F1 overrated and boring?

Touring car was where it was at, Volvo estates, Laguna’s and other car shapes you could recognise from the real world all leaning on each other through the corners, without worrying a wheel was going to fall off. Proper elbows out racing.

There were a couple of comments earlier about how great BTCC was, referring to Volvo estates, but that was 30 years ago. THIRTY YEARS! That’s the equivalent of my grandfather telling me that I shouldn’t bother listening to Depeche Mode in 1985 but check out that Buddy Holly groove. 😀  And I seem to remember that while the BTCC highlights were absolutely excellent, it wasn’t so great when they started showing whole races live, because, you know, highlights.

That reminds me, really wish the C4 “highlights” actually were

I was into touring cars back in the old Group A days, it was basically the same pattern. Ford homologated the Sierra RS500 with a Cosworth developed turbo engine and dominated for years, then Nissan homologated the Skyline GTR which had a bigger turbo engine and all-wheel-drive, and that dominated Group A until everyone got sick of it and changed the rules. Group A cars were still based on a car you could buy off the showroom floor, but since then the cars have steadily moved further and further away from production based cars because allowing technical development just allows the manufacturer with the biggest budget to dominate. If you’re into that sort of thing, Indycar is what you want. If you want the team with the best engineers to win, F1 is what you want.

BTCC back in the Sierra/M3 days was great because you had properly good drivers like Rouse and Soper mixing it with muppets like Mike Smith. Some proper comedy moments like when he took a tour of the infield at Donington! 🙂

If you’re into that sort of thing, Indycar is what you want.

I watched some of that Indycar race from the private track in Florida (???) a few weeks ago. It was properly boring, just with an American accent.

Elbows out…

https://www.facebook.com/1990sBTCC/videos/2322811267869229/?mibextid=rS40aB7S9Ucbxw6v

AND a flounce for extra drama..

How I wish this type of stuff was still on the telly..

I’m a huge motorsport fan, but haven’t followed F1 in years. The racing is poor, the regulations too complicated, and it’s all about ‘the spectacle’ now rather than talent. Any form of recreation/event that requires transport and resources could be called non-green.

This is what real elbows out driving looks like (these two guys were teammates too, BMW must have been thrilled)

1. This is what real elbows out driving looks like (these two guys were teammates too, BMW must have been thrilled)

That was outrageous lol

@peterno51

How I wish this type of stuff was still on the telly..

Every BTCC race is live on ITV 4.

There are 4 ITV’s? Everyday a school day.

In that rather splendid clip, it looks like the first contact broke the steering arm that further shunted them both off.

I do realise the irony of one of my previous comment’s relishing in the fact that touring cars didn’t have a wheel fall off at a whiff of contact.

Idly looking at the BBC F1 live feed text whilst I work avoid. Business as usual…..whatever.

I had an idea……qualifying as usual. But every spot on the grid has a different weight penalty – every car has a balast box in a defined point on the car and you carry the extra weight defined by your place on grid. Someone clever does the maths but it might be say 50kg for first down to 0kg for last. Might need to be move or less, I don’t know.  The winner of the qualifying gets to choose their place on the grid, making the decision on the compromise between position advantage and weight disadvantage. 2nd in qualy gets the next choice and so on. The last in qualifying gets what’s left which might be pole or it might be last or anything in between.

Teams would be able to play to their strengths – is my driver good at overtaking but our car needs the assistance of carrying less weight so we are going to choose a lower grid position and so on.

It’s probably already been done in a Motorsport category somewhere.

I had an idea……qualifying as usual. But every spot on the grid has a different weight penalty

It’s too gimmicky, none of the teams would want anything to do with it.

Idly looking at the BBC F1 live feed text whilst I work avoid. Business as usual…..whatever.

To idle lookers it looks boring, when in fact it’s been a really good race with lots of action.

It’s too gimmicky, none of the teams would want anything to do with it.

