Gollum said:
Schumacher is one factor, despite his titles he still seems to be one of the most dedicated and hardest working drivers in the F1 landscape. Besides that, I think some of this season's changes were going into the right direction. Reducing the cost asociated with developing and maintaining the cars throughout the season should make the budget less of a concern. This should be one of the biggest priorities. F1 is way too expensive for its own good and cutting down on cost, along with a couple other rule modifications, should help make it more competitive the next years.
Then again, that's what they've been trying the past 2 years and see who came out on top...
They don't really want to cut costs too much. I mean you could just set each team a budget, and that would be it, but part of the attraction is that F1 is supposed to be the most extreme motorsport with the most advanced engineering. It's supposed to be a test of the team and it's ability to design and build cars, as well as to race them to success.
If you went to the logical extreme and had everyone using the same identical cars to concentrate purely on driver ability, not only would you diminish F1, you'd probably end up with Schumacher winning again.
Over the years, we've seen rule changes to slow the cars down and to remove technology that gives one team overwhelming advantages - sometimes in the same season the tech has first appeared, but ultimately it's always the case that the best drivers with the best cars win - and that's pretty much the way it should be.
Personally, I agree with one of the posters in the other F1 thread that the problem is the older designed tracks that are very poor for passing. Tracks like Monaco are in the season because it's where all the corporate customers go to wheeler-deal, but it's an unsafe, boring track that's only there for nostalgia. It would never get approved as a track today. The races at newer tracks like Barhain and Malaysia have shown that good tracks can make exciting racing, and apart from Ferrari being way out in front, the rest of the teams are acutally closer together than they have ever been, with BAR, Renault, Jaguar etc all raising their game this season.
It's still early days though. We had the same talk last year when Ferrari got off to a good start, and yet at the end Shumacher just managed to scrape through to get the championship. There's more races this year, so more time for other teams to make up the difference. It's just been the case this year that Ferrari once again has been more together out of the blocks than the other teams, and have once again reaped the rewards that implies.
