James Burgess

Jeremy Martin goes over the basics of what the upcoming Javascript 2.0 will include. It looks promising!

As some of you may know, I’m a huge motorsport fan, with my biggest passion being Formula One - I’ve not missed a race since the start of 1997, and I have no plans of stopping any time soon.

For years, however, there has been a plague sweeping the F1 world - tinkering. Max Mosely and his cronies over at the FIA (the sport’s governing body), have an obsession with it. Every year, we have a mountain of tiny (or, maybe, not-so-tiny) rule changes, ‘cost-cutting measures’ (we’ll come back to this) and things that will apparently make the sport better.

We’ve been from turbos, to no turbos, to traction control, to no traction control (and back, and forth, and back… you get the idea) - everything has been tried, and then un-tried, but the fact remains the same… people have no idea what’s going on.

Tuning in to last weekend’s season opener in Melbourne, I was struck by how incredibly complex the qualifying format must be for a newcomer to the sport. All 22 cars participate in the first session, then the 6 slowest get knocked out. The remaining cars participate in the second session, then the 6 slowest get knocked out. Then the remaining 10 cars participate in the final session, running race-fuel (”what does this mean?”, I hear you ask!), to determine pole position… and then a Zeppelin comes in and drops a giant portrait of an iguana onto the track… what!?

Apparently the old format of “you have 12 laps available to you… and 1 hour to use them in.” was a bit too boring. Granted, you sometimes had wait for 40 minutes for the track to spring into life - but those last 20 minutes were magic. 22 cars, doing a number of laps each, in 20 minutes… it was amazing. People vying for on-track position for their hot-laps, planning when to pit out to avoid the traffic - it was all great fun, and huge upsets when a big name caught a slower car on his hot-lap and ended up miles down the grid. I still don’t get why it was butchered (or, rather, I do… but I’m trying to ignore commercialism here).

In addition, we’ve had so many ‘cost-cutting measures’ implemented - but I’m really sceptical of them. A couple of years ago, we made the change from one-per-race V10s to one-per-two-races V8s, in the name of cost-cutting… but how does that work? Teams spent millions upon millions of pounds redeveloping technology that was already working, already developed, and already known to them. A far simpler idea would have been to effectively freeze development by further constricting the engine regulations (as teams were developing almost entirely new engines each season, due to quite non-specific regulations).

Why is their the need for such tinkering? Why does everything have to be tweaked and changed to make it more complex, more political and less spectator-friendly? As much as sayings like this are clichéd, I’m going to say it - what happened to the good old days?

Concorde Agreement or not… F1 needs an overhaul.

Whilst I am in the middle of a very hectic end-of-(this-part-of-the-) semester at University, I just felt like celebrating the fact that I have indeed found a supervisor for my final year project. That lifts a great weight from me!

Details of the project will follow in a few weeks… when everything’s confirmed!