To be honest I don’t care what the teams want. And I’m not sure the series owners do either. Terms and conditions can be rewritten and they could be told to do one. Teams are are not currently involved as some sort of charity case out of the goodness of their hearts. They want in because it is in their interests to be. They might moan and groan but new aresholes can be ripped given the right motivation.

To idle lookers it looks boring, when in fact it’s been a really good race with lots of action.

Yet you have time to read STW at the same time, read this thread AND respond…….curious.

I can multi-task! 😀

I had an idea…

I think pretty much everyone thinks that it needs less gimmicks (DRS, must use different tyres, etc) rather than more.

Ah, one of our female members clearly 😉

I think pretty much everyone thinks that it needs less gimmicks (DRS, must use different tyres, etc) rather than more.

You say gimmick…….been done for literally centuries in hose racing (well the weight penalty bit) and I don’t think they consider it a gimmick there. Just a way to make races closer and worth watching with reduced (but not eliminated) predicability.

WEC has BOP (balance of performance) and teams moan about a lot about that. No system is perfect but leave gimmicks out of F1. Want to win then sort your team out, the races are won back at HQ and in the windtunnel.

Want to win then sort your team out, the races are won back at HQ and in the windtunnel.

Which is not hugely different to non-powered / technology driven sports – sure they’re all fast but the ones that win are the ones that work hardest and most effectively in the offseason with access to the best coaches and ‘programmes’ (read into that what you want)

F1’s not a drivers race, it’s the whole package, including on the day strategists. Admittedly when one car is so much better than the others then the rest is (to some extent) irrelevant, but there’s the rub.

I stopped watching F1 5 years ago. Not missed it.

Sure it’s boring and over-hyped but for motorsport nerds it’s catnip.

Needs an update for the budget cap era, but still does a very good job of rounding up current F1

Just a way to make races closer and worth watching with reduced (but not eliminated) predicability.

But the folks who love watching F1 will watch regardless. Yesterday Verstappen pranced off into the distance and the cameras didn’t bother picking him up until the last lap. But there was so much other racing going on, and cars breaking and safety cars and accidents and overtakes and strategy complications and risks and Hamilton going from 18th to 8th, Alonso putting in ridiculous fast laps at the end  and Norris running a chancy one stop, and Perez and LeClerc fighting for position for a 1/3 or a lap, and the crowd cheering every time Zhou went round (and every time the Stake team got the tyre change right) It was great.

Didn’t need weight penalties.

I grew up on a diet of motor racing (F1/Sportscars/Trucks/Club racing) as my Dad was obsessed…

F1 is so out of touch with what is a real sport, it’s not worth even wasting thought about. Uber-corporate. The drivers are just corporate dummies. Cars are so much easier to drive nowadays it’s boring.

Ecclestone et al. along with the latest lot (Liberty) have milked it for every $ and it’s utterly dreadful.

In the bin.

mikertroid
I grew up on a diet of motor racing (F1/Sportscars/Trucks/Club racing) as my Dad was obsessed…

F1 is so out of touch with what is a real sport, it’s not worth even wasting thought about. Uber-corporate. The drivers are just corporate dummies. Cars are so easy to drive nowadays it’s boring

Ecclestone et al. along with the latest lot (Liberty) have milked it for every $ and it’s utterly dreadful.

In the bin.

Yet here you are posting utter bollocks about it 🤷‍♂️

Picked at random – British GP result from 1982. Only ten finishers and 10th place was 3 laps down. Rose tinted specs are very popular!..

The only go I’ve ever been to. Boring as ****. The best bit was the Xjs following the cars round on the first lap.

Cars are so much easier to drive nowadays it’s boring.

LOL. Ask Danny Ricciardo how easy the McLaren was to drive, or Lewis Hamilton about the ground effect Mercs, or nearly all of Verstappen’s teammates about the Red Bulls with skittery rear ends. If it was easy, everyone would win.

…all while flicking through menus and sub menus on the steering wheel constantly changing car settings while trying to keep it on the road!! 😜

@multi21

Yet here you are posting utter bollocks about it 🤷‍♂️

Well, as I said, motorsport is in my blood and it saddens me that folk perceive F1 to have any relevance in that sporting area….the thread title got me.

