Grand Prix now for kiddies’ toy cars?
Lord T has written about the dumbing down of Formula One in line with the new green political correctness. They’re changing the rules to slow the cars down and make them drive more fuel efficiently.
WTF?
Since when does the elite level ever benefit from outside interference and make the sport more interesting for spectators? Anywhere they’ve tried such things it’s gone pear-shaped in the end. The elite level is the elite level and if you play about with it for artificial reasons, then certain things start to happen.
The International C Class – 25 feet long and 375 pounds, made of space age materials and costing as much
Take the International C Class catamaran, for example. For decades the fastest thing afloat, it was the cutting edge of technological innovation in sailing but then the PCists got to the Seacliffe Yacht Club, which controlled the championship deed and they voted to take it away from the super-expensive, sponsorship only C Class with those giant wings for sails and instead gave it to a bog-standard production boat to sail, on the grounds that big fleets allow much broader participation.
Now hang on.
Let’s use the Formula One analogy here. This is like taking it away from F1 cars and giving the Grand Prix to, say, a racetrack full of BMWs. Lovely car, yes but hardly in the same league, would you say? So everyone would tune in, on the Grand Prix circuit, to 200 BMWs cruising around the track at about two thirds of the speed of the old F1s?
What would happen would be predictable. Someone would put up the money for a “real” race again, under the auspices of a different controlling body and F1 would be back.
This is what happened with the Little America’s Cup. No one is interested in those sweet little production boats so when the real boats challenged each other, it produced a championship which was in all the sailing journals in the world.
As it should have been. No pries for guessing which way the promotional money would have gone.
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James, Just so we are clear the article I reference in my blog makes no reference to slowing cars down or fuel efficiency.
What they have done is changed the rules so that the cars get filled up at the start with fuel with no refills during the race. I concluded the green agenda from that. After all what other reason could they possibly have?