Is time almost up for Formula 1?

Camel · April 3, 2016

There's apparently a bit of a power struggle going in on Formula 1 at the moment, and has been for a few years now. On the one hand you have Bernie Ecclestone, the power crazed senile(?) old man and the FIA with Jean Todt. And then on the other hand you have the teams pushing for what they believe will be best for Formula 1 and the GPDA which most drivers are a part of.

Bernie choosing to stick with Pirelli, a tyre manufacturer who have had a shakey few years in Formula 1 and it doesn't really look to improve much over the next few years with their new deal. Which seemed to be purely based on money.

The current qualifying fiasco. The majority of fans are not happy with it because the track is empty for half of qualifying now and drivers just watch and wait to get knocked out. The teams agreed to go back to the 2015 qualifying format after the farce of Australia but Jean Todt didn't give them the option so they're stuck with the new format that just doesn't work. Just so that the teams/drivers can't guide the path that F1 goes down.

Viewing figures are dropping, there's not as much of a following from younger fans as they would like so what's the best way to resolve this? Of course, it's to sign deals that send live F1 races to pay TV which puts them out of reach for a large amount of people. A lot of people feel that F1 is simply not worth paying upto £500 a year for. And why not ban the use of social media in the paddock.

There are many more hairbrained ideas that Bernie and the FIA have pushed through or tried to push through regardless of what the teams/fans and drivers say. Double points for the last race. New engines just years after the big push for the current hybrids. Rule changes that then get changed before the season starts. The list goes on. It's all about the money and short-term gain.

Is Formula 1 on course to self destruct at the hands of Bernie and Todt or will the teams and fans win in the end?

superhyper · April 4, 2016

Like most drivers have expressed it, it should be about the racing, not the money and politics behind it. Most of their recent efforts to "improve" F1 have been way off ("You can now vote for your driver of the day! Except that it will always be Haryanto because of Indonesian people. Except it won't because it's suddenly Grosjean (spoiler alert: nobody cares about this vote anyway)." or "Hey fans, we heard you! We're making big changes...to the qualifying system! We're putting all our effort into fixing the least broken part of the sport!").

One can only hope Bernie retires asap. Otherwise I'm afraid the series is going nowhere but downhill.