The Trap

There has been a long, slow drift towards increasingly restrictive technical regulations in F1, gradually closing down the space in which teams can seek to find the 'unfair advantage' and design a better race car than their rivals. Of late, this tendency has rather accelerated. Max Mosley's announcement earlier this year of a ten year engine freeze has been the most dramatic example, but the move to standardised ECUs (driven by the understandable desire to eliminate traction control) and even the recent move to a single tyre supplier, are examples of the same underlying trend.

I'm not going to start defending Max Mosley as a person. His behaviour, particularly this year, has been ill-fitting of a man who, as head of the FIA, ought to be able to stand above the day-to-day scandals and spats of the F1 paddock. In this context, his remarks about Jackie Stewart, his insistence that Ron Dennis "probably lied" during the Mclaren spy-affair and his legal action against the Sunday Times all suggest a man who has forgotten the requirements of his office, and is descending into an undignified pettiness. Let's not pretend, though, that the issues that he, and the FIA, are wrestling with, do not really exist, or that there is an easy and straightforward solution which the FIA are boneheadedly ignoring.

Anyone designing a set of rules for F1 might reasonably be aiming to achieve five objectives.

Firstly, the rules should promote close, exciting racing.

Secondly, the rules should ensure that there is scope for engineering innovation and technical excellence to shine through.

Thirdly, the rules should ensure that the sport remains affordable (I'll get into more detail about what I mean by that later).

Fourthly, they should ensure that the cars are a genuine challenge to drive - that a great driver will be faster than a merely good one.

Finally, the rules should ensure that the sport remains acceptably safe - in particular, it should guarantee in so far as it is possible, that the spectators are not put at risk.

The trouble is that these five objectives will always end up conflicting with each other. A complete technical free-for-all would almost certainly result in cars that all but drive themselves, are absurdly expensive, and profoundly dangerous. While many officials will claim that "safety must always come first" this is true only in relative terms. The only way to entirely guarantee safety would be not to race at all - as ticket stubs remind us "motor racing is dangerous."

These are extreme examples, but nonetheless, the FIA has a very difficult job on its' hands in trying to balance these objectives. Take engines for example. The ten year engine freeze (now apparently reduced to five) represents a very serious restriction on the ability of teams to develop their cars. Between 1995, when the 3.0l engine formula came into being, and 2005, when it was phased out and replaced with the current 2.4l formula, the power output of F1 engines improved from around 700BHP to over 1000BHP. Now, that battle has been stopped in its' tracks and engines will remain essentially as they are. Thus the desire to ensure that the sport remains affordable comes into conflict with the desire to keep it technically interesting.

Why? The argument for the engine freeze is that engine development represents a hugely expensive dead end, in which rival car manufacturers spend hundreds of millions of pounds running to stand still, all advancing at, give or take a few BHP, exactly the same rate, until eventually the engines produce sufficient power that the FIA feel they have to cut engine capacity again in the name of safety - thus forcing yet another costly development cycle on the engine manufacturers. At a time when many large car manufacturers are struggling somewhat, pouring vast amounts of money into the development of ever more powerful small capacity engines must seem something of an expensive indulgence.

There has been a lot of focus of late on the need to control costs - to ensure that F1 remains affordable for the teams. Now, of course, leaving aside the possible solution of budget-capping, the cost of F1 will always be some percentage of what the wealthiest team is prepared to spend. When the richest teams had $30m budgets, the smallest teams could get by on about $3m. Now the Ferraris and Mclarens of this world have as much as $400m a year to play with, the likes of Spyker need at least $40m even just to stay at the races. However, the sport can be made more affordable by 'closing off' those aspects of car development where additional research and development budgets are likely to produce the greatest improvements. Before the engine freeze, customer engines were far and away the greatest expense for the smaller teams, severely curtailing their ability to spend money in other areas. With the freeze in place, engines inevitably begin to come down in price. The engine makers no longer have to recoup immense development costs, and so can cut the price being charged to the likes of Williams, Red Bull, Spyker et al. This frees the smaller teams up to spend more money on things like wind tunnels and CFD, and so should help to narrow the gap between the rich and the poor.

