Well…I finally got the F1 channel to work this morning and with that, I got to see the new F1 cars on the track for the first time…and I like what I see…these new cars are much cleaner looking than last year’s cars with no barge boards or all of the damn little add ons that made them look so strange….they look like race cars again and it hit me watching practice that they look like cars from the early two thousands like the Brawn that was a pretty good looking car…the team that I root for, Mercedes, doesn’t look like they have the speed yet but they normally sandbag during testing so we’ll see when the races start in a couple of weeks…I really can’t wait to see how they race in big packs and whether the huge changes they made to make the racing better actually worked…one thing I don’t like is that once these practices are over, the engines are frozen and no changes can take place for a couple of years…now, F1 is supposed to be the pinnacle of innovation in racing and to tell the best engineers in the world they can’t do anything to make their car better seems to go against that innovation…the same thing happened in NASCAR when they implemented so many rules that your car can be disqualified for a 32nd of an inch in body measurements and everything else is now standard so creativity is gone and the racing is no better for it…in fact, I liked it a lot better when someone could come up with something world beating new that would allow them to dominate until the other teams caught up….I mean do the few people who run nascar have more creativity than a hundred engineers from the teams? No, and the purpose of the team engineers have been ruined by the “parity” that is the goal of nascar….I for one don’t want parity that makes for boring racing…I want people thinking and innovating in both nascar and F1 that gives us something new occasionally that keeps me interested and looking forward to something new…not cookie cutter cars that by rule can’t change over the course of the season…
Tag Archives: no innovation
Too many rules in racing….
Well…if you’ve watched any type of racing in the past 20 years or so, you have seen the explosion of rules that have taken all of the innovation out of the sport. Watch any Indy car race for example…every car is a Dallara that looks exactly the same as all the rest…and all of the engines must meet a rule package that is tested all season to make sure that no one figures out how to make more power or reliability…when I started following this series, there were every kind of car imaginable and they only had to have 4 tires and then anything else went…you had Offenhouser 4 cylinders, Ford V-8′s, Novis, diesels, turbines…front wheel drive, all wheel drive, rear wheel drive cars and any body work they needed to cover the engine and driver….and it was cool to see what people had come up with over the winter to try to get an advantage…now they shave .003 of an inch off a side plate of a wing and the car is disqualified….too many damn rules. This misguided reliance on rules permeates NASCAR, too…with cars being rejected in inspection for being .0002 inches too low or for having a rear fender that is a 16th of an inch too wide and all of this is measured by lasers which is taking all of the creativity out of the sport…I sound like an old guy but, again, when I started following nascar in the early 60′s you had people like Smokey Yunick showing up with a Chevelle that had a foot cut out of the center of the car to lower the drag…and no one would have found out but someone parked a rental Chevelle next to it and then you could easily see the difference…and what about Freddie Lorenzen’s 1966 Ford “banana car” that had the front of the car pushed down by a foot while the rear had been bent up by a foot to give it more downforce…or the special manufacturer cars like the Charger Daytona or Torina Talledaga that gave each manufacturer an advantage for a while. And the engines….like the Chrysler Hemi, the Ford Boss 429, and the Ford SOHC 427 that were built just for this series….and now the engines are basically all the same and in the truck series, they ARE all the same engine built by Ilmor and put in the Fords, Toyotas, and Chevys…no innovation at all other than what is allowed by the series…and this has made all of the series just too damn boring. I think they should have a”run what you brung” series that goes back to 4 wheels and a driver and no other regulations…I mean Bill Elliot lapped Talladega at over 215 mph all the way back in 1985 and the cars have just gotten slower and slower since and how can that be exciting? Okay…that’s enough for now…don’t even get me started about formula 1….it will take one of these just for that….