Should F1 cars have their length/wheelbase reduced?

[politburo]

This is all off topic chat, but for me the way to get close racing is to get differences between cars. If every car can go flat through 130R or Eau Rouge or Copse/Abbey...etc then there's little differentiation. That plays out in the times, the slowest to fastest cars are minimally different. You get overtaking in braking and acceleration zones (pre-DRS) because they're areas the drivers can make a difference, so it tracks that increasing the braking/non-flat out zones makes more opportunities for drivers to make a difference.

Which really means reducing / removing downforce - something that reducing the wheelbase of the cars would achieve. If we halved the downforce of the cars, many corners would be "tricky" and thus overtaking would be more likely according to your model. But we already have series with that level of downforce - the feeder series - and they don't get the viewing figures that F1 gets. Why is that? There's plenty of racing (if by racing one means overtaking) but the drivers aren't household names. So is it necessary to have lots of overtaking to make a series worth watching?

That’s the rub isn't it. How do you qualify or give value to entertainment vs being the fastest motorsport. The LMH cars are slower than LMP1s but have generated some intrigue.

Perhaps it may be like this 2022 onwards. Whereby the cars are slower in corners and very fast on the straights, which may lead to it being more driver-dependent. In addition, they should remove power steering, this would be a great change.