Here's another left field proposal to possibly to reduce costs and increase competitiveness in F1. The rule change would be that teams would have to provide a certain level of detailed blueprints of their car to the FIA at every race, who would then randomly validate these against the cars in parc ferme (similar to the checks against the rulebook they currently do anyway). The blueprints provided by the teams would have to be in a digital format to allow easy analysis in CFD. Any discrepancies would be penalised at that race weekend.Then, the FIA publish the library of blueprints for every team online twice during the season - once at halfway and once at the end of the year.
Why do this? I think it would have 3 main effects:
1. Allow less competitve teams an easier chance to 'catch up' more, and bring cars competitveness closer together later in the season, and in future seasons if rules remain relatively constant year to year.
2. Discourage top teams from spending megabucks on certain areas of r+d - this then means there will be a lower gap in baseline performance too.
3. More transparency - discourages 'bending' of the rules as this will be more likely to be caught.
As a bonus, it will allow fans to see the cars real inner workings much sooner and in much greater detail.
Why only publish around halfway and at the end of the season? This is so the team that does the best job designing a new car can benefit from their investment for at least the first half of the season, and still likely win the championships. But it gives enough time for some design elements to be copied to the current seasons cars, and larger design philosophies to be implemented in the next years cars.
Some downsides: Engine manufacturers/parts suppliers that use F1 to develop tech for the road market will be heavily against revealing the inner workings of their parts, so there would have to be some exemptions in certain areas. So the blueprints might have to be limited to only aero/packaging. Blueprints won't show teams how to setup or run a car optimally, so may not be that useful in certain areas. It will require more expensive policing from the FIA - how do you prove that a blueprint is perfectly accurate? Top teams/current strategy group probably won't sign up to this (but who knows how this situation might change in the future).
Thoughts?
Edited by beeclown, 26 April 2015 - 12:01.
