Sit down and take a long breath, this is going to be long and could potentially bore you to death...
For a start, let me agree wholeheartedly with what gixxer_drew said couple of pages ago (and I think I already said various years ago on one or more of the multiple threads about the same argument), but that is worth repeating:
as long as we live submerged in that fluid we call air (and for our own sake we should hope it will stay with us a few more years...) the interaction with said fluid will necessarily be the fundamental factor in the performance of any object travelling at F1-like speeds, no matter rules on bodywork geometry, kind of propulsion adopted, budget restriction, whatever.
Thinking that opening up development of other areas would decrease that importance is rather myopic, because it's physics that makes aerodynamics a fundamental factor not rules (same can be said about tyres), even if bodywork was equal for everybody teams would spend countless hours to get the most accurate map and understand how to best use it, via CFD models and/or putting the car itself in the tunnel (GP2, or other single spec lower series with infinitively smaller budgets, teams do it, go figure what F1 would do...)
So, that's first point. If your dream is to see a F1 where aerodynamics isn't important, you better include in that dream also the ability of surviving without breathing.
Then it comes the matter of "evil downforce" and how to reduce it (there's the matter of understanding if it's really the element that prevents "racing" or not, in part I talk about it in the next post, starting from xpensive's quote).
The thing people typically overlook when complaining about the obsession of teams for downforce generation is that the optimal level of downforce designers aim to doesn't depend by bodywork rules, or because there's a lobby of aerodynamicists dictating it.
That level is defined, first of all, by track's characteristics and then by some of cars related characteristics (mainly amount of power available, the more power is available, the higher the optimal downforce level for a given track).
As long as these basic elements, tracks layout and power, are untouched, no amount of playing on bodywork rules is going to change the downforce level teams will want to achieve; if anything further limiting the easy ways to generate downforce will just make teams more eager to recover every little bit as the performance gain from it would be increased. (the more distant you are from optimal downforce level, the higher the performance gain from any small amount added)
This means that, in order to understand, or even control, on which direction of development teams are going to push, it's first of all tracks that we have to look at.
To do that, using the speed data from all tracks (that I obtain via the usual analysis of engine rpm) I devised a rather simple method to judge the importance of few parameters on each track.
Since this post is already quite long for the moment I just show the graph with the results and few comments on how to read it; in a following post (and if you are interested) I can post all the details of how I arrived to it, in a nutshell by calculating the % of time spent in certain speed ranges and separating between corners and straights.
So, this is the graph:
First, red and blue bars. These represent the importance of the part of laptime spent cornering in the corresponding speed range, relatively to part of laptime spent cornering in the range <150km/h. So, if the bar is higher than 1, it means that that speed range is more important than <150, if it's lower it means it's less important.
The green line on the contrary represents the importance of drag reduction, I calculated an arbitrary index (based on % of time spent above >90% of peak speed, peak speed itself and % of time spent in corners), and then divided that index by the value obtained for Spa (not Monza because otherwise value for certain tracks would have disappeared from graph...)
Based on that should be clear that looking at the three values for each track allows to rapidly identify what kind of aero setup is best suited to it.
So, if for example we take Suzuka the fact that both bars for cornering are well over 1 means that both these speed ranges are lot more important than "<150", with medium more important than high.
On the other end of range there's Monaco, already blue is under 0.5, while red is barely visible. The green bar being very low also means that drag reduction gives virtually no gain.
You can repeat the same for all tracks by yourself, but let me just point out couple of things (hoping you are still awake...)
First, even just casually looking at the graph in general, it's evident how in many cases both red and blue bars are under1 (meaning in all these tracks the low speed range is most important), and the red bar in particular is over 1 only in 3 cases out of 19, meaning that high speed corners are a rarity, to say the least.
Additionally, there are some cases of tracks (India for example) that theoretically would have medium/high speed performance rather important compared with low so could appear as favoring lower downforce level more than others, but then the importance of drag reduction is so low that using an high downforce level is ultimately preferable anyway.
And since we are at it, we can also take a look at what kind of characteristics the most recently introduced circuits demand, finding out that virtually all are biased more towards lower speed performance while the tracks that tend to favor an higher speed range are basically only the old/traditional venues.
Is it surprising, based on this result, that teams focus first and foremost on performance at low-medium speed, thus mainly on downforce generation giving scarce, if any, importance to drag reduction?
Maybe this should give an hint on what mostly went wrong in recent years and why none of the many changes on bodywork rules introduced (not rarely as random knee-jerk reactions especially in Mosley's era) was successful in moving the focus of designers away from pure downforce generation and more towards aero efficiency.
Sure, while designing cars teams follow the bodywork rules, but rules define "just" how the downforce target is going to be achieved, the downforce target itself is defined mostly by tracks and if most of calendar the requirement is "all downforce you can make and then a bit more", to improve performance in the low-medium speed range, that's what engineers will work for.
And that independently if the car has flat floor, stepped floor or tunnels, small/big/wide/narrow wings, wing only at front/rear or nowhere, or any other random combination people constantly like to come up with to pretend having a solution to counteract focus on downforce.
As long as tracks are like that, no matter the bodywork rules, teams will work night and day to find a way (legal or "creative"...) to generate if not all downforce needed, at least as much as possible, because that's the primary key for performance with these layouts.