Restrictions on technology aren't always about saving money. The recent introduction of the standard ECU has more to do with ensuring that the driver remains an essential part of the equation than anything else. There has been a growing suspicion that modern F1 cars have dramatically reduced the difference between the great and the merely good drivers. The fact that Felipe Massa was able to run Kimi Raikkonen so close last year may - or may not - help to illustrate the point. In reality, traction control is only one small part of that particular equation (fundamentally, the problem is that F1 cars now have too much grip and too little power), but nonetheless, it has become something of a totemic cause for the purists, and so the FIA have stepped in. The standard ECU has become necessary because, without it, any ban on traction control would be all but impossible to enforce. It is simply too easy to hide software code away in proprietory ECUs. In contrast with many of the changes the FIA have brought through in recent years, it will probably have the effect of making the sport ever so slightly less safe. But then there has always been a conflict between the desire to ensure safety and the requirement that F1 cars are challenging to drive.

For all the focus on engines and ECUs, the vast majority of the performance difference between current F1 cars almost certainly derives from their degree of aerodynamic efficiency. In general, the front running cars have tended to look visibly more aerodynamically intricate than their less well-funded rivals. Like the engine horsepower battles that raged until last year, highly competitive teams are spending millions to fight each other to a stand-still. As with the engine battle, it is hard to see what possible wider use all this development could have, beyond the world of motorsport. And, to an even greater extent than the engine battle, it is genuinely difficult to see what the FIA could do to stop it. Short of forcing teams to homologate a single body shape for what? A whole season? Five seasons? or introducing standard bodywork pieces that would surely be the first part of a move to make F1 a spec-formula, there is little the FIA can do but let the battle continue to rage. Talk of wind-tunnel time limits and suchlike strike me as fundamentally unworkable, and liable to open up F1 to constant allegations of rule-bending and outright cheating. Something we have frankly already had enough of last year.

These are problems which motorsport has faced since its earliest days. However, I can't help but feel that motorsport, and perhaps particularly F1, has become a victim of its own success. The problem is that, over the last eighty years , so many incredibly bright individuals have given so much thought to the question of how to make racing cars go faster and faster, that there really is little scope for the truly novel innovation left. Not only do teams now know more about the physics of race car design than ever before, but they know much more about the science of determining how to go about making a racing car faster.

In the 60s and 70s, when budgets were much smaller and computers available to few outside NASA and the military, the intuition and intelligence of individual engineers and designers could still produce quantum leaps in performance. And those did not necessarily rely on the team being better funded than it's rivals. When Lotus dominated the sport in 1978, they did not do so because they had more money than their rivals, but because their engineers had developed a means of producing dramatically more downforce than any other car on the grid (so called 'skirts'). Nowadays, car development consists to a much greater degree of exhaustively enumerating possible detail changes to aerodynamic parts, in the hope of finding maybe a few thousandths of a second a lap. The more money you can throw at your exhaustive search, the better you will do.

This is of course, a caricature of the real situation. If race car design really were as simple as throwing as much resource at the problem as possible, there is no way that Toyota would have failed to win a race and that Renault would have picked up the World Championship twice in recent years. Nonetheless, F1's collective knowledge and understanding of the science of building a racing car is now such that radical innovations and giant-killing achievements from small teams are vanishingly unlikely. The sport has fallen into a trap of it's own making - a victim of its own success. The restless, ceaseless desire of some of the cleverest and most competitive minds on this earth, seeking to understand perfectly how to make half a tonne of carbon fibre around a 3 mile ribbon of tarmac quicker than anyone else, has produced an expensive stalemate. The FIA face an almost impossible task in balancing the contradictory objectives in a satisfactory way to enable the sport to survive in some recognisable form into the coming decades.

Fuelish Thoughts

Refuelling in Formula 1 is, as far as I'm concerned, a bad thing. I allude to this from time to time, but until now, I don't think I've ever actually gone through my reasoning on this in any kind of coherent way before.

