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I used to love F1.
“USED TO” being the operative words, for now, like many others, I find it to be an extremely tedious affair. I used to watch each race religiously, from the qualifying sessions to the race, with the middle of the night Australian and Japanese Grand Prixs being great fun to get up out of bed, have a cup of warm tea and watch, but now I’m bored with it and don’t watch any races anymore.
My F1 discontent is mainly due the current Ferrari processions every two weeks, meaning the outcome of each race is a forgone conclusion, and yet again, the latest GP was another leisurely exhibition for the azzurri.
Of course, racing teams do have their periods of domination, not too long ago it was the Williams team who were unbeatable when Mansell was winning loads of races, then a couple of years ago it was the McLaren team with Mika Hakkinen being F1 champ, and there were many other periods of domination before that. However, no team has ever dominated a championship season like Ferrari has this 2002 term.
It’s not just about domination either, the sport in general has become way too reliant on sophisticated technology, and the essence of F1 racing from the early days seems to have been forgotten, with computers doing all the work.
There’s no brilliant “track dog-fighting” anymore, with racers battling and weaving to do fancy overtaking manoeuvres, as most overtaking is now masterminded by technicians doing fuel and tire wear calculations and done in and around pitstops.
Lapping straggling cars is also much easier nowadays and requires no racing guile, as the advent of blue flags means that the lower cars must just move over and let the leaders past, where’s the fun and skill in that?
And there’s not really any good racing personalities or rivalries. Who can forget Prost versus Senna, Senna versus Mansell or Schumacher versus Hill and all the many others?
Now though, the drivers aren’t charismatic enough, and don’t seem bothered about winning, they just pick up their fat pay cheques and hang around with F-list celebrities who frequent the races.
I looked on Ceefax the other day and saw a little article about FIA, the governing body of F1, making proposals to change some aspects of F1 racing, with plans to change things around to make the sport more exciting and hopefully give it a bit more competitiveness. Some of the drivers disliked some of those proposals, and I also think some of them sound a bit strange, but it couldn’t help to try.
So having read the small article, I found out some more info about it on the net, and here is what I found:
From itv.com/f1
*****************************
“The FIA have published a nine-point plan to make F1 more exciting and cost effective.
The plan involves a number of ideas which are highly unlikely to come to fruition, but the boldness of the governing body's thinking is impressive.
One of the suggestions is that the drivers rotate the teams they drive for during the season. This would introduce the prospect of Michael Schumacher driving for Minardi – unlikely to go down well with Ferrari and the German’s multi-million pound sponsors.
The list is published in full in today’s Autosport magazine. The nine points are:
1 Driver swapping: drivers race every car on the grid during the course of a season.
2 Aggregated qualifying: four half-hour sessions on Fridays and Saturdays at Grand Prix.
3 Bespoke tyres: rubber suppliers can produce different tyres for each of their teams
4 Success ballast: a penalty of 1kg in ballast weight per point scored during 2003.
5 Testing restrictions: limit testing during the 2003 season to just 12 days per car.
6 Aerodynamic freeze: from 2003 only two sets of bodywork can be homologated at the start of the season.
7 Long-life engines: one engine per weekend in 2003, one engine per four races in 2004, and one engine per eight in 2005.
8 Long-life gearbox: gearbox assemblies to have required life for a number of races.
9 Standardised parts: all teams would have to use standardised electronics, ECUs, brakes and fixed ballast.
The team bosses will informally discuss the ideas with Bernie Ecclestone and Max Mosley at this weekend’s Japanese Grand Prix.”
*****************************
Some of those ideas seem a bit radical, especially the “driver swapping” one and many drivers don’t like the idea of that one, but some of the more technical ideas could be for the better.
We’ll just have to wait and see if any of those proposals are taken onboard and used in future seasons.
So, not wanting to be totally serious and let FIA have all the fun of inventing new rules, I have come up with some of my own enhancements to make the sport of Formula 1 great again:
Turbo boosts: “Ha ha” you say, but actually a similar idea was raised by some mad buffoon not that long ago.
If you’ve seen “The Fast & the Furious” or played games like Burnout, then you’ll know what the turbo boost is all about.
