Carlos wrote:They seem to turn out a new chassis /engine for a new open wheel series every week, twice a week, must be about 20 series now. Super League? Next week the Ultra League? How can anyone buy or build a car, doesn't it cost hundreds of millions? I am beginning to have my doubts.
Of course N.Technology
started the new
Formula Master series this year, too. Impressive looking equipment for a Formula 3 equivalent. Another interesting example of recent race car design.
F1 might actually be facing an interesting crises in how powerful, cheap and easy to use design and fabricating tools are soon to become (or are already) - even at the very highest end. And how educated people are and will become. Spending $300M a season on going 1 sec per lap faster than a competitor in another series that spends, say, $25M per season on directly comparable equipment is in fact going to be highly embarrasing. That won't matter of course, if your main market is the Paris Hilton crowd, or the 1000 or so billionaires in the World and their extended families. Briatore has an aptly named brand set up already, but as I see it the raison d'être of F1 can't consist of being the biggest spender alone ... but that's what we're headed for, faster than ever with the prolonged freezes and rules that make any significant technological advances impossible. It's a sad commentary on our World if that happens, but it might.
In fact, if everything goes OK in how design and manufacturing processes evolve in general, it's soon very hard to be as wasteful as F1 is going to become comparing bang for the buck, bang for the engineer and bang for the gallon. A thorough rethink about what is relevant and applicable in this World is required, and has been required for quite some time already. We don't need a 95% spec open wheel race car series for the pinnacle of motorsport.
Perhaps what we need is a spec
resource open wheel racing series with a high degree of design freedom. Such an organisation would have virtual design teams and two or three identical manufacturing campuses where all the allowed physical equipment (autoclaves, wind tunnels, test facilities) would be situated. Marketing would be run by the overall organisation, every team would have the same budget, the same amount of personnel, the same computers and programs, the same amount of time. Every design would have to be generated by and originate from the allowed resources only - demonstratably so. Each car would have the same amount of energy allocated per race.
Only the quality of your ideas could put you in an advantage, nothing else. Ideas are the ultimate capital, not money. Profits would be distributed according to success to the team owners/members, but couldn't be added to the team budget.
That way it's not necessary to spend 10 times over what others are spending to be "the pinnacle". Two, three times is plenty, while all kinds of efficiency and ecology related innovations remain possible and in fact very likely to emerge. Incidentally, Gordon Kirby laments the rise of the spec age and considers how we should move forward in his latest column "
The Way It Is/ Do aesthetics matter in racing today?". Well worth a read. (I disagree to a degree with his assertion that aerodynamics have had a deleterious effect on the look of racing cars. To me, all the winglets are just a further example of impractical regulations. But that's details.)
Is F1 losing its focus? Or is it gaining one? I don't know, but the emergence of Superleague Formula and series of its ilk is bound to reflect on F1, too. It's another thing altogether if F1 dares to look in that mirror and draw conclusions.
) but I caught the last race of the Master series at Monza and have been deeply impressed by the racing, or rather the drafting. It seemed like watching a race in a bygone era, where the 3rd car would jump first and excitement till the last corners. Provided that each series is cost efficient and provide this type of entertainment, I can only see it as a plus having more formulae.
Half of the people photographed next to cars look completely bemused. Am I the only one that thinks this looks terrible?