Add my name to the WTF? list here because I've seen some incredible racing this year, there are of course caveats but I'm happy about a lot of things.
1) Loadsa torque!
How many times have you seen cars drifting out of corners this year and slithering about in the acceleration zones as the drivers struggle to put all that low rev torque down? It's been said for many a year that fast cars should be difficult to handle, they should have more power than the chassis can cope with so that drivers are having to manage The Loud Peddle (or, as it will be known this year, The Moderately Loud pedal) This is the first time since the old turbo days that I've seen cars struggle to put it all down and it looks great.
2) Many ways to skin a cat
I liked how different drivers used to approach F1 in a variety of ways in the 80's, balls-out chargers, car strokers, tyre whisperers, and strategists, a combination of sprinters and marathon runners but from Villeneuve to Prost they were all able to get the job done. Then came the 90's and suddenly there was one way to win and that was to sprint, so we had sprinters at the front and anyone with different skills just became an also-ran. It made racing much more physically demanding too which led to the sport being dominated by young, physically fit drivers. this brings us to point 3
3) Room for some old dogs?
I used to ****ing LOVE the fact that Mario and Emmo were still lining up at the sharp end of Indycar grids in the mid 90's but that was only possible because the cars were less physically demanding to drive so speed was more a function of skill than physical condition. The mix of old dogs and young chargers was great to see and we got a bit of that when Schumacher came back to F1, as much as I disliked the guy I thought it made a great story for the sport but it was only possible because the cars were physically easier to drive and testing had been scaled back. I like this, you shouldn't be winning because your' balls have just dropped, you should be winning because you're better than the rest.
4) Talking about engines again.
Only speaking for myself but I got bored to death hearing about winglets and diffusers, I like the oily stuff and I used to love when a team would turn up with a new engine or gearbox mid season. I loved talking about rev increases or friction reduction and comparing powerplant performance and I love to see that back on the agenda a bit more. Lets be honest, it's the engine that makes the sport, without them you'd just be looking at an expensive collection of pedal cars....
DRS is still a questionable one but it's a response to a problem. Before wings the car in front controlled the track position but suffered drag whilst the car behind lost track position but gained the slipstream, the equation was in balance with each car having one positive and one negative and racing was possible. Then wings came along and now the car in front had track position with drag but the car behind lost track position, lost grip and gained the slipstream, car in front one positive and one negative, car behind, one positive and two negatives, the equation was out of balance and racing suffered. DRS is an attempt to re-balance that equation without taking wings away again and if balanced correctly can work just fine in my view although ideally I'd just like to see an end to wings.....
The tyres are a question mark too but again they are an attempt to replace something lost with time. This time it's the natural randomness that used to happen due to inconsistent design, manufacturing or driving, these days everybody's so bloody good at what they do that teams all get 98% from their cars, grids line up like Noah's Ark in order of car speed then the field stretches out like an accordion in the race. You need to shuffle the grid to avoid that and the tyres are one way of achieving this, I'd prefer something else but can't think of a better way, short of artificially limiting the teams engineering ability by stripping non-safety based sensors off the cars and setting them up by feel again.
So, all in all there's room for improvement but I'm liking this years F1 quite a bit.
Edited by Boing 2, 01 August 2014 - 15:53.