Cars could have a limited amount of Nitrous Oxide, and can use their boosts whenever they wish, it would make overtaking easier and more exciting and the boosts would have to be used tactically.
Stronger cars, more crashes, ramps and shortcuts: Of course we would never want to see any fatalities or injuries, but many people only watch F1 for the big pile ups (though they don’t admit it). So, like GTA3 and other video games, how about it you were awarded bonus points for crazy crashes, flips and spins etc. Cars should be made a bit stronger instead of having very brittle fibreglass or whatever it is, where if you slightly bump into another car your front wing or wishbone crumble to pieces. We can then have some real car bashing as driver vie for position.
Also, the addition of ramps and shortcuts would make races much more exciting as when drivers take different routes, you won’t know who’s in front until the track meets up again, and they can use speed boosts to go up ramps to gain bonus air time points and improve track position.
Weapons & gadgets: We could make Formula 1 more like the chariot race in Ben Hur, but with F1 cars instead of chariots, or F1 cars could be more like Michael Crawford’s gadget laden car in “Condorman”. Drivers could have lasers, oil slicks, smoke screens, those tire shredding saw things that come out of hubcaps like in Goldfinger and banana skins (well it worked for Mario Kart) to use against the opposition.
“Michael Schumacher comes into the final straight, it looks like he’s going to win his 50th GP in a row…BUT NO…he’s slipped and spun out on Juan Pablo Montoya’s craftily placed banana skin!!”
All women pit crews: Nowadays in F1, the pit stops are over in a flash, but if you had all women pit crews, tire changing and refuelling could be really exciting and tense, as it could take 2 minutes or 20 minutes…oh the suspense…
OAP drivers: All F1 races are held on a Sunday, so how about if they had the REAL “Sunday drivers” taking part…pensioners!
Yes, “Grand Prix” would be renamed “Grand OAPrix”, with the competitors swerving all over the road and driving REALLY slowly.
Tracks would be relocated from Monaco, Japan and Australia etc to Bognor, Blackpool, Clacton, Spanish holiday resort islands and other old favourite person destinations
Celebrity Drivers: As I’ve mentioned, F1 drivers have about as much charisma nowadays as Alan Shearer and Michael Owen, so maybe if we have celebrity drivers who’d make races more like “The Wacky Races”. We’d have famous F1 fan Sly Stallone and Wolf from Gladiators battling against the Chuckle Brothers in their special comedy two-seater F1 car with silly wheels, or the Chuckle Bros could be against each other in Schumacher style sibling rivalry. Perhaps there could also be a WWE wrestler and a pop star thrown in as well, maybe Peter Andre.
“USED TO” being the operative words, for now, like many others, I find it to be an extremely tedious affair. I used to watch each race religiously, from the qualifying sessions to the race, with the middle of the night Australian and Japanese Grand Prixs being great fun to get up out of bed, have a cup of warm tea and watch, but now I’m bored with it and don’t watch any races anymore.
My F1 discontent is mainly due the current Ferrari processions every two weeks, meaning the outcome of each race is a forgone conclusion, and yet again, the latest GP was another leisurely exhibition for the azzurri.
Of course, racing teams do have their periods of domination, not too long ago it was the Williams team who were unbeatable when Mansell was winning loads of races, then a couple of years ago it was the McLaren team with Mika Hakkinen being F1 champ, and there were many other periods of domination before that. However, no team has ever dominated a championship season like Ferrari has this 2002 term.
It’s not just about domination either, the sport in general has become way too reliant on sophisticated technology, and the essence of F1 racing from the early days seems to have been forgotten, with computers doing all the work.
There’s no brilliant “track dog-fighting” anymore, with racers battling and weaving to do fancy overtaking manoeuvres, as most overtaking is now masterminded by technicians doing fuel and tire wear calculations and done in and around pitstops.
Lapping straggling cars is also much easier nowadays and requires no racing guile, as the advent of blue flags means that the lower cars must just move over and let the leaders past, where’s the fun and skill in that?
And there’s not really any good racing personalities or rivalries. Who can forget Prost versus Senna, Senna versus Mansell or Schumacher versus Hill and all the many others?
Now though, the drivers aren’t charismatic enough, and don’t seem bothered about winning, they just pick up their fat pay cheques and hang around with F-list celebrities who frequent the races.
