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16 Apr 2012, 12:00 (Ref:3060164) | #1 | ||
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is single seater racing *really* in crisis?
this post in the f2 thread got me thinking:
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even if you take out the eurocup, that's in the region of 60-70 of the much grumbled about current chassis competing in individual series, plus another 25 of the fr2000 cars competing in barc alone. they're all on various budgets, in various teams with different kit and staffing levels. meanwhile, british f3 has (as discussed elsewhere) less than 15 cars, f2 has 17 entries, fr uk ceased to exist, fford uk has 16 entrants at the first round, 7 of which are the new ecoboost thing, and intersteps has 10 as per round 1. what are we doing wrong in the uk? are we actually doing anything wrong or is it the economic conditions? is it that racing in the uk on a cost basis is higher than on the continent? do we need to man up and accept that the reason other series have good healthy grids is by racing in more than 1 country? is that something we need to consider? let's try and stay away from individual series bashing here, let's try and look at the bigger picture. |
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16 Apr 2012, 14:25 (Ref:3060251) | #2 | ||
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There's formula racing crisis in Japan and South America too. Indy Lights grids aren't strong enough either.
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16 Apr 2012, 14:35 (Ref:3060264) | #3 | |
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right, but why? japanese formulae have always been heavily supported by manufacturers, so with their lack of interest comes a need to find other investment. and indy lights... is it too expensive? or is there just a lack of drivers willing to take part because it's not going to get them a career any more?
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16 Apr 2012, 14:39 (Ref:3060270) | #4 | ||
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I think you know a lot of my views so I'm going to withold until a suitable moment.
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16 Apr 2012, 14:53 (Ref:3060279) | #5 | |
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Single seater racing is not in crisis, but quite a number of single seater series are. The reasons for this are fairly simple. First, there are too many series around the same level aiming at the same driver. Second, there are a number of series that are just bad value for money. Third, the economic crisis has led to a reduced number of drivers and those that are able to race are looking for better bang for their buck.
Because of the above, drivers have gravitated towards certain series and these have thrived at the expense of the weaker ones that have either deteriorated or expired. |
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16 Apr 2012, 14:56 (Ref:3060281) | #6 | ||
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Maybe the promotor who promoted FR UK, British F3 and provides the race meeting that Formula Ford race under do not really understand single seater racing and much prefer to promote GT racing.
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16 Apr 2012, 15:01 (Ref:3060290) | #7 | |
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is it natural evolution or poor brand building when times were good? that's part of the reason why frenault in all forms has stood the test of time i think - they built a really strong well-planned and thought out event whilst everyone else was making like times were hard - i'm thinking of maybe 5-7 years ago.
can anyone think of any others to add to the list that are doing well and maintaining grid numbers without needing to offer unsustainably cheap deals? what do you think their secrets to success are? |
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16 Apr 2012, 15:20 (Ref:3060297) | #8 | ||
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I pretty much agree with davyboy.
In times of economic stress even rich folk don't want to throw their money around and FR BARC and F3 Open seem to offer much better value for money. And if I had the cash for FR 2.0 why race around places like Oulton, Croft and Snetterton when you can be in the Eurocup for the about the same price? The egoboost cars (at 50k plus spares) have pretty much ruined Formula Ford in the short term from what I seen on TV from Oulton and Intersteps is a nonsense anyway imho. And as for BF3? What on earth are they doing in Monza? Just throwing money down the drain. If you want to race in Europe then fine, but keep the British series in Britain. Lastly the utter dominance of a single team, Jamun in FF and Carlin in BF3 in recent years must put some people off. It certainly would me. So I would say it's part economy, part hopeless decision making that's caused this problem. Last edited by Flavio Galtieri; 16 Apr 2012 at 15:35. Reason: forgot a para |
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16 Apr 2012, 15:23 (Ref:3060301) | #9 | ||
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16 Apr 2012, 15:27 (Ref:3060303) | #10 | ||
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16 Apr 2012, 18:45 (Ref:3060420) | #11 | |
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Single seater racing is clearly in trouble, at least in the UK. I’m now involved in the organisation of single seater racing, but I’m also an active competitor and this post is a purely personal one.