Given that I think the reintroduction of refuelling into Formula 1 in 1994 has been the biggest wrong-turning that the sport has taken in the time that I have been following it, I think this is something of an omission on my part. It strikes me that the three week gap in the Grand Prix calendar is as good a time as any to set the record straight.

An unnecessary risk

You might be well aware that Motorsports Ramblings is perhaps not the biggest fan of the health and safety brigade. I don't like it when drivers die any more than the next person, but motor racing is fundamentally dangerous, and in my view, it can only be made entirely safe via the kinds of compromises, for example to circuit design, which will eventually kill the very essence of the sport.

Nonetheless, I'd like to see refuelling banned because it is potentially very dangerous. Dangerous not just to the drivers, who have, to some extent, made their Faustian pact in pursuing their dream, but to mechanics, journalists, VIPs, and anyone else within the vicinity of the pitlane.

Enabling refuelling to take place during the race requires that each team has fuel-rigs with hundreds of litres of highly flammable liquid stored in the pitlane. Pitlane accidents are rare, but not completely unheard of. Likewise, the requirement to move heavy rigs around in order to refuel a car and get it out of the pitlane again as quickly as possible in a high pressure situation adds its own dangers.

The fact that there has not been a serious accident in the 14 years since refuelling was reintroduced in F1 indicates that the risk is very small. It does not mean that this risk is non-existent. The reason I bring it up is that the potential consequences are so dire. Remember Jos Verstappen's pitlane conflagration at Hockenheim in 1994? That spectacular blaze occured when just a litre of two of spilt fuel ignited on hot bodywork. If an entire fuel rig caught fire, the potential exists for a Le Mans 1955 kind of catastrophe (after all, press offices and corporate hospitality boxes are normally built above the pitlane these days). And in this safety-conscious era, F1 might never recover from such a disaster.

Dumbing down

My second argument is that the existence of refuelling dumbs down Grand Prix racing. Of course, in a sense, it does exactly the opposite - all those complicated strategies require the input of some serious pitlane brainpower and the likes of Pat Symonds and Ross Brawn have amassed a considerable reputation as masterminds of the art of calling the right time to refuel. From the point of view of the driver though, things are simplified. When a driver had to start the race with the fuel he needed to go the entire distance, he would begin with a car some 200kgs heavier than it is in qualifying trim. As such, the car behaves quite differently - it puts more strain on the tyres and brakes, and its handling characteristics will change significantly over the course of a race distance.

These days, a driver no longer needs to think about looking after the tyres or brakes in the early stages of the race, when the car is fat with fuel. Neither need he adapt to the very different handling of a 700kg F1 car on full fuel. Strategic thinking and intelligence are less important - fitness and the ability to run off a series of qualifying-style laps instead become all important. To me, that's less interesting. When I started following F1, the ability of guys like Alain Prost to 'read' a race, and to (in the words of Fangio) master the art of winning the race at the slowest possible speed, was a major part of the sport's appeal.

No passing, please

My most fundamental gripe with refuelling in F1 is that I think it reduces the amount of overtaking we see in the sport. That's overtaking as opposed to position changes. Sure, refuelling promotes position changes, as it provides an opportunity for a quick guy who has qualified poorly to move up through the order without having to find a way past on the track (simple fuel up heavy, sit behind the slower cars in the early laps, then go hot-lapping when everyone else comes in to refuel).

The thing is, pit-based changes of position aren't all that exciting. Overtaking is the lifeblood of the sport, and if a battle for the lead between two front runners can be resolved without them actually swapping places out on the track, I for one feel slightly cheated.

Now it could be argued that refuelling doesn't actually make overtaking any less likely - that's the fault of the laws of physics - or more exactly, the ever greater understanding of how to apply them that F1 designers have acquired over the years - it merely makes it seem that way because with passing ever more difficult on track - its at the fuel stops where places swap.

