Thoughts on the 2015 F1 Season

[cosworth151]

I'll start off with this thought. One of the biggest questions since motorsports began: Which is more important, the car or the driver? Look at the top ten finishers in this year's WDC. In order, the 2 Mercedes drivers, then the two Ferrari drivers, the two Williams drivers, the two Red Bull drivers and the two Force India drivers.

[Alianora La Canta]

And three of those five (Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull) are in the position of their funding. (Williams is 5th, having leapfrogged not only Red Bull but the disaster show McLaren, and Force India is 6th and also benefitted from McLaren's woes.

[lkjohnson1950]

The car is more important today, though it wasn't always that way. But the driver still counts as I think Mercedes shows. Two highly talented drivers in the same car, yet Lewis seems to win almost whenever he wants to.

 

[J.Clark]

On the whole, I found the season to be too predictable and more-or-less boring.

Looking back to the time Schumi was at Ferrari, and they totally dominated, I do not remember the team and driver championships so looked into an order.  There were drivers who broke out and performed above the level of the car.

There were some stellar individual performances by a few drivers, who at a particular circuit had standout races, but in general, that did not happen with enough frequency.

Mercs were pretty much bullet proof.
Ferrari slowly over took Williams, a team which was its own worst enemy.
Red Bull did much better once they stopped complaining about their engine supplier and simply got down to racing.
Watching STR and FI duke it out was where nearly all of the actual racing took place and those fights were fun to watch.

I will simply hang on and wait until January for 2016 launches and testing in February.

[Jericoke]

It's hardly new for the best drivers to end up with the best teams.

I think the difference amongst top drivers have shrunk.. that I think anyone who drove an F1 race this season would be capable of winning had they driven the Mercedes.  So yes, the car made the difference, but only because the gap between drivers is historically small.

[Scott]

I enjoy every season of F1, if not every race (thankfully because the TV directors seem to still have autonomy and are able to show us battles that are going on instead of following the Mercedes driving around by themselves), but the results bear out the Merc dominance.

I'll play that tune again...the engine regulations are the biggest burden to the teams in my opinion.  They need to be loosened and in every instance allow for development throughout the season, including testing, a lot of testing.

And for the second tune you've heard again and again...there is enough money coming into F1 to fund every team to the point they can build respectable race programs and compete against one another.  The problem is simply the amount of money that leaves the sport due to Bernie and CVC and partners. 

Sometimes they will go the wrong direction, but there is still enough money in the sport that would allow them to change direction and make corrections during the season.  The way things are now, if a team shows up in Melbourne with a dog, they may as well just sit out the season if it weren't for penalties for no-shows. 

[Andy B]

Are the cars not easier to drive? I'm sure I heard that statement from someone during the season and they have said from 2017 they are going to be harder to drive maybe that'll sort the men from the boys?.

As for the cars being bigger than the driver you have to include the engine the Merc was all conquering but the Lotus had Merc power as did the Williams but are they all equal power units? If you were Mercedes would you supply the exact same unit that the manufacturer uses to customers?

So who else would you fancy to have won the WDC in the Merc instead of Lewis? Vettel who has shown some quality this season, Alonso, JB would be there but I think Nico would have beaten Kimi who I have never rated at the top end.

[Monty]

There is no doubt that the latest cars are easier to drive - although that isn't surprising considering the levels of very expensive technology that are lavished on the designs. It also seems to me that the top drivers have so much time in the simulators that there isn't even the old dice roll of who does well at what track.
I know it will never happen but I would just love the last race of the year to be like a swingers party - they put all of the car keys in a bowl and the drivers pick a car at random! Imagine Will Stevens driving a Merc., Vettel in a Sauber, etc., etc.

[Jericoke]

There is no doubt that the latest cars are easier to drive - although that isn't surprising considering the levels of very expensive technology that are lavished on the designs. It also seems to me that the top drivers have so much time in the simulators that there isn't even the old dice roll of who does well at what track.
I know it will never happen but I would just love the last race of the year to be like a swingers party - they put all of the car keys in a bowl and the drivers pick a car at random! Imagine Will Stevens driving a Merc., Vettel in a Sauber, etc., etc.

I'd love to see every race like that, not just the last one.

It would give true meaning to both championships.