I think the undoubted current problems in UK single seater racing stem from both historical and current causes, which are certainly multi-faceted and complex. Simple ideas about what’s wrong and how to fix it are unlikely to help much. Look at Formula Ford – a category I was lucky to know well in its hey-day. FF1600 did not start principally as “progression” formula. It was born from the idea that it was possible to provide an exciting single seater that the man in the street could afford to race and had the technical ability to manage. This idea proved to correct and the formula grew. As it grew its participants (who were often poor but very quick!) succeeded in developing their racing “careers” and this meant that the perception of the formula evolved to one where the idea of racing for enjoyment, and the idea racing to progress up the steps of a career ladder, co-existed in people’s thinking about FF1600. At the same time pressure on the manufacturers who had got into the business to make and sell cars meant that they tended to have “works” teams to help them gain racing success. So the idea of “teams” and rent-a-drives started to gain strength, as compared to what’s often now called the lad & dad approach. Another way of looking at this contrast between teams and individual driver/owners is often referred to as amateur vs professional. Actually this is nonsense – no drivers are genuinely professional at this level of the sport. They may pretend to be because it supports their career aspirations but they, or (most likely) their families are paying for the drive. It is the teams who provide the kit that are the professionals. We never found out where the team vs individual; amateur vs professional, career vs enjoyment dimensions would take FF1600 because in the mid 90s Ford completely forgot or misunderstood the basis of FF1600s success; and via Zetec, Duratec and now most horribly Ecoboost, they evolved the formula squarely along the Teams, Career, Professional axis – diametrically away from the basis of its success. Because Formula Ford had then moved into a different, but fairly crowded arena of competing categories, without knowing why it had done this and what its market now was, the inevitable happened and it has pretty much failed. Six cars costing about £65000 each…fantastic. Although I do lay the blame mostly at Ford’s door for this, the fact is the causes are more complex still. For example; during the time FF1600 has been around the man-in-the-street has lost much of his mechanical experience and ability, because modern road cars don’t go wrong and so these skills aren’t called for much these days. The man-in-the-street to longer knows how to tinker with the car, and doesn’t want to. At the same time there are many more options now for him to spend his money. And as teams stretched their wings they found that they could justify a higher cost base if the cars they ran were more complex, and so they went down this route, and consequently rent-a-drive prices tend to rise across the board. So the man-in-the-street now does track days, or goes on holiday to Turkey. On so on. In the same way complex causes lie behind the decline or success of all the single seater categories that exist today. But I do think one theme, or dimension, does stand out. We do not seem to be able to understand how to manage the tensions between amateur vs professional, team vs individual, simple-car vs complex-car, career vs enjoyment. Today the most often proposed solution is to polarise the sport along these axis and treat the resulting parts separately. So it appears that currently the “influential” people in the sport seem to believe both the problems and the solutions are to be found only within the “top-level” categories of single seater racing. I think they are wrong. |
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16 Apr 2012, 19:36 (Ref:3060445) | #12 | |
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Can't find much fault with that post, ffracer. Good points all around.
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16 Apr 2012, 19:53 (Ref:3060457) | #13 | ||||
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Actually, this map from the British F3 website does concern me. http://www.formula3.co/calendar Spa is fine, but the other three are about as far away as you get. |
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16 Apr 2012, 20:01 (Ref:3060458) | #14 | ||
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16 Apr 2012, 20:54 (Ref:3060492) | #15 | |
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Sadly F3 drivers have no interest in racing on a number of the British circuits however they want to race on GP type circuits. Yes they are further away but the added travel costs are normaly less than the accident damage caused by small run off areas.Plus sponsors and fathers would rather visit these circuits fot the facilities.Pau is an exception as it is a circuit that trains drivers to race on a street circuit. The ideal F3 calendar would be 6 on European GP circuits and 4 in the UK on the best tracks. We have plenty of formula series who like to race on the other circuits.
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16 Apr 2012, 21:06 (Ref:3060499) | #16 | |
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*facepalm* if this turns into another f3 thread i'm going to start deleting posts. it's getting REALLY old.
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16 Apr 2012, 22:29 (Ref:3060546) | #17 | ||
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No danger of that from me. I'm outta here.