I looked on Ceefax the other day and saw a little article about FIA, the governing body of F1, making proposals to change some aspects of F1 racing, with plans to change things around to make the sport more exciting and hopefully give it a bit more competitiveness. Some of the drivers disliked some of those proposals, and I also think some of them sound a bit strange, but it couldn’t help to try.
So having read the small article, I found out some more info about it on the net, and here is what I found:
From itv.com/f1
*****************************
“The FIA have published a nine-point plan to make F1 more exciting and cost effective.
The plan involves a number of ideas which are highly unlikely to come to fruition, but the boldness of the governing body's thinking is impressive.
One of the suggestions is that the drivers rotate the teams they drive for during the season. This would introduce the prospect of Michael Schumacher driving for Minardi – unlikely to go down well with Ferrari and the German’s multi-million pound sponsors.
The list is published in full in today’s Autosport magazine. The nine points are:
1 Driver swapping: drivers race every car on the grid during the course of a season.
2 Aggregated qualifying: four half-hour sessions on Fridays and Saturdays at Grand Prix.
3 Bespoke tyres: rubber suppliers can produce different tyres for each of their teams
4 Success ballast: a penalty of 1kg in ballast weight per point scored during 2003.
5 Testing restrictions: limit testing during the 2003 season to just 12 days per car.
6 Aerodynamic freeze: from 2003 only two sets of bodywork can be homologated at the start of the season.
7 Long-life engines: one engine per weekend in 2003, one engine per four races in 2004, and one engine per eight in 2005.
8 Long-life gearbox: gearbox assemblies to have required life for a number of races.
9 Standardised parts: all teams would have to use standardised electronics, ECUs, brakes and fixed ballast.
The team bosses will informally discuss the ideas with Bernie Ecclestone and Max Mosley at this weekend’s Japanese Grand Prix.”
*****************************
Some of those ideas seem a bit radical, especially the “driver swapping” one and many drivers don’t like the idea of that one, but some of the more technical ideas could be for the better.
We’ll just have to wait and see if any of those proposals are taken onboard and used in future seasons.
So, not wanting to be totally serious and let FIA have all the fun of inventing new rules, I have come up with some of my own enhancements to make the sport of Formula 1 great again:
Turbo boosts: “Ha ha” you say, but actually a similar idea was raised by some mad buffoon not that long ago.
If you’ve seen “The Fast & the Furious” or played games like Burnout, then you’ll know what the turbo boost is all about.
Cars could have a limited amount of Nitrous Oxide, and can use their boosts whenever they wish, it would make overtaking easier and more exciting and the boosts would have to be used tactically.
Stronger cars, more crashes, ramps and shortcuts: Of course we would never want to see any fatalities or injuries, but many people only watch F1 for the big pile ups (though they don’t admit it). So, like GTA3 and other video games, how about it you were awarded bonus points for crazy crashes, flips and spins etc. Cars should be made a bit stronger instead of having very brittle fibreglass or whatever it is, where if you slightly bump into another car your front wing or wishbone crumble to pieces. We can then have some real car bashing as driver vie for position.
Also, the addition of ramps and shortcuts would make races much more exciting as when drivers take different routes, you won’t know who’s in front until the track meets up again, and they can use speed boosts to go up ramps to gain bonus air time points and improve track position.
Weapons & gadgets: We could make Formula 1 more like the chariot race in Ben Hur, but with F1 cars instead of chariots, or F1 cars could be more like Michael Crawford’s gadget laden car in “Condorman”. Drivers could have lasers, oil slicks, smoke screens, those tire shredding saw things that come out of hubcaps like in Goldfinger and banana skins (well it worked for Mario Kart) to use against the opposition.
“Michael Schumacher comes into the final straight, it looks like he’s going to win his 50th GP in a row…BUT NO…he’s slipped and spun out on Juan Pablo Montoya’s craftily placed banana skin!!”
All women pit crews: Nowadays in F1, the pit stops are over in a flash, but if you had all women pit crews, tire changing and refuelling could be really exciting and tense, as it could take 2 minutes or 20 minutes…oh the suspense…
OAP drivers: All F1 races are held on a Sunday, so how about if they had the REAL “Sunday drivers” taking part…pensioners!
