It was Bernie Ecclestone who best summed up the farcical scenes in Spielberg over the weekend when Nico Rosberg won the Austrian Grand Prix.
After a race that had seen 20 per cent of the grid receive penalties before qualifying for engine changes, and then world championship leader Lewis Hamilton given a time penalty for putting a wheel across a pit-lane exit line, the F1 chief executive acknowledged that the sport has some serious issues.
“I think we need to have a very, very good look at all our sporting regulations,” he said at the Red Bull Ring.
“Don’t go over the white line, don’t do this, don’t do that, if you change your engine you go back 20 places – it’s not what the public understand.
“They (the fans) don’t understand and when they do understand they don’t care basically.”
Ecclestone was right on the last part particularly. F1 is in serious danger of alienating itself from all but its hardcore, with the present rules.
The rules at the start of the season were that no driver can use more than four 1.6 litre V6 turbocharged engines during the 19-race season, and that if they go above that then the driver will be penalised, depending on the number of new parts brought to a race, with a grid penalty – that, in the case of the McLaren drivers Fernando Alonso and Jenson Button in Austria, could go as high as 25 places.
The idea was to drive down costs in F1 and there are significant limitations on what upgrades the engine manufacturers can make during the season.
Unfortunately, the engines, introduced first in 2014, are extremely technical.
Only Mercedes, and to a lesser extent Ferrari this year, have got their heads around the new technology well, with Renault struggling both years, while Honda’s return to F1 with McLaren has been a huge disappointment.
The Honda has been horribly unreliable and the nadir came in Austria with Alonso accumulating a 25-place penalty for exceeding the allocation of various components of his engine, as well as having a gearbox change. It was the same for Button.
The comical element comes in giving 25-place grid penalties to drivers on a 20-car grid, which F1 is in 2015.
With both men starting at the back of the field, with no chance of falling 25 places down the field, the rules dictated they must each serve a drive-through pit lane penalty early in the race, effectively losing 20 seconds, to complete their punishments.
F1 enthusiasts trying to explain that to non-F1 followers in the build-up to Sunday’s race, without making the series sound like a mess, must have had a great time.
With both Red Bull Racing drivers, Daniel Ricciardo and Daniil Kvyat, also having 10-place engine-related penalties, it made trying to work out who started where for Sunday’s race at the back very difficult and it would have given a headache to fans in Spielberg trying to work that out.
Ecclestone was right to be critical of the situation. F1 is a sport, first and foremost.
But in the modern era it is also a show, and it is failing badly on that score with little competition at the front and a number of teams struggling with over elaborate regulations.
Red Bull and McLaren are two of the teams that you would expect to challenge the dominant Mercedes-GP, but both have been badly hamstrung by uncompetitive engines, which have effectively confined their seasons to failure, regardless of how good their cars are aerodynamically.
The engine design was open to all manufacturers and Mercedes have done an exceptional job, for their own team and the teams they supply – Williams, Force India and Lotus .
Sebastian Vettel’s Ferrari was the only non-Mercedes powered car in the top seven.
But F1 has to rethink how it punishes teams with less competitive engines.
Watching McLaren accumulate penalties in Austria felt like a defenceless creature being kicked relentlessly from side by side.
Starting at the back of the grid is punishment enough, the extra penalties in the race are unnecessary, and the time has come to relax the development rules to allow Honda and Renault a chance to get closer to being competitive.
That is not fair on Mercedes, but this is bigger than them.
TV ratings were down in 2014 by about 25 million globally, according to reports, and it is unlikely many of those who switched off will be racing to their remote controls to tune back in anytime soon when they read of the continued domination of Mercedes and 25-place penalties being handed out to teams whose engines continue to fail.
gcaygill@thenational.ae
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