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16 Apr 2012, 23:52 (Ref:3060580) | #18 | |
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I think what that part of the sport needs to do is rediscover it's roots when you had an easy to understand formula like Formula Ford 1600 and whoever wanted to could build a car to the rules. And it was so popular you could pretty much run just about every weekend somewhere. Everyone knew who the best drivers were because they all had a chance to compete with one another.
So now you have all these single make series that might be popular for a year or two as the next big thing before people are onto something else. And because these single make series are all built around one sole car from one manufacturer with a sole source of high marked up spare parts prices, once the life of that particular car is up, the series is dead or pretty much has to reboot itself. I say get back to the basics, especially at the lower levels. You don't need F1 tech or over complication at that level. |
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17 Apr 2012, 00:36 (Ref:3060608) | #19 | ||
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That brings up Star Mazda. A good value for money today, as the winner gets a full season in Lights. Hence why we see a decent grid in Star Mazda this year. Realistically this seems to be more of an issue within the British Isles. Racing in Europe has become so centralized in it's ladder system that the national series have struggled (and the Brit series' were the strongest of those). We've talked into detail about that and the decline in F3 due to other choices in Europe, so I won't go into detail. Single seater racing is at it's height IMO. Especially in North America. While, yes the number of American-born drivers don't reflect such, the return of paying gigs in IndyCar have brought those young kids who viewed the way to get paid in motorsport is NASCAR to stick with the single seaters. |
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17 Apr 2012, 06:39 (Ref:3060700) | #20 | |
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Big engined single seater series have not faired well in the UK. Think back to the old British F3000 days.
I doubt there would be any appetite for such a series again. |
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17 Apr 2012, 08:24 (Ref:3060744) | #21 | ||
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fwiw i agree with moneyseeker about the big noisy single seaters point. there's definitely a small army of us who will go and see (and hear) anything big and noisy, but not big enough to come up with 20,000 crowds regularly. i think the cars have to be the perfect size for circuits that already exist for it to be appealing. which f3 already is, albeit a bit too big for some of the narrower ones. |
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17 Apr 2012, 08:27 (Ref:3060747) | #22 | ||
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otherwise, what's the incentive to compete at all? |
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17 Apr 2012, 09:44 (Ref:3060803) | #23 | |||
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Get rid of GP3, F2 (but make F3 more like F2 in many ways), and keep 'career' drivers out of BARC Renault. Get Formula Ford back to its roots (low cost, low tech), and get Formula Renault back with a much simpler car. If F3 can reduce the budgets by at least 50% by coping what F2 has done in many cases, then the single seater ladder is simple. FFord. FRenault. F3. GP2 (but rename it F2). F1. As 99% of F1 wannabes will have to do most of these, you guarantee big grids and competitive prices from the teams, particularly if a way can be found to stop some teams using windtunnels or making special bespoke parts, or having 300 'mechanics' per car when 2 will do fine. Ban datalogging on FFord and maybe even FRenault. The drivers do need to learn about it, and they can do that at F3 level upwards. Ban paddleshifters too, even though if (ha) they got to F1 they would have to learn - I don't think anyone has ever had trouble moving from h-shift or sequential to paddle!! It's a ladder; add complexity and difficulty at the higher levels. Just my uninformed opinion. |
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17 Apr 2012, 12:30 (Ref:3060897) | #24 | |
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"keep career drivers out of BARC Renault"
I presume you are referring to the likes of my son Scott? Well obviously he'd love to be competing in one of the considered higher ranking championships ( not that I consider there to be anything at all wrong with BARC FR which is highly competitive at the moment & remember Scott is running with a small & new outfit in Cullen/CDR not one of the bigger established teams like Fortec) but it's a case of trying to keep his "career" alive the moment & without a big budget behind him competing in FR Euro, F3, GP3, or F2 or even a move to GT's or proto-types is just not possible! |
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17 Apr 2012, 13:01 (Ref:3060915) | #25 | ||
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i think fford is the perfect place to learn the skills of looking at your laps in terms of squiggles on a graph. the driving experience is so raw that it's very simple to translate whats happening in the car to what's happening on the screen or on your printout. however, i agree with you on gearboxes. doing your first racing stuff on flappy paddles is like learning to drive on the road in an automatic. |
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