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'Make the cars faster': Top 4 ways to improve F1

Cape Town - New rules, qualifying mix-up, dwindling audience... Formula 1 is in turmoil with many teams and drivers calling for major changes to the sport.

Just one race into the new 2016 F1 season and unhappy drivers are calling the series' decision-making "obsolete and ill-structured" and calling for a "restructuring" of its governance.

A rushed decision to change the rules of qualifying, and then subsequently scrap those changes after the season-opening 2016 Australian Grand Prix  in March, showed how much F1 is riddled with confusion and uncertainty as it tries to regain popularity

Ways to improve the sport

Wheels24 user Jason van Schalkwyk shares his thoughts on the state of F1: 

Currently there are many articles on the web about what is wrong with F1 and a lot of wealthy people are flying to Paris and back to have various meeting with fancy names to address these issues, even though not much comes from it.

I am an avid F1 fan and I would suggest the following to improve the sport. I use the word improve, because it is not broken, it is still one amazing spectacle. 

1 Stick to the original qualifying format.

It worked, was simple to understand and frankly it will give the same result at the end of the day, without making a fake spectacle. To ensure drivers stay on track, allocate X amount of tyres for qualifying and X amount for race day.

This will avoid drivers staying in the garage on Saturday to save tyres for Sunday.

2 Decrease the technicalities - Tyres


As with the first suggestion, allocate X amount of each compound for each day of a GP and that's it. Let drivers race or qualify on whichever tyre he/she wants for as long as they want.

At the end of the day a driver knows that staying on softer tyres will mean more stops than the harder tyre and along with his team can decide when to use which tyre based on what they have available. Making it compulsory to use a specific tyre and that compound spoils the race.


3 Stop penalising drivers for anything 

Giving a driver like Fernando Alonso grid penalties because his power unit broke or got destroyed in a crash is silly.

He has already suffered the damage of perhaps qualifying poorly when it broke, not finishing a race when he crashed or when it broke.

To further penalise a driver in the season is not good for anyone. I understand that it should promote reliability, which in the long run will cut costs, but I am fairly certain that no one has ever benefited from a faulty power unit.

4 Make the cars faster

Saying that cars are currently as fast as the V8 and V10 era of some years ago should not be something to be proud of. Yes it shows that teams are able to do more with less but it also shows that the sport has not improved in 10 years, only the technology.

Give teams the freedom to come up with aero ideas with less limitations, to develop the power unit throughout the season without worrying about the amount of tokens. Make the limits basic for example, car width, length and height, tyres as standards from a single supplier, drive to the rear wheels and so forth.

Complicating it by removing systems like blown diffusers, f-ducts, brake steer and so forth, removes imagination and the possibility of developing new technology. 

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