Yes, “Grand Prix” would be renamed “Grand OAPrix”, with the competitors swerving all over the road and driving REALLY slowly.
Tracks would be relocated from Monaco, Japan and Australia etc to Bognor, Blackpool, Clacton, Spanish holiday resort islands and other old favourite person destinations
Celebrity Drivers: As I’ve mentioned, F1 drivers have about as much charisma nowadays as Alan Shearer and Michael Owen, so maybe if we have celebrity drivers who’d make races more like “The Wacky Races”. We’d have famous F1 fan Sly Stallone and Wolf from Gladiators battling against the Chuckle Brothers in their special comedy two-seater F1 car with silly wheels, or the Chuckle Bros could be against each other in Schumacher style sibling rivalry. Perhaps there could also be a WWE wrestler and a pop star thrown in as well, maybe Peter Andre.
With obvious respect given to the original posting...I'm not claiming any credit of my own for the Chuckle Borthers!
F1 needs to repliacte the success of the Wacky Racers. Personaly I never knew who was going to win and actually lost quite a lot of money down at the bookies, repeatedly backing Dick Dastardly at 100-1.
F1 needs:
A name change:
Formula Fun, Formula Ferrari Won, Formula One Touring Cars Nil and Formula Too are all under consideration.
Wacky designs/themes for each team such as the:
Miserymobile- themed on Eastenders. This revolutionary dual fuel car runs on tears or depression, depending on race scenarios.
Dragstar-the driver is voted for and selected by the public but will doubtless disappear without trace after some intial success.
Knightrider- could any driver withstand THAT voice talking at you for 60 laps of Monaco? "Left turn Michael, I really should have been a rally car, flat right over easy left 50, you know this is beneath me don't you"?
A-team van- they would always start off in the pits (locked in a garage with minmal equipment supplied) and after about 20 laps have gone, they'd appear in the race with Hannibal-inspired modifications, such as dustbin lid hub caps, a big mirror for overtaking manovers and Face man, a roof top mounted gun that although it aimed directly at other cars, would always mysteriously shoot the ground in front of them and of course a baby seat for BA. Most races would be lost trying to break Murdoch out of the old folks home across the road.
Robotwars- any of the saddos entries will do as long as they get smashed to bits. Then smashed up some more. Before they got to the track.
Ferrari- their car will be unmodified but will have Sadam at the wheel as he wants to ensure another 100% landslide victory. However his best laid schemes, such as lapping everyone 10 times then spending an hour trying to shoot rival's car tyres out with a pea-shooter, will never come to fruition. New regualtions will require him to have the dog featured on That's Life which said "sausages" as his passenger. The dog will be brought out of retirement after successfuly entertaining the massess at Butlins for 10 years in his one dog show "Repeated growls that may sound like sausages and actual growls at the man repeatedly grabbing me by the unmentionables in an attempt to get me to growl the word sausages". His later tour of Holland was a bigger success due in part to the change of the shows title to "Bangers and Hash".
Rule changes:
The first rule of Formula One is that nobody talks about Formula One
The Second rule of Formula One is that nobody talks about Formula One because its boring
Commentators:
Jonathan Pearce- I can't believe what I'm seeing, this is amazing, COME ON FORMULA ONE, GET IN THERE MY SON, the lights have turned Red. AMAZING!
Stuart Pearce (looking down)- er which ones got Gazza in.
Jonathan Pearce- the one who's suspension is knackered-look!
Stuart Pearce- In twenty years of football i've never looked up and I'm not about to start now!
Pit crews:
The chuckle brothers- to me to you.
Ant and Dec- they're in everything else, ditto Volderman, Smiley et al.
Representative Shelf stackers from the trackside supermarket- just how slow can you go?
The tracks:
Any Tesco carpark, any Kwik save carpark, Slough, M25 and Alton Towers (the theme park not the circuit as that would be silly).
Conclusion:
If the BBC don't offer me lots of money for conning the public with some lame shows then I'm Audley Harrington!
F1 needs:
A name change:
Formula Fun, Formula Ferrari Won, Formula One Touring Cars Nil and Formula Too are all under consideration.
Wacky designs/themes for each team such as the:
Miserymobile- themed on Eastenders. This revolutionary dual fuel car runs on tears or depression, depending on race scenarios.
