F1 needs a quick fix to stem Red Bull’s dominance | GRR

Problem one: the Red Bulls are not just faster than anything else, when their DRS flaps are open they are ridiculously so. They remind me of the moment in The Cannonball Run where the two ladies in their Lamborghini Countach sneak up behind that hapless cop car, hoot, the streak off into the distance.

Problem two: I’m all for the cost cap, but cannot deny that getting back onto even approximately level terms while staying within its limits is an almost unbelievably difficult thing for a team to achieve. Just ask Toto Wolff.

Problem three: the cars are too large. Compared even to the machines of 20 years ago, the modern F1 car is a vast beast roaming around circuits which have not expanded in commensurate terms. Wider and longer, they are harder to squeeze past and take more time to overtake.

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.

There are things that can be done to liven up the show. Getting rid of the hybrid powertrains would save weight and reduce the size of the cars. Besides, it is a hard sell to suggest they’re there for environmental reasons: any sport that thinks it ok to race in Baku one weekend, Miami the next, then return to Italy two weeks later is unlikely to win any prizes for environmental good citizenship. If F1 is really that into virtue signalling, it could always run non-hybrid engines on synthetic fuel.

What I find frustrating is that for years everyone has known what to do to make the spectacle more interesting. Decimate the downforce. That would make the cars both harder to drive and easier to pass. You wouldn’t need a DRS system. Keep the cars as strong and safe as they are now, but clip their wings to make them faster in a straight line but slower and therefore easier to follow through the corners. I know attempts have been made to do this in the past, but they have been largely token efforts that have taken very little time indeed for the aerodynamicists to cancel out. Wind tunnel time should be drastically reduced and a standard specification for tunnels prescribed.

But all this takes time. The good news is there is stuff that can be done now. I appreciate that to many this is close to heresy, but I’d look at some kind of success penalty. Nothing too extreme, for it is of course entirely right that the best team or driver should win the title, but a measure that recognises first when one team becomes dominant to the detriment of the sport as a whole and, second, that the cost cap makes closing that gap almost impossible.

What form should it take? A few extra kilos for the winning car and team the following weekend? Something to just blunt the claws a little, without removing them altogether. Would this not be a rather artificial imposition? Of course, but no more so than DRS. And if the last two races and Red Bull’s runaway train progress this year and last are a guide, something needs to be done that is quick, easy and applicable across the board, before more major rule changes can be implemented. Is it ideal? Of course not. Is it better than leaving things as they are? In my view unquestionably so.

Images courtesy of Motorsport Images.