Joe wonders if we’re obsessing about engine noise to avoid really talking about the future of the sport.
Formula 1 is a complex business, but few look beyond the obvious. The sport has just managed to sort out the mess over its qualifying system and now the focus has shifted to the 2017 technical regulations – with serious concerns about whether the Strategy Group will be able to come up with a solution.
But is this really what’s important? The cars are getting faster and more efficient with each passing race weekend, and the show that the sport creates in 2016 is not nearly as bad as some people think. The switch that allows drivers to use three tyre compounds rather than the previous two seems to have made a difference, but is it really enough?
There are some in F1 circles who think that all of this is just a series of diversionary tactics that are designed to stop the sport and its supporters from looking too closely at the real problems of the sport – the commercial structure, which allows 40 percent of the revenues to be taken by a promoter who never does anything to promote the sport.
It’s an interesting argument, and one can see some logic in it. The thing that worries many people in the F1 industry is that it seems like nobody is looking at the long-term future of the sport, at a time when there are seismic changes beginning to happen in the automobile industry. The electric car market is growing much faster than people thought it would. On paper, that ought to mean that Formula E is in a good place to be – but the series is burning money at a high rate, and it’ll be a tough challenge to make it pay in the immediate future. Some believe that it’ll run out of cash before technology is sufficiently developed to give it a chance to survive. I can’t say whether this is true or false, because no-one knows what the manufacturers will come up with next. How many of the big players are now concluding that it’s time to get serious about electric cars? And how many hybrid cars will the market demand five years from now?
Everyone is talking today about connected cars, but no-one mentions that the most connected cars in the world are the F1 racing machines. Every aspect of these cars is captured, recorded by sensors and sent around the world. I’m told that each weekend a top F1 team collects eight billion data points, to be analysed by the engineers, in order to produce a better performing car.
Is F1 going to miss the connected car revolution?
The world of fully autonomous cars is just around the corner, and is anyone asking what’s going to happen when self-driving machines take over? I don’t know how the industry is going to get around the question of insurance because an autonomous car must be programmed to decide what to do in a crisis. And if a car must swerve to avoid an errant pedestrian, how can it decide what to do if the choice is to run into a crowd of people? Such a situation requires programmers to decide who to kill and it’s hard to see how a machine can make such a decision without there being problems of liability for the manufacturer. Even programming a random choice would make those who programmed the car liable.
There are probably ways that this can be overcome because where there’s money to be made, there are often ways to ensure that such questions are never asked. This being the case, it is entirely possible to imagine that the babies who are born today may never get a driving licence, because they will never need one.
And how can the car companies of today compete with industry newcomers if these newbies use automobiles simply to supply them with components and sell these devices as data delivery machines on wheels rather than vehicles? One can even imagine a situation in which new cars might be given away, on the basis that the owners will agree to sign up to subscriptions that will provide them with all the services they want when they are travelling – be it music, video, data, social media, or any of the many services that will become important in the Internet of Things.
And if this happens, what future is there for automobile racing? It’s been calculated that if the rates of engine efficiency that are seen in F1 could be repeated throughout the automobile industry, the average car today would be able to operate at 70km/l. This would mean that there’s a huge opportunity for F1 to help the world by reducing the consumption of fossil fuels, and, thus, improve the environment and extend the available supplies well into the future. This is wildly impressive, but it doesn’t fit at all with the big players who are arguing for more engine noise and faster engines that burn more fuel.
These are old-fashioned ideas that used to work to promote spectacular events, but the world is more sophisticated these days. Kids still love cars, but the sport is losing them because it’s failing to keep up with available information technology. In many cases, the Formula One group deliberately blocks social media, thus depriving itself of a means of developing the youth market. And we’re only just scratching the surface of how F1 can adopt new technology that will engage even more with the fans. Augmented reality could transform the product as it exists today.
None of this means that motor racing is going to stop. We still have horse racing in a world where few travel on horseback, but the sport must be prepared to become a niche business – much more so than it is today. It needs people thinking about where the sport goes before a crisis develops...
Joe Saward has been covering Formula 1 full-time for 28 years. He has not missed a race since 1988.
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