I don't think that's the whole story. I think refuelling discourages overtaking still further in two specific ways. Firstly, it reduces the temptation for a driver to gamble on an on-track pass. A pass on the road can be a position gained, but there's also a risk that it might all end in an accident. I'm not sure what proportion of crashes in F1 occur during attempted passes, but off the top of my head, I'd expect its quite high. If the only way you're going to find a way past is on the road, its usually still a risk worth taking - but if you're confident you can find a way past in the pitlane when you both come to refuel, why take the chance?

That's not the only way in which the current sprint-stop-sprint format of F1 inhibits overtaking, though. The other one comes back to the 'dumbing down' argument: If there is less variability in how a car handles over the course of a race, there is less chance that different drivers, or different cars, will be quick at different points. When someone whose car handles well on heavy fuel disappears off into a lead only to be reeled in by someone else, whose car is set up more for running on less fuel towards the end of a race, there is a greater probability of overtaking. The current format mitigates against different people being quick at different points of the race - and hence against overtaking.

The same is as true, if not even more true, of tyres (though without refuelling, this becomes more of an issue, because a driver can always decide not to pit for tyres, and sacrifice grip for track position). After all, when was there last overtaking in the race at the front end of the grid in F1 at Monaco? 1975? 1985 maybe?

No, 2005. There was refuelling, of course, but in 2005, drivers had to run the entire race on a single set of tyres. Hence the Renaults of Fernando Alonso and Giancarlo Fisichella were quick in the early stages of the race, but were sitting ducks towards the end. In Alonso's case, for example, this led to the Williamses of both Heidfeld and Webber passing him for position in the closing laps. It was the most entertaining Monaco Grand Prix in years. With refuelling banned, you would not need to ban tyre changes (which, it could be argued, is dangerous, as drivers are encouraged to gamble on pressing on with dangerously damaged rubber) as the 'don't pit for tyres and try to take advantage of track position' strategy would always be open to any driver or team prepared to take the risk.

Nothing gained...

Is there really any argument for retaining refuelling? Something I have missed? Well, if so, I honestly don't know what it could be. It might be argued that refuelling encourages position changes. As I've said already, that may be true, but its not a price worth paying - nobody watches F1 in order to see changes of position in the pitlane. Perhaps the additional 'strategy' element adds a layer of interest to the sport? I'd argue that by homogenising car set ups and removing the gambler's option of running the whole race on a single set of tyres, it does the reverse. And besides, this is meant to be motor racing, not high speed chess. I've even heard know-nothings argue that pit stops are exciting to watch, and refuelling encourages more of them. Perhaps they are, at first sight, but after over 20 years of following the sport, I'm no longer enthralled by them. I want to see more on track action.

Could refuelling be abolished? I'd argue so. It has not become intrinsic to the sport. Sure, the teams might need a couple of year's notice to deal with the expensive business of designing quite considerably different chassis in order to carry twice as much fuel. Mr Mosley, if you're reading this, I know you're prepared to think radically when it comes to the future F1 rules. I've heard suggestions about regenerative braking, hybrid engines, spec-chassis and all the rest. So have a think about it eh...

Customer Service

Every other year, it seems, come the first race, there is a dispute over some aspect of the season's new rules that threatens to derail the Grand Prix circus and leave the sport in a quagmire of court battles.

A while back, there was the threat of arbitration over the 2.4 litre engine rules that hovered over 2005. For those who can't recall the tedious details of this dispute, a couple of the manufacturers who had produced the best 3 litre V10s questioned whether the FIA had the power to change the engine regulations before the end of 2007 under the rules stability agreement signed by the teams. The FIA more or less claimed that they had the power to do anything that was deemed necessary on the grounds of safety - which rather leaves one wondering what the point of rules stability agreements are in the first place.

The same went with the rather more vexed question of the special dispensation to Squadro Toro Rosso to run rev-restricted V10s last year. All the more so because the right to run such engines was being decided on a case-by-case basis - i.e. the rules were not the same for all teams. In the event, the cars wee so uncompetitive that all bar Midland, who were rather preoccupied with their own survival, didn't really care. Going back a bit, there were the rows over Mclaren's trick braking systems, the detailed workings of the whole-race tyre rule and the question of what to do about the deliberate retiring of healthy cars to get around the two race engine rules. Back in 1982, there was even a strike over new driver contracts, led by none other than Niki Lauda. Not a natural comrade of Arthur Scargill, one wouldn't have thought.

