Problem four: the cars are too heavy. This mass makes them far more stable and easier to drive. Even at hot and humid circuits, drivers emerge as if they’ve just done some warm up stretches in the gym. They should look like they’ve been to war. Thirty years ago, F1 cars weighed just 505kg. Today? Well over half as much again, at 798kg. This not only makes them less strenuous to conduct, but less of a handful too, meaning a good driver can get closer to the time of a true great than would ever have been possible a few years back. In qualifying Valtteri Bottas could often meet or beat the times of Lewis Hamilton, though I think few would argue they were even in the same street when it comes to raw talent. We see the same today with Sergio Perez and Max Verstappen.
Problem five: this is the biggest problem of all: the cars are the way they are today for a reason. So much of their size and weight is a result of measures taken to protect their occupants. The halo alone has been seen to save lives on more than one occasion just in F1, let alone the other formulae in which it is now used. Would anyone actually advocate going back to bad old days? Not me, for sure.
And even if you might, politically it is an almost impossible move to contemplate and would certainly result in a quick march to the exit door of all major car manufacturers involved in the sport today. Some might say that was not necessarily a bad thing: take the sport away from the marketing departments of vast OEMs and give it back to the teams. But in what is now a multi-billion-pound industry, that simply isn’t going to happen.