Dragstar-the driver is voted for and selected by the public but will doubtless disappear without trace after some intial success.
Knightrider- could any driver withstand THAT voice talking at you for 60 laps of Monaco? "Left turn Michael, I really should have been a rally car, flat right over easy left 50, you know this is beneath me don't you"?
A-team van- they would always start off in the pits (locked in a garage with minmal equipment supplied) and after about 20 laps have gone, they'd appear in the race with Hannibal-inspired modifications, such as dustbin lid hub caps, a big mirror for overtaking manovers and Face man, a roof top mounted gun that although it aimed directly at other cars, would always mysteriously shoot the ground in front of them and of course a baby seat for BA. Most races would be lost trying to break Murdoch out of the old folks home across the road.
Robotwars- any of the saddos entries will do as long as they get smashed to bits. Then smashed up some more. Before they got to the track.
Ferrari- their car will be unmodified but will have Sadam at the wheel as he wants to ensure another 100% landslide victory. However his best laid schemes, such as lapping everyone 10 times then spending an hour trying to shoot rival's car tyres out with a pea-shooter, will never come to fruition. New regualtions will require him to have the dog featured on That's Life which said "sausages" as his passenger. The dog will be brought out of retirement after successfuly entertaining the massess at Butlins for 10 years in his one dog show "Repeated growls that may sound like sausages and actual growls at the man repeatedly grabbing me by the unmentionables in an attempt to get me to growl the word sausages". His later tour of Holland was a bigger success due in part to the change of the shows title to "Bangers and Hash".
Rule changes:
The first rule of Formula One is that nobody talks about Formula One
The Second rule of Formula One is that nobody talks about Formula One because its boring
Commentators:
Jonathan Pearce- I can't believe what I'm seeing, this is amazing, COME ON FORMULA ONE, GET IN THERE MY SON, the lights have turned Red. AMAZING!
Stuart Pearce (looking down)- er which ones got Gazza in.
Jonathan Pearce- the one who's suspension is knackered-look!
Stuart Pearce- In twenty years of football i've never looked up and I'm not about to start now!
Pit crews:
The chuckle brothers- to me to you.
Ant and Dec- they're in everything else, ditto Volderman, Smiley et al.
Representative Shelf stackers from the trackside supermarket- just how slow can you go?
The tracks:
Any Tesco carpark, any Kwik save carpark, Slough, M25 and Alton Towers (the theme park not the circuit as that would be silly).
Conclusion:
If the BBC don't offer me lots of money for conning the public with some lame shows then I'm Audley Harrington!
Personally i think the best way to make it more interesting is to get rid of all the drivers aids such as traction control and launch control and actually make them drive the cars like they used to instead of having glorified scalextric (sp?) cars.
Also if there's any hint of team orders then a ban of 3 races should be enforced or the teams should have 2 test drivers who will take the drivers place for that number of races. Let's see how many races Schumey wins without Barrichello's help.
If Schumacher manages to storm every championship then i might consider him as the best of all time but for now i don't even figure him in my top 5.
Also if there's any hint of team orders then a ban of 3 races should be enforced or the teams should have 2 test drivers who will take the drivers place for that number of races. Let's see how many races Schumey wins without Barrichello's help.
If Schumacher manages to storm every championship then i might consider him as the best of all time but for now i don't even figure him in my top 5.
I used to love F1.
“USED TO” being the operative words, for now, like many others, I find it to be an extremely tedious affair. I used to watch each race religiously, from the qualifying sessions to the race, with the middle of the night Australian and Japanese Grand Prixs being great fun to get up out of bed, have a cup of warm tea and watch, but now I’m bored with it and don’t watch any races anymore.
My F1 discontent is mainly due the current Ferrari processions every two weeks, meaning the outcome of each race is a forgone conclusion, and yet again, the latest GP was another leisurely exhibition for the azzurri.
Of course, racing teams do have their periods of domination, not too long ago it was the Williams team who were unbeatable when Mansell was winning loads of races, then a couple of years ago it was the McLaren team with Mika Hakkinen being F1 champ, and there were many other periods of domination before that. However, no team has ever dominated a championship season like Ferrari has this 2002 term.
