sure, but like you I think I have ideas as to what has made good racing in the past. Creating those scenarios in the future is harder!
Like you, I expect it is more about the problem being mentally challenging and less about it being physically demanding. As others have pointed out, driver fitness can only improve. I don't think we can use methods of making it more physically challenging as a way to increase the spectacle.
While medicine and other sports knowledge has increased over the decades we are still humans. You can look at other sporting endeavors to see the impacts of progress. I don't follow track and field, but roughly speaking records are approaching the limits of the human body. So if you break a world record, it is by very small amounts. On the other end, you have sports like rock climbing (which is still young) in which roughly speaking the challenge has remained constant, but technique and fitness has allowed large performance increases.
I think there are some strong corollaries between something like climbing El Capitan (Yosemite USA) and F1. I am not into climbing, but I watched a documentary earlier this year that was very interesting...
http://www.valleyuprising.com/
I would recommend watching it even if you are not into climbing as it is a good story. Anyhow, it talks about when people first started to climb as a sport. It not "mountaineering", but just the rock climbing part of that. In the late 1950's the first trip up the nose of El Capitan took 47 days. Within a decade that had dropped to 10 days. Today speed climbers are doing it in roughly 2.5 hrs and many people now climb it while it was a VERY elite group at the start. And while the equipment is better, it basically is the same as before and some climb without equipment.
To bring F1 and climbing El Capitan together... We have been measuring how fast someone can run 100 meters for a very long time. It has been diminishing gains for awhile. However, within a single lifetime (and within the lifetime of some on this forum), we have seen something like F1 or climbing El Capitan start as being "hard" and with large jumps in "accomplishments", but are now are starting to see it hitting that wall in which big jumps or spectacular achievements are hard if not impossible to achieve.
My point is that both El Capitan and F1 are still both "challenging", but the problem is less than it was decades ago. The "nut" has been cracked. It is a problem with a known solution. Less art, more science. Less intuition, more textbook.
So to me it probably will be less about the cars (high or low tech) or drivers (high fitness level from here forward) and more about creating a new challenge for the overall system. Chillibowl mentions examples above of driving in the rain, or fighting your way through a field from the back. Those are examples of challenges that are not easy to solve and it results in memorable drives/races.
So I wonder if in addition to some of the technology changes we talk about (make it easier to run closer to other cars, etc.) that changes to the game are needed as well. I still don't know what the answer is. I hope it is not things like reverse grids or randomly spraying water on track during events. But I do look at tracks today and think "Is that track particularly challenging?" and I think "No".
Tracks are billiard table smooth. The Raidillon and Eau Rouge turn complex is no longer feared. What if there was more camber, more elevation change, changing surfaces, etc. Also, what if the game that is played was changed. Would that make it all more interesting? I wish I had more answers as to "how to change the game". I am not saying to make F1 races longer, but I think one thing that makes WEC races interesting is that they are long and it harder to ensure success. There is a lot more chance for things to go wrong or not to plan.
Sorry for the rambling post!
Richard