Cav's Place

After years of rumors and negotiations, the future of Formula One seems to have finally been decided. Something big will happen, but it’ll start in 2014 instead of the proposed 2013, the engines will be V6 instead of the proposed I4 and they’ll be limited to 15000 rpm instead of the proposed 12000. They’ll also initially be meant to use 35% less fuel than the current engines, which is at the lowest end of the original plan, which aimed to reduce fuel consumption by anything between 35% and 50%. So the FIA caved in to pretty much every demand, but they still seem pleased with the outcome, which preserved the goals of reducing fuel consumption and improving energy recovery systems, while also finally ending the current freeze and once again allowing engine development to take place.

I’m not quite sure exactly how I feel about all of this, but reducing fuel consumption, improving the “green” systems and finally allowing engine development to resume are undeniably good things. The question is what will actually happen, how successful will this be, but also what the new limits be will be, because they obviously won’t allow teams and engine manufacturers to develop as much as they possibly could, instead setting some new limits and most likely freezing development yet again at some later point, once they’ll believe that those limits have been reached.
Practically banning engine development in what is supposed to be the pinnacle of motorsports always seemed completely absurd to me, especially when the engine is the main component that could also be relevant for road cars, so allowing it again could be enough for me to be pleased by the announcement regardless of any other issues. However, the terms make all the difference and we’ll need to see exactly what these new specifications are likely to mean, for the first season or two as well as in the long run, especially since previous such changes tended to have rather unpleasant results, mostly just lowering performance for a while for no real reason.
At least this time there is a reason I can really approve of, namely the “greening” of Formula One, but the question is how much of it will be real and how much will be just greenwashing. After all, they openly state that the image of Formula One has suffered recently due to being seen as a very polluting sport that promotes the use of fossil fuels, so these changes are obviously aimed at improving said image as much as possible, any potential environmental benefits, particularly those that could potentially arise out of the implementation of these new technologies in road cars, being only side effects. But at least they’d be positive side effects for a change…

Not counting this season, when they seem to have managed to come up with some changes that truly made the races much more interesting to watch, I quite thoroughly hated the outcome of any such announcements in the past. As I already said, the result was nothing but a temporary reduction in performance for no practical reason that could make any sense to me, seeing as Formula One cars should be the best racing vehicles on Earth and the aim should be to constantly improve their performance. Actually, I should also add that these performance improvements would preferably not be primarily thanks to aerodynamics, because working on the aerodynamics of a Formula One car essentially means struggling to get the highest cornering speeds out of a design that other people are coming up with specifically to reduce cornering speeds, as someone once said.
Before the engine development freeze, such changes were incremental, constantly getting the performance back down just as the teams were managing to recover what they had lost as a result of the last change. The reasons given were that it was an attempt to make the sport more interesting to watch while at the same time reducing costs. However, the sport didn’t exactly get any more interesting to watch as a result of such changes before this year, sometimes quite the contrary, and the costs argument is one I’m firmly against. As I said, I believe that Formula One should truly offer the best possible performance, so if a team or an engine manufacturer is capable and willing to pour endless amounts of money into a project that will gain them a tenth of a second per lap, they should be allowed and perhaps even encouraged to do so. If other teams and manufacturers can’t keep up, they can always move on to other championships, as there are certainly plenty of them to choose from.
I’ve been known in the past to advocate a Formula One championship with no more than eight or nine teams, and perhaps as little as six, each of which having three cars, just so only the best would compete. There is no reason to have “filler” teams like the three that entered last year, which are still far behind even the weakest of the older teams. A team should only be in Formula One if it can at the very least keep up with those that constantly improve the overall performance, and preferably all teams should improve the overall performance of what is generally understood as a Formula One car in one way or another. But these changes do seem like they may just allow even smaller teams to make improvements, at least as long as they’ll secure the use of a decent engine from one of the few manufacturers still involved in the sport, so it may turn out well from this point of view as well. At the same time, it may not…

As I said, previous changes were frustrating because they were incremental and served no practical purpose. These, while certainly being very watered down, are anything but incremental and serve a purpose I can fully agree with, even if indirectly. If the teams and engine manufacturers will be allowed to keep developing their packages according to these new specifications for a long time to come, without having the FIA freeze development yet again as soon as some advancements will be made, great things may happen in the future. There may even be actual environmental benefits, especially if the new technologies will end up being implemented in road cars. However, at this point it’s all very uncertain, everything depending on the teams’ and manufacturers’ willingness to commit and the FIA’s willingness to give the best of them the freedom they need to show the world what can be done.