It would also clear up the pay driver nonsense, though I suspect the better drivers would attract far more personal sponsorship.

[Andy B]

It would never work!
A driver who has fought hard to achieve a good race seat gets a Manor for two races and pay drivers sponsors would be jumping up and down.
It need the drivers to drive the car alone maybe without a radio or just a one way radio.
Make the cars harder to drive I'm not sure how but I'm sure something in the regulations could achieve that.
Unfortunately my Christmas wish lists never come to much.

[Irisado]

I would not like to see a random 'free for all' allocation of cars to drivers at the season's end as part of the championship.  If something like that were to happen, it would have to be for a non-championship race after the championship is over.  Even then, I'm still not sure how much I'd like it.

As for the 2015 season, I was pretty excited by the first few races, but it started becoming very predictable and boring from the mid point of the season onwards, especially once the teams improved their reliability.  The wet race in Austin and, surprisingly, the race at Sochi, were the only memorable moments during the second half of the year.

Every season just feels less challenging than the last.  The cars are too easy to drive, and too reliable, while the engines are too expensive, and the penalty rules are just plain silly.  Add to this that the circuits are, for the most part, too easy as well, with even the classic tracks neutered.  A classic example of this was Verstappen's pass on Nasr at Blanchimont, previously one of the toughest corners in Formula 1.  He put his right wheels slightly off the track during the manoeuvre.  Had the gravel trap still been there he would have been straight off the road, bouncing through it, either badly damaging his car and rejoining, or going off to hit the tyre wall.  This is how Formula 1 should be.  We have drivers running wide and passing people regularly now, and complaints about track limits, all because they have taken away the gravel traps.  Put the gravel traps back in and you solve all these problems, and you make the tracks more challenging to drive, because mistakes will actually cost the drivers more than a time penalty.

Another major point to come out of this season was the paucity of teams on the grid.  There were only 15 starters in Melbourne.  Yes, Bottas had a bad back, and Kvyat and Magnussen broke down on the way to the grid, but had the grid been full (26 cars) it wouldn't have looked quite so sparse.  Formula 1 needs to find much better ways of making it feasible for small independent teams to enter.  The fees required to enter should be massively reduced, and the amount of money paid to Ecclestone and the engine suppliers needs to be massively cut, while prize money needs to be much more fairly distributed.

The quality of the racing also needs vast improvement.  DRS passes are artificial gimmicks.  This is not acceptable to me.  They need to design the cars differently to promote overtaking.  This goes back to the old bugbear of aerodynamics.  It's true that the engineers cannot forget the knowledge that they have acquired, so it's up to the rule makers to change the rules in such a way that mechanical grip takes precedence over aerodynamics.  If the teams don't like it tough, they're not supposed to be making the rules, which brings me neatly on to...

Manufacturers have no business in wielding any sort of veto.  This is the kind of politics which got Formula 1 into a complete mess in the mid 2000s.  Manufacturers will forever be dominated by their boards.  They really should only be in Formula 1 as engine suppliers, not as teams, but if they are going to be allowed to compete as teams, then the rules need to be made crystal clear that the FIA makes all the rules and all teams will follow them.  No exceptions and no vetos.

The racing, such as it was, had few memories for me.  Perez's podium at Sochi was my favourite moment of the season.  Button managing to keep the same driver behind him for lap after lap at Melbourne was also immensely entertaining.  The fact that my other most memorable moment was Alonso sitting in the marshal's chair dreaming of [insert your witty ideas here] tells you all you need to know about my views on the quality of this season's on track battles.

There are currently a lot of very good drivers on the grid.  Even though there is a case for saying that the car is more important than the driver, I think that it is important to recognise that nearly all the drivers within each team were very closely matched, so two-by-two results were always going to be likely on that basis, barring technical problems or collisions.  The only team where there was a significant gap in performance between the drivers was at Lotus, where Grosjean comprehensively beat Maldonado in qualifying.

Finally, I'll conclude by saying congratulations to the BBC on its coverage since 2009.  They've done their very best to make some increasingly dull races as interesting as they could, and their final programme reviewing this season was excellent (if you missed it, I'd encourage you to watch it on the iplayer).  They made the season as a whole look far more exciting and dramatic than it actually was, and for that they deserve a lot of plaudits.