FIA President Max Mosley is reported to have said today what many F1 fans have been thinking for quite a while, that Formula One has become boring. Mosley apparently attributed the lack of excitement to Ferrari’s total dominance this season but added that it was not Ferrari’s fault but rather the fault of the other teams that weren’t as good.
This fan, for one, believes that it goes back a while further than that to the time when the races became virtual processions with most significant lead changes taking place in the pits but that’s another issue.
To cut costs Mosley is apparently considering restricting testing, practice, qualifying (both time and laps allowed) and the number of changes made to the car.
To make the races more interesting the FIA is considering a handicapping system where the winner of a race — or perhaps the championship points leader, the details are not yet clear — would be given a weight penalty in future races to avoid them running away with the series.
This “punish the winner policy” is an idea that has been tried in several other series and while it can make for some close racing in the short-term it can also lead to the better teams and drivers quitting the series in favour of other events where their innovation and superiority will be appreciated so I would suggest that the FIA thinks long and hard about this before they start dumbing the series down.
Formula One as the world’s premier racing series is supposed to be about technical innovation and since dominance in F1 has always tended to go in cycles it would be a shame to see them mess with the rules just to bring the current Ferrari era to an end a year or so sooner than it would have naturally happened.