Thanks
Fenderman. I have a lot of sympathy for your position and I used to share it - to some extent I still do. I thought of myself as a purist, I opposed all technical restrictions on the teams for cost-saving reasons - engine restrictions, spending limits, single suppliers, testing and so on. Actually, several of those I still find problematic.
My belief now is that liberalising the regulations would actually lead not to more diversity but to more similarity. The teams' years of experience, backed up by highly sophisticated simulation tools, mean that the optimum package for a given regulation set can be defined much more narrowly than in the past. Which team gets closest to the summit quickest depends predominantly on the size of their resource, and only secondarily on the creativity of their thinking.
This, I am sure, explains to a large extent the evolution of F1 from the early 1990s up to the pre-Pirelli period. After billions of pounds of accumulated spend over the decades, the teams had engineered the excitement out of the sport. They were able to run flat-out for the entire distance without any concerns regarding reliability, fuel or tyre consumption. Aerodynamics undoubtedly contributed hugely to the problems with passing, but in many races the question never arose; the cars lined up in speed order from fastest to slowest and finished the same way. It was actually an early artificial innovation, single-lap qualifying, that rescued several of the races in the Schumacher/Ferrari period from being even duller than they turned out to be.
What appeals to me about the Pirelli situation is that it is fair, in the sense that all the teams have the same product to work with and the same access to it (secret testing notwithstanding) but crucially, they don't have control over it. This, coupled with the characteristics of the tyres, means that teams have had to widen their narrow performance windows to give themselves some flexibility with tyre usage, bringing the optimum within closer reach of the less well resourced teams - not necessarily over a season, inevitably, but at least for specific cars at specific races.
For the drivers, this requires a level of consideration and planning that is new to many, but is actually consistent with how Grand Prix drivers have had to operate historically - albeit certainly not for the same reasons as in the past. Seeing that multi-dimensionality, or lack of it, adds to my viewing pleasure in a way that is unconnected to overtaking. I've never necessarily believed that the quickest driver is the best one; each has his strengths and weaknesses and the current formula exposes them quite ruthlessly.
Of course there is a balance to be struck, and F1 needs ultimately to remain a meritocracy. The best car/driver combination doesn't always win the championship, but they should always be in contention to do so. The last thing I'd want is a lottery, and this season at times things have swung too far in that direction. Pirelli have an incredibly difficult job to produce tyres that everyone can use safely with no testing, taking into account how cars will develop over the winter, and manufacturing only four compounds to cover every eventuality of circuit condition and climate. The Hard is too soft for Catalunya; the Super-Soft is too hard for Monaco. The sport should be looking at ways to help them - obliging each team to hand over an example of the previous year's car for testing, for example; increasing the number of compounds available - so that Pirelli are better able to hit the "sweet spot" of 2 or 3 stop races at all circuits.
In my ideal world, having the tyres as an unpredictable factor should allow other areas of the car to be opened up for development, and hopefully next season this will happen with the engine and ERS, if nothing else. Thus over a season, the team that does the best job collects the cups, while we retain the week-by-week uncertainty of who is going to be fighting for the win.