All the nostalgia for the old days is nice, but it's never going to happen. You can reset the rules back to your favourite era and you'll get similar scenario to now.
In the olden days people were making it up as they went along, so garagistas with clever ideas could outfox the big teams. Even when you had a fast car you weren't sure if it would get to the end. In many races less than half the entrants didn't get to the finish line, if that happened now there'd be outcry about who let those amateurs on to the track.
Ciro Pabón wrote:Well, F1 has hit the capitalist wall.
In capitalism, once you deregulate a sector invariably tends to have only three players while the other smaller potatoes are adorn figures
You'll be needing the Herfindahl index:
(based on prize money)
This infers moderate concentration. Add in sponsorship and we'd be into the utterly non-competitive end of the scale. Add in the preferential voting when setting the rules and we're into give up hope end of the scale.
The reason is quite simple, the sport & technology has matured so we now have a few dominant participants with huge budgets who are able to manipulate events to suit their goals. Those huge budgets result in barriers to entry for other teams who can never hope to compete. Even when the aero was homogenised to allow the teams to be able to build a car at a reasonable price the big teams with huge budgets dominated the aero arms race.
So lets imagine the FIA say there is an engine free for all, any configuration is allowed. You'd find within a season that the big teams rapidly converge on the same performance. They'd reassert themselves as leaders of the pack. The little teams couldn't afford to keep up.
This domination by a few players pervades all markets. We have the same in politics with mature democracies dominated by a two parties, we see it with groceries dominated by P&G and Unilever. Then there are the examples cited by Ciro. Also 90% of the words cereal production is controlled by just 4 companies, those 4 firms determine the price of food for the whole world. That default scenario of 3 or 4 big players dominating a competitive environment is a fact of life, F1 doesn't have some magic immunity to it.
So yearning for a return to a long gone era is like wishing the tide didn't come in, or someone in middle age harking back to their teenage years. We can only get back to the teenage years of F1 if we find some way to unlearn the knowledge. Alas, knowledge can't be unlearnt so the only credible end game is disruption or revolution. Bernie has been too clever to let that happens. He has the perfect knack of squeezing everything up to (but not over) the point of inciting insurrection. However nothing lasts for ever, even Bernie can't hold back. It just depends on how long you are prepared to wait.
Of course the answer of sports organisation around the world is to neuter the competitive facts of life by implementing central control. The irony being that the sports with the most central control (aka socialism!) are to be found in the USA, the country where capitalism is mercilessly red in tooth and claw.
ps - As for the engine freeze, it was a cynical ploy when the rules were made up and now its backfired on the people who put it in there. I really don't have much sympathy for them. Hopefully 2015 will be a bit more sensible.
pps - It's not "hopefully" 2015 will be more sensible, it's a certainty. Why? Because it is in the interests of the dominant players to rig the game in their mutual favour.
