Formula 1 Looks To Make A Change

It will be a long 10 days for Formula 1 as it now wonders how it can avoid another dreary race that had armchair viewers searching for the off button in Sunday's Bahrain Grand Prix. With new rules in place which limited the number of pitstops and prevented refuelling during the race, expectations were heightened that it was going to be a new era of the sport. Having four World Champions competing this year, including seven time winner Michael Schumacher, could only have made the changes more thrilling but in the end we were left with 49 laps of something that made NASCAR worth watching as the race was essentially won on the first corner.

Even the drivers were voicing their disdain of the new system with Schumacher saying after the race that "overtaking was basically impossible unless somebody made a mistake” although his biggest concern should be that he was well off the pace of his team mate Nico Rosberg who finished one position ahead of the 41 year old German in fifth place. For all the technical progress in optimising the car technology and engineering skill to ensure there are the fastest and most efficient cars on the track, it certainly seems that F1 has lost the entertainment aspect of the sport.




Introducing refuelling again is not an option on cars and teams built specifically around the new rules and even having a mandatory two pit-stops won't combat the biggest issue in F1 – the lack of overtaking. Bernie Ecclestone, the F1 President, is favoring a wait-and-see approach until after the next three grand prix after which there will be a three week window of opportunity for change before F1 travels to Europe for the first time this season.

One Ecclestone proposal is one of creating short cuts at each track whereby a driver has a limited number of chances per race to make use of the short cut to either overtake a competitor or move past slower moving traffic. After doing nothing to combat the overtaking issue for years, which could have been rectified by designing different styles of new tracks and retrofitting older ones, it seems like the old man is taking his ideas from Mario Kart. So don't be surprised to see drivers collecting gold coins around the track and changing the name of the Monaco Grand Prix to the Mushroom Cup before the season is out.


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