It’s not just about domination either, the sport in general has become way too reliant on sophisticated technology, and the essence of F1 racing from the early days seems to have been forgotten, with computers doing all the work.
There’s no brilliant “track dog-fighting” anymore, with racers battling and weaving to do fancy overtaking manoeuvres, as most overtaking is now masterminded by technicians doing fuel and tire wear calculations and done in and around pitstops.
Lapping straggling cars is also much easier nowadays and requires no racing guile, as the advent of blue flags means that the lower cars must just move over and let the leaders past, where’s the fun and skill in that?
And there’s not really any good racing personalities or rivalries. Who can forget Prost versus Senna, Senna versus Mansell or Schumacher versus Hill and all the many others?
Now though, the drivers aren’t charismatic enough, and don’t seem bothered about winning, they just pick up their fat pay cheques and hang around with F-list celebrities who frequent the races.
I looked on Ceefax the other day and saw a little article about FIA, the governing body of F1, making proposals to change some aspects of F1 racing, with plans to change things around to make the sport more exciting and hopefully give it a bit more competitiveness. Some of the drivers disliked some of those proposals, and I also think some of them sound a bit strange, but it couldn’t help to try.
So having read the small article, I found out some more info about it on the net, and here is what I found:
From itv.com/f1
*****************************
“The FIA have published a nine-point plan to make F1 more exciting and cost effective.
The plan involves a number of ideas which are highly unlikely to come to fruition, but the boldness of the governing body's thinking is impressive.
One of the suggestions is that the drivers rotate the teams they drive for during the season. This would introduce the prospect of Michael Schumacher driving for Minardi – unlikely to go down well with Ferrari and the German’s multi-million pound sponsors.
The list is published in full in today’s Autosport magazine. The nine points are:
1 Driver swapping: drivers race every car on the grid during the course of a season.
2 Aggregated qualifying: four half-hour sessions on Fridays and Saturdays at Grand Prix.
3 Bespoke tyres: rubber suppliers can produce different tyres for each of their teams
4 Success ballast: a penalty of 1kg in ballast weight per point scored during 2003.
5 Testing restrictions: limit testing during the 2003 season to just 12 days per car.
6 Aerodynamic freeze: from 2003 only two sets of bodywork can be homologated at the start of the season.
7 Long-life engines: one engine per weekend in 2003, one engine per four races in 2004, and one engine per eight in 2005.
8 Long-life gearbox: gearbox assemblies to have required life for a number of races.
9 Standardised parts: all teams would have to use standardised electronics, ECUs, brakes and fixed ballast.
The team bosses will informally discuss the ideas with Bernie Ecclestone and Max Mosley at this weekend’s Japanese Grand Prix.”
*****************************
Some of those ideas seem a bit radical, especially the “driver swapping” one and many drivers don’t like the idea of that one, but some of the more technical ideas could be for the better.
We’ll just have to wait and see if any of those proposals are taken onboard and used in future seasons.
So, not wanting to be totally serious and let FIA have all the fun of inventing new rules, I have come up with some of my own enhancements to make the sport of Formula 1 great again:
Turbo boosts: “Ha ha” you say, but actually a similar idea was raised by some mad buffoon not that long ago.
If you’ve seen “The Fast & the Furious” or played games like Burnout, then you’ll know what the turbo boost is all about.
Cars could have a limited amount of Nitrous Oxide, and can use their boosts whenever they wish, it would make overtaking easier and more exciting and the boosts would have to be used tactically.
Stronger cars, more crashes, ramps and shortcuts: Of course we would never want to see any fatalities or injuries, but many people only watch F1 for the big pile ups (though they don’t admit it). So, like GTA3 and other video games, how about it you were awarded bonus points for crazy crashes, flips and spins etc. Cars should be made a bit stronger instead of having very brittle fibreglass or whatever it is, where if you slightly bump into another car your front wing or wishbone crumble to pieces. We can then have some real car bashing as driver vie for position.
Also, the addition of ramps and shortcuts would make races much more exciting as when drivers take different routes, you won’t know who’s in front until the track meets up again, and they can use speed boosts to go up ramps to gain bonus air time points and improve track position.
