I've just picked up
James Allen's latest "on F1" podcast (on the topic of the importance of innovation to F1), in which he has a conversation with Frank Durney that I found both interesting and relevant to this thread:
James Allen on F1 podcast -- 005 July 2012
JA-
Frank, do you think there's enough innovation in Formula One these days?
FD-
It's a difficult one, isn't it? Because, you know, people like it to be between the drivers, and it's always difficult to get a balance between somebody producing a car [that's] so much better than all the others that any of the top drivers will be World Champion in it. And you know, if you try and stop all innovation, it's not Formula One any more.
I always give the example that 1982, if we'd had the money, we would have had six-wheeled, turbocharged, ground effect cars with active suspension, power steering and all those things. All of those things we'd thought of, and were doing, to an extent, but we didn't have enough resource. There was nowhere near as much money in Formula One then as now. Whereas nowadays, none of those things are permitted, but we've got hundreds of millions to spend. So it's ironic, really, that at the time when we had a huge ability to innovate, we didn't have enough resource to do as much as we would have liked, and now that we've got a massive amount of resource, we're not allowed to do very much.
JA-
And it's obviously the fault of the rules, isn't it? The rules are very restrictive....
FD-
Yeah.
JA-
...but it's a trade-off between, on the one hand, cost restrictions -- cost control -- and on the other hand, allowing people to sort of have of have incredibly expensive flights of fancy.
FD-
You see, I don't I think, ...the cost controls itself, you've got as much as you've got, you know. If your wife has a hundred pound budget to buy shoes, she spends £102 on shoes, you know. It it's not the amount of money you've got that limits, ...sorry, it
is the amount of money you've got that limits how much you spend,
not the freedom. Because if it really was only about the freedom of the rules, the most sophisticated and expensive cars would have been made in 1982. But we didn't have the money. So I don't think that
any technical change to the rules makes it any cheaper because you spend all the money you've got. If you're only allowed to lighten the wheel nut, you will spend $100 million dollars on making the lightest possible wheel nut because that's how much you've got.
Ja-
Do you think that the direction of travel for innovation has to be for the benefit of society, that the way the road car industry is going? Or do you think it should be, in Formula One it should be innovation for its own sake?
FD-
Personally, I think Formula One has always been innovation for it's own sake. I mean, no one tried to justify football by saying, because these guys play football, we've got much better stitched shoes than we had before, you know. Formula One in
my view, personally, is that it justifies itself as a sport, and that's that.
If there's a spinoff, great! If there isn't, well, I think the last spin-off was disk brakes in the 60s, wasn't it?* (laughs)
JA-
What's the ...what's the one that's really impressed you the most in the last few years, ...the best innovation for you?
FD-
Well, the F-Duct was very clever, I was very impressed by the F-Duct.
JA-
Why?
FD-
Well, because it was, you know, it was just a clever innovation. Somebody thought through the rules. It's all about, in my view, it's all about reading the rule book and coming up with the cleverest interpretation which doesn't include cheating. So doing something in such restricted rules that was such a clever thing, I thought was great.
You know, When I started, the rule book was two pages of A5. And therefore there wasn't an awful lot to argue about, you know. If the car was too wide, it wasn't really very difficult to measure that it was too wide, and it was rather difficult to argue that it wasn't. Now that we have got page after page after page on complicated regulations to try and limit things, it's much more difficult to be really precise. And you've got clever people -- lots of them -- trying to work their way round this rule book. And when they find something, it'll be something that hadn't been anticipated when the rules were written.
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*For the record, disc brakes were used on the 1902 Lanchester automobile (built in Birmingham), a year before the Wright brother's first powered flight. Malcolm Lougheed (founder of Lockheed) added hydraulics in 1918. The 1954 Austin-Healey 100S production automobile had 4-wheel disc brakes. F1 cars continued running drum brakes until the 1955 season.