These things tend rapidly to blow over, but this year, the arguments are over something rather more fundamental - the question of whether teams are required to run cars that they themselves have designed. And because of the implications it has for the survival of some of the lesse teams, it may all take a rather longer to sort out.

On the face of it, there is little to dispute. The rules state that teams cannot run a car bought from any other team. They must own the Intellectual Property rights to their own car - end of debate. This, of course, the two teams around whom the debate is centred - Super Aguri and Toro Rosso, claim to do. Nonetheless, few expect the Toro Rosso to look radically different from the new Red Bull RB3, or the Super Aguri to depart significantly from last year's Honda. Understandably, this is something which pleases Spyker, in particular, not one bit. Without a similarly close relationship with any of the major teams, they are going to struggle to produce anything which can outpace a late-model Honda or a rebadged Red Bull, especially with guys like Sato and Liuzzi at the wheel.

If, in their view, the new Super Aguris and Toro Rossos (which are being kept carefully under wraps at present) are 'customer cars', they intend to take the matter to court. What, realistically, though, are their chances of success? The actual Concorde Agreement rules are confidential, but reports suggest that the key question is over who owns the Intellectual Property rights to the car. It may be that there are provisions to prevent one team selling IP rights to a previous year's car to another team, but even if that is the case, then it may well be that only the most minor modifications to the old car would be needed to make the case that it is, in fact, a new car altogether.

After all, there have been a number of cars that have looked rather, how shall we say, similar down the years, and the FIA has declared each of them legal. Who honestly believes that the previous Toro Rosso was anything more than a 2005 Red Bull RB1? And what of Sauber's 2004 'Blue Ferrari'? Going back a few years, the similarities between the Briatore-owned 1995 Benetton and the Briatore-owned 1995 Ligier are rather striking. To my knowledge, the only entries that have ever been refused under the 'no customer cars' rules were the 1992 Andrea Moda (a reworked Coloni - they quickly reappeared with a Simtek/BMW cast-off) and Middlebridge Racing's attempt to run a rather striking looking year-old Benetton for Emmanuele Pirro in 1987.

If the FIA are inclined to accept a car's entry, then there is clearly little that any other team can do, short of going to arbitration against the FIA itself - something which risks leaving the team with a very powerful enemy, even if they are successful. And given the FIA's stated position on the legality of customer cars in 2008, it is pretty clear what Max Mosley's attitude towards the matter is.

So if it is going to happen anyway, does it matter? I'm agnostic on the point. After all, customer cars would not represent some absolute break with previous tradition. Such efforts were common enough until the major teams, under Bernie Ecclestone's FOCA umbrella, got them outlawed in the early 1980s. At that time, they were little missed. Customer cars were usually run at selected races by bit-part players, running rent-a-drivers in old Marches, etc. In earlier times, though, there had been some pretty serious non-works efforts in Formula One. Lotus, for instance, took their first win not with the factory team, but with the rather better prepared Rob Walker Racing team, who ran a Lotus 18 for Stirling Moss. For a year or two at the end of the 1960s, Frank Williams ran a pretty effective operation with a customer Brabham, and all kinds of people ran non-works Coopers through that decade. The aforementioned Walker even had plans to run a customer Ferrari for Moss in 1962, before his career-ending shunt at Goodwood put a stop to that plan.