Weapons & gadgets: We could make Formula 1 more like the chariot race in Ben Hur, but with F1 cars instead of chariots, or F1 cars could be more like Michael Crawford’s gadget laden car in “Condorman”. Drivers could have lasers, oil slicks, smoke screens, those tire shredding saw things that come out of hubcaps like in Goldfinger and banana skins (well it worked for Mario Kart) to use against the opposition.
“Michael Schumacher comes into the final straight, it looks like he’s going to win his 50th GP in a row…BUT NO…he’s slipped and spun out on Juan Pablo Montoya’s craftily placed banana skin!!”
All women pit crews: Nowadays in F1, the pit stops are over in a flash, but if you had all women pit crews, tire changing and refuelling could be really exciting and tense, as it could take 2 minutes or 20 minutes…oh the suspense…
OAP drivers: All F1 races are held on a Sunday, so how about if they had the REAL “Sunday drivers” taking part…pensioners!
Yes, “Grand Prix” would be renamed “Grand OAPrix”, with the competitors swerving all over the road and driving REALLY slowly.
Tracks would be relocated from Monaco, Japan and Australia etc to Bognor, Blackpool, Clacton, Spanish holiday resort islands and other old favourite person destinations
Celebrity Drivers: As I’ve mentioned, F1 drivers have about as much charisma nowadays as Alan Shearer and Michael Owen, so maybe if we have celebrity drivers who’d make races more like “The Wacky Races”. We’d have famous F1 fan Sly Stallone and Wolf from Gladiators battling against the Chuckle Brothers in their special comedy two-seater F1 car with silly wheels, or the Chuckle Bros could be against each other in Schumacher style sibling rivalry. Perhaps there could also be a WWE wrestler and a pop star thrown in as well, maybe Peter Andre.
“USED TO” being the operative words, for now, like many others, I find it to be an extremely tedious affair. I used to watch each race religiously, from the qualifying sessions to the race, with the middle of the night Australian and Japanese Grand Prixs being great fun to get up out of bed, have a cup of warm tea and watch, but now I’m bored with it and don’t watch any races anymore.
My F1 discontent is mainly due the current Ferrari processions every two weeks, meaning the outcome of each race is a forgone conclusion, and yet again, the latest GP was another leisurely exhibition for the azzurri.
Of course, racing teams do have their periods of domination, not too long ago it was the Williams team who were unbeatable when Mansell was winning loads of races, then a couple of years ago it was the McLaren team with Mika Hakkinen being F1 champ, and there were many other periods of domination before that. However, no team has ever dominated a championship season like Ferrari has this 2002 term.
It’s not just about domination either, the sport in general has become way too reliant on sophisticated technology, and the essence of F1 racing from the early days seems to have been forgotten, with computers doing all the work.
There’s no brilliant “track dog-fighting” anymore, with racers battling and weaving to do fancy overtaking manoeuvres, as most overtaking is now masterminded by technicians doing fuel and tire wear calculations and done in and around pitstops.
Lapping straggling cars is also much easier nowadays and requires no racing guile, as the advent of blue flags means that the lower cars must just move over and let the leaders past, where’s the fun and skill in that?
And there’s not really any good racing personalities or rivalries. Who can forget Prost versus Senna, Senna versus Mansell or Schumacher versus Hill and all the many others?
Now though, the drivers aren’t charismatic enough, and don’t seem bothered about winning, they just pick up their fat pay cheques and hang around with F-list celebrities who frequent the races.
I looked on Ceefax the other day and saw a little article about FIA, the governing body of F1, making proposals to change some aspects of F1 racing, with plans to change things around to make the sport more exciting and hopefully give it a bit more competitiveness. Some of the drivers disliked some of those proposals, and I also think some of them sound a bit strange, but it couldn’t help to try.
So having read the small article, I found out some more info about it on the net, and here is what I found:
From itv.com/f1
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“The FIA have published a nine-point plan to make F1 more exciting and cost effective.
The plan involves a number of ideas which are highly unlikely to come to fruition, but the boldness of the governing body's thinking is impressive.
One of the suggestions is that the drivers rotate the teams they drive for during the season. This would introduce the prospect of Michael Schumacher driving for Minardi – unlikely to go down well with Ferrari and the German’s multi-million pound sponsors.