But yes, I don’t spare any thought over it anymore, other than to say it’s cr@p now!

than to say it’s cr@p now

This seems to be a common theme, but people who espouse it rarely say when they thought it was good and why that’s the case. I’ve been following F1 (and other motorsports) for over 5 decades, back to the days when all we got about F1 was a short highlights program tucked away on BBC2 in the middle of the night. We got more coverage of the rac rally than any f1 race back then.

When I first started following F1 most people ran the Ford DFV but even then reliability was woeful, car advantages were still a massive factor, the organisation of races was chaotic, politics was everywhere (JM Balestre, FISA/FOCA), and people were injured or killed far too often. Are those the good old days? Really?

I hear you,  but you still can have epic racing with the safety improvements available today.

Balestre….he was a disaster for motorsport, wasn’t he?!

I’d describe it as a corporate penis pump.

Each to their own and all that.

@thepurist totally agree with that assessment, there seems to be a mythical time when F1 was great but no one ever knows when it was.

Been watching since the early 90’s and it’s easy to forget how staggeringly boring and one sided the races were, F1 has always been been about periods of one team finding the right ingredients to dominate with occasional interruptions by a rules change or generational talent like Schumacher managing to keep a season interesting (or indeed the second half of the 90’s).  Every so often it all culminates into a season where it’s genuinely incredible sporting theatre, 94, 97, 08, 21 are the ones that spring to mind from my time watching.  It’s not that different to the Premier League really, periods of one team running away and then you get a super close year like this one of something weird happens, like Leicester.  That’s sport, you watch because of what might happen.

The big issue for me with F1 is over saturation, I can’t get the time to watch 24 races (plus sprints) this year and China was the first full one I’ve had a chance to see.  With so many races and the inevitable domination by Verstappen I don’t feel I need to watch all the races now, there will be another in 7 days or so for most of the season.

And if you don’t like F1 then the beauty of motorsport is that there is a version for everyone, prefer tin tops with performance levelling systems then the BTCC is your thing, WEC for sportscars with BoP, World GT Series for sprint and endurance races with GT cars, Indycar for “almost anyone of 12 drivers could win this weekend” fast open wheeler racing.  That’s not even getting into WRC, MOTOGP etc…

mikertroid
I hear you,  but you still can have epic racing with the safety improvements available today.

Like we had in 2021 you mean, just three years ago? It was an absolutely epic year, the best year of *any* motorsport I can remember since the early 90s.

I mean just go and watch Socchi, Bahrain, Hungary, Monza, Brazil, Paul Ricard & Emilia Romagna from 2021. Just brilliant. And the season went right down to the wire with some drama & controversy right to the end. Fantastic.

From memory there were only two duds that season, Monaco and Belgium (rain too heavy, should have been cancelled early doors).

It’s unfortunate that Red Bull have aced the new regs since then but unless you add weights to hobble the leading cars like in touring cars and WEC, that will always be the case sometimes.

The big issue for me with F1 is over saturation

My uncle recently died, and he made a massive collection of Autosport and Motorsport going back to the late 50’s it was a proper treasure trove, in one there’s an article criticising the F1 drivers for doing things like F2 or Trans Am or sports cars, becasue the editorial suggested [paraphrasing] Too much exposure or racing that they do will weaken the appeal of headline F1 races like Monaco and Nuremberg Ring. Another edition was complaining about rules changes to make the racing closer and stopping Lotus from dominating everything they entered. Another was complaining about the increasing weight of cars with additional safety equipment (on-board fire extinguishers)

Only the names have changed really

‘. . . along with the latest lot (Liberty) have milked it for every $ . . .’
And the good news is they’re now going to spoil Moto GP too!

‘. . . along with the latest lot (Liberty) have milked it for every $ . . .’

TBF to Liberty, I think the teams are in a much stronger financial position due to Liberty. Of the 10 teams on the grid, I think only Ferrari haven’t had a period of severe financial problems in the last 20 years.