Nonetheless, I'm far from sure that the experience with customer chassis elsewhere in top-line single seater racing has been entirely positive. Take Champ Car, for example. They have always allowed customer chassis, and back in the early 1980s, there was a wealth of different manufacturers, and plenty variety on the grid. Gradually, though, the biggest players - namely Reynard and Lola, became so dominant as to wipe the smaller players off the grid entirely. They made clearly better cars than any other manufacturer, and economies of scale were such that they were able to build them ever more cheaply than their competitors to boot. When Reynard's 2001 chassis proved less than entirely wonderful, everyone migrated over to the Lola chassis, and the series became a de-facto one-make championship. In the end, it didn't even do Lola any favours, as, faced with a de-facto one-make series, series bosses introduced a de-jure spec-formula, and gave the contract to make the cars to Panoz, as exchange rates meant they could do the job more cheaply.

A similar process led to a one-make series emerging in F3000 (Lola, before Dallara won the GP2 contract, there's nothing new under the sun) and IRL is already heading in the same direction, with everyone running Dallaras. Formula 3 isn't quite so clear cut, but its been a long time since anything other than a Dallara won a championship of any standing.

Could it happen in Formula 1? It might seem far-fetched, but given enough time, I think it could. Imagine that Mclaren, for example, make a couple of their cars available to a satellite team. Those customer cars don't win anything, but they do enough to wipe out any real opportunities for say, Red Bull and WIlliams to score points. A couple of years later, Red Bull find themselves wondering why they are spending so much money on designing their cars when they could spend considerably less on getting hold of some customer Mclarens. For Williams, pride is at stake, but in the end, in the face of extinction, Frank swallows his pride and buys some Mclarens too. The money coming in from Williams, Red Bull and the original satellite team enables Mclaren to invest still more in their design for the following season, and up their production facilities. Increasingly, the workds Renault, Toyota and BMW teams, or rather the shareholders in the parent companies, wonder why they are spending so much money finishing 10th behind a pack of Mclarens every other weekend. Uninterested in running Mclarens, they sell their factories to the leading GP2 teams, who are more than happy to buy customer cars - its what they've done all their lives, after all. A decade down the line from the rule change, F1 has become a spec-formula (and Ron Dennis richer than Croesus).

Would it really happen that way? Maybe not. Maybe F1 is different, maybe the sheer level of technical know-how involved would get in the way of the kind of volume-car manufacture undertaken by Lola or Dallara. But that does rather tend to be the way it works out (although the F1 engine market provides an intriguing counter-example).

So what reason could there be for allowing customer cars? Well, there was a reason. Jaguar pulled out of F1 a couple of years ago, and other manufacturer teams could follow (watch Toyota....) There won't be a soft-drinks billionaire around to buy all of them. The cost of establishing a Formula 1 team from scratch. In the last 10 years, only Toyota and BAR have done so, and only then with the resources of the world's second largest car manufacturer and a tobacco conglomerate, respectively. And look how wrong they got it, initially!

If new teams are to come in, there's a strong argument that it will only be possible by allowing them to run cars bought from other teams. Could Super Aguri have come into being in 100 days if they hadn't owned the rights to the old Arrows A23s? What chance would Prodrive have of building its own cars in time for 2008?

So what is the compromise solution? A championship for drivers, open to everyone, and a manufacturers championship open only to those who design and build their own cars? Perhaps, but as Joe Saward pointed out recently, the risk is that Mclaren, Ferrari and Toyota (who probably have the resources to do it) would run satellite teams, purely to take points off their rivals, and soon half the grid would be made up of teams running under orders not to race the 'A teams'.

No, to me, the best solution is simpler. New teams should be allowed to purchase year-old cars from rival operations (To my mind, though, they should not be able to buy from any team which finished in the top 5 in the constructors championship - this would provide a useful revenue stream to a team like Williams, for example, and prevent the big teams running strategic satellite teams). They should be allowed to continue doing this for up to 3 years, while they build up their operation. At the end of the 3 year period, though, they should be required either to enter their own car, or continue running with a 2 year old design (perhaps modified by the new team itself). The three year period coincides neatly with the period that any new team is required to be in existence for before becoming entitled to any FOM money - neatly solving two problems at once. That way, there is a route for equipes wishing to move up from GP2 or suchlike, but at the same time, no risk is run of heading down the Champ Car/IRL road. A perfect solution? Well, has anyone got any better ideas?