The list is published in full in today’s Autosport magazine. The nine points are:
1 Driver swapping: drivers race every car on the grid during the course of a season.
2 Aggregated qualifying: four half-hour sessions on Fridays and Saturdays at Grand Prix.
3 Bespoke tyres: rubber suppliers can produce different tyres for each of their teams
4 Success ballast: a penalty of 1kg in ballast weight per point scored during 2003.
5 Testing restrictions: limit testing during the 2003 season to just 12 days per car.
6 Aerodynamic freeze: from 2003 only two sets of bodywork can be homologated at the start of the season.
7 Long-life engines: one engine per weekend in 2003, one engine per four races in 2004, and one engine per eight in 2005.
8 Long-life gearbox: gearbox assemblies to have required life for a number of races.
9 Standardised parts: all teams would have to use standardised electronics, ECUs, brakes and fixed ballast.
The team bosses will informally discuss the ideas with Bernie Ecclestone and Max Mosley at this weekend’s Japanese Grand Prix.”
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Some of those ideas seem a bit radical, especially the “driver swapping” one and many drivers don’t like the idea of that one, but some of the more technical ideas could be for the better.
We’ll just have to wait and see if any of those proposals are taken onboard and used in future seasons.
So, not wanting to be totally serious and let FIA have all the fun of inventing new rules, I have come up with some of my own enhancements to make the sport of Formula 1 great again:
Turbo boosts: “Ha ha” you say, but actually a similar idea was raised by some mad buffoon not that long ago.
If you’ve seen “The Fast & the Furious” or played games like Burnout, then you’ll know what the turbo boost is all about.
Cars could have a limited amount of Nitrous Oxide, and can use their boosts whenever they wish, it would make overtaking easier and more exciting and the boosts would have to be used tactically.
Stronger cars, more crashes, ramps and shortcuts: Of course we would never want to see any fatalities or injuries, but many people only watch F1 for the big pile ups (though they don’t admit it). So, like GTA3 and other video games, how about it you were awarded bonus points for crazy crashes, flips and spins etc. Cars should be made a bit stronger instead of having very brittle fibreglass or whatever it is, where if you slightly bump into another car your front wing or wishbone crumble to pieces. We can then have some real car bashing as driver vie for position.
Also, the addition of ramps and shortcuts would make races much more exciting as when drivers take different routes, you won’t know who’s in front until the track meets up again, and they can use speed boosts to go up ramps to gain bonus air time points and improve track position.
Weapons & gadgets: We could make Formula 1 more like the chariot race in Ben Hur, but with F1 cars instead of chariots, or F1 cars could be more like Michael Crawford’s gadget laden car in “Condorman”. Drivers could have lasers, oil slicks, smoke screens, those tire shredding saw things that come out of hubcaps like in Goldfinger and banana skins (well it worked for Mario Kart) to use against the opposition.
“Michael Schumacher comes into the final straight, it looks like he’s going to win his 50th GP in a row…BUT NO…he’s slipped and spun out on Juan Pablo Montoya’s craftily placed banana skin!!”
All women pit crews: Nowadays in F1, the pit stops are over in a flash, but if you had all women pit crews, tire changing and refuelling could be really exciting and tense, as it could take 2 minutes or 20 minutes…oh the suspense…
OAP drivers: All F1 races are held on a Sunday, so how about if they had the REAL “Sunday drivers” taking part…pensioners!
Yes, “Grand Prix” would be renamed “Grand OAPrix”, with the competitors swerving all over the road and driving REALLY slowly.
Tracks would be relocated from Monaco, Japan and Australia etc to Bognor, Blackpool, Clacton, Spanish holiday resort islands and other old favourite person destinations
Celebrity Drivers: As I’ve mentioned, F1 drivers have about as much charisma nowadays as Alan Shearer and Michael Owen, so maybe if we have celebrity drivers who’d make races more like “The Wacky Races”. We’d have famous F1 fan Sly Stallone and Wolf from Gladiators battling against the Chuckle Brothers in their special comedy two-seater F1 car with silly wheels, or the Chuckle Bros could be against each other in Schumacher style sibling rivalry. Perhaps there could also be a WWE wrestler and a pop star thrown in as well, maybe Peter Andre.