MOTORSPORT: Formula One’s future in the melting pot

Formula One’s heaviest hitters sat down a few days ago to try to renew the sport’s appeal and they came up with a host of ideas to make F1 faster and sexier, including bringing back refueling during races – something that was done away with five years ago because of the dangers and the costs.

There was talk too of making the open-wheeler cars wider, with bigger tyres and more rubber compound options, and bigger aerodynamic wings.

And of noise. Yes, it was generally agreed, F1 cars need to be louder again.

Interest in the world’s major motor racing world championship has waned since the introduction last year of V6 hybrid engines that did away with the screeching noise for which F1 was renowned.

Any major changes to F1’s rules and regulations won’t come before 2017 – and first they have to get through the F1 Commission, which includes some grand prix circuit promoters, and the Federation Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA) World Motor Sport Council, a broader church again.

The meeting last week was of what’s called F1’s strategy group. In attendance were the sport’s 84-year-old commercial ringmaster Bernie Ecclestone, FIA president Jean Todt and the principals of six of the 10 F1 teams – Mercedes, Ferrari, Williams, Red Bull, McLaren and Force India.

CVC, the private equity company that owns the biggest slice of what is the umbrella company of F1, may have had a seat too in the meeting room at Ecclestone’s Biggin Hill airport in London, and certainly the suppliers of the hybrid engines – or power units as they’re more properly called – did.

And one thing became certain – the hybrids are staying, because the manufacturers have invested so much money in developing them.

The task is to make them sound like F1 motors. The engineers are on notice to come up with technical rather than artificial solutions, most probably through the exhaust architecture.

Whatever is done, it’s becoming obvious that Audi – part of Germany’s giant Volkswagen group – won’t be acquiescing to Red Bull’s overtures to come to its rescue as a replacement for Renault, which has faltered badly in the hybrid era after they combined for four consecutive world title seasons at the end of the most recent V8 era.

Audi is content to dominate the Le Mans 24-Hour sports car classic and compete in the wider World Endurance Championship, which moved into hybrid technology earlier, as well as dabble in the new all-electric open-wheeler series, Formula E.

Its board and management may be divided, but they agree on something – that F1 is too expensive.

In light of the costs that are crippling several teams, perhaps half the field, and which have opened up the prospect of the top teams providing customer cars if the smaller outfits fold, the push to resurrect refueling came as a shock.

But the powerbrokers of the strategy group saw a need to inject an element of unpredictability back into F1 racing that has become staid and lost viewers, both at tracks and on telecasts.

It is accepted that the Monaco GP – F1’s crown jewel on again this weekend (starting with practice Thursday and a lay-day Friday) – has little passing on the tight streets of Europe’s rich playground principality, but elsewhere the races are too predictable and processional.

Apart from making the racing more competitive, the strategy group saw a need to simply make the cars faster again.

They’re now lapping circuits several seconds slower than they were years ago. The wow factor has gone.

“What we want is to definitely make it the fastest car on the planet,” says Toto Wolff, who runs the reigning world champion Mercedes team.

The starting points look likely to be a weight reduction of 30-50kg, higher-revving engines and gearboxes with six speeds rather than eight.

But all of this is going to need agreement all the way up the line.

And, as has often been said, in the world of F1 it’s hard to get agreement on what time of day it is.

The clash ultimately will come between the FIA’s increasingly staunch 'green' stance and Ecclestone’s populist philosophies to underpin F1’s following and, by extension, its finances.

At Biggin Hill the powerbrokers couldn’t agree on raising the power unit limit for each F1 car this season from four to five after the idea supposedly had unanimous support a month ago.

That’s going to mean a 10-place grid penalty for Daniel Ricciardo pretty soon as he’s already on his fourth Renault unit in his Red Bull RB11.

As if he hasn’t got enough headaches, behind that eternal smile, seeing Mercedes, Ferrari and Williams cars – even Red Bull’s supposedly secondary Toro Rossos driven by a couple of young rookies – charge off into the distance.