What can us poor fans do about this though? Bernie is under the impression that the new tyres are a good thing. I'm sure the FIA likes them. Presenters, team principals and drivers are probably being forced to be 'politically correct'.
The truth is, I believe the Pirellis and DRS has turned F1 into something more akin to a reality gameshow. Here we are, yearning for Prost vs Senna, Hakkinnen vs Schumacher or (dare I say it) Alonso vs Hamilton. However, we are being treated to a lottery where the tyres play the key role in deciding the winner.
F1 should be a sport, a competition testing both driving and engineering skills. It should be about the best engineers in the world being allowed to build the best cars in the world, which are then driven by the best drivers in the world. And the drivers compete against each other, giving everything they've got, lap after lap, with the winner being the best car and machine combination.
The battle between two great drivers is a thrill to watch. Though many laps may go by without an overtake, the fight goes on and on. One man trying to overtake and the other defending. We see them on the edge of disaster of long stints at a time, fighting withing millimeters of a crash, until perhaps the driver from behind can overtake, or if the driver ahead can hold him off long enough to make his pit stop strategy work.
However nowadays, we have been robbed of that spectacle. With the Pirelli tyres, true battles are impossible to see. The person ahead cant really defend at all. If they do, then their tyre loses LAPS worth of life. The guy behind just closes in at a nice and easy pace over several laps, then uses DRS. Not to discredit their phenomenal skills, but thats all it is. Maintain race pace, get close and get past.
Furthermore, races are nowadays just as strategy intensive as the refueling days. Pit stop timing and race strategy decides the race winner, not battles on the track. I'm not saying that is a bad thing, because I personally enjoy seeing a good pit stop. It may seem strange, but I love seeing that element of a race, because after all it is a team sport. However, it has become too much a part of the race, in my opinion even more than the refueling era. At least back then, if an overtake happened it would be exciting, an edge of the seat, thudding heartbeat spectacle.
To make things worse, engine development is frozen, transmission development has been regulated into irrelevance, the rules have made the body work so restricted that the cars look the same and we have frozen engine maps.
Who wants to see such a championship? If it weren't for the great drivers we have now, it would have been the most boring era in F1, because the spectacle has been lost. People outside F1 dont care about Fernando Alonso nearly winning last year. They care about the cars. Really they do. They all know F1 cars are the fastest cars in the world. They all believe that F1 cars are the most technologically advanced. Everyone would at least like to see a demonstration run of an F1 car, for the sheer spectacle of it, because they believe F1 cars are mad. But all the rule changes since circa 2006 have been clipping their wings (
) and they are no longer the mad, dangerous and exciting cars that people think they are. One friend of mine was shocked when I told him that F1 cars are slower now than in 2004-05. Another stopped watching F1 due to Pirelli. That guy started watching only in 2009 due to the brilliance of Brawn, so he's not a hardcore fan either.
On top of that, getting rid of all the great circuits of the past for new and boring circuits. Like Abu Dhabi.
And I also believe that Pirelli caused the demise of racing in the wet, due to their wet tyres being bad. I think the FIA are covering it up.
Although there is light at the end of the tunnel due to the 2014 engines, currently I wish I could kidnap Bernie, stuff him in one of his second hand cars and roll it off a pier, then replace him with three people-Schumacher, Prost and Byrne. Then we'd have a REAL sport.
