Should Formula One go to a single engine format?

No

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by Malcolm Toogood

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It is interesting that, at the time of writing this, nobody has yet taken the tenuous step of writing an article on the Yes side of this debate. Of course, there will eventually be a submission from some eco-warrior killjoy who will trot-out every reason why Grand Prix racing is killing the Planet, along with every other enjoyable activity that demonstrates how mankind needs entertainment to balance the heavy weight of responsibility we all carry every day. But until then the reason for that gaping hole in this debate is quite simple; nobody who is a true fan of motor sport would vote Yes.

Why? Well because we already have a myriad of formulae where the car, or the engine, or both are built to a fixed specification, all the way from the karting grass roots of the sport to GP2, the feeder competition into F1 for up-and-coming drivers, and teams. GP2 provides support races at Grand Prix events around the world, and gives us exciting racing where the skills of the drivers are paramount to success. But it doesn't draw a tenth of the crowd numbers that the main event does, despite the fact that it is less processional than Formula One tends to be. This is purely because Formula One is the race that everybody wants to watch, because it pits man AND machine against each other.

You cannot be a petrol-head without having at least an appreciation of superb engineering, and for a car to be competitive in Grand Prix racing, it has to be exactly that, a feat of engineering of the highest calibre. Of course, the gizmo's take some of the shine off of the driver's contribution, but to suggest that these cars drive themselves is a huge misunderstanding of exactly how difficult they are to handle even with the so-called driver-aids' that are now being stripped-away, year-on-year.

I became hooked on Motor Sport at the age of seven, when one of the first things I saw on our new Black and White TV was the 1957 British Grand Prix, live from Aintree, when Stirling Moss took over Tony Brooks' Vanwall, having blown the engine in his own car, and drove it from ninth place up through the field to score the very first win for a British driver in a British car since the 1920's.

What an introduction to a sport that was! You could see his elbows flailing around as he battled to control a front-engined car delivering nigh-on 300BHP through skinny rear tyres, with no aerodynamic package, no special tyre compounds and no seat-belts. His only obvious protection was the equivalent of a pith-helmet, and a pair of motor-cycle goggles covered in oil.

But it wasn't just the driver and his boys-own exploits that attracted this particular engineer-in-the-maki ng, but the machine he was driving. The Vanwall just perfectly illustrated the old engineering adage that if a machine looks right, then it most probably is right. I would learn later that its chassis was engineered by Colin Chapman, and the beautifully-clean aerodynamics evolved by Frank Costin, two names that would be written into the bedrock of Grand Prix racing over the following decades that saw the developments that have been refined into today's awesome machines.

But these developments would never have happened if there had been standardisation of components. Of course there were, and still are, strict regulations governing engine capacity, weight, dimensions, and so on, but the developments came-about because engineers had free-rein to interpret the regulations ingeniously. Occasionally, they would gain an advantage that may have been within the letter, but outside of the spirit, of the regulations, such as the infamous Brabham fan-car in the late-seventies, and the authorities always moved quickly to ban such advantages. But otherwise, it would be down to the engineers in the other teams to play catch-up as quickly as possible.

Cost was never a factor for regulatory consideration. The rules are the rules, and if you cannot afford the membership fees, you simply don't apply to join. Yes, that makes it an exclusive club, but aren't all the best ones exactly that? And hasn't history shown us that if a business drops its prices simply to accommodate those that cannot afford them, then the standard of product rapidly follows-suit.

In this sport, exclusivity not only attracts excellence, it generates it as well. And that is what will be lost if the F1 hierarchy bow to the dumbing-down of political-correctnes s and remove the one factor that has made the sport what it was then, and still is today: that the winner will always be the supreme driver in the ultimate car.

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