I am not advocating a return to yesteryear’s lack of safetly. I am advocating a return to racing where the driver mattered more. In fact, putting driving back into the hands of the driver does only a little if any to make the sport more dangerous. Outlawing downforce producing bodies greatly reduces cornering speeds, which combined with keeping all the other modern tech safety items would make F1 far safer than what it is now. And you still have interesting racing instead of what we see now.

Wings and huge downforce make the racing more dangerous not the reverse.

For ‘racing’ one must look elsewhere as you said doublechili.

I appreciate the technological marvels that F1 cars are, but just like the new tennis raquets they can cover mistakes like the old cars couldn’t. Less opportunity for mistakes homogenizes things. More opportunity for mistakes makes for better racing with more focus on the drivers. I realize safety isn’t going to go backwards, so as a tradeoff I’d rather see smaller courses with slower speeds but more competition. But that’s not going to happen, so I’ll watch F1 sometimes, mostly for the amazing in- car camera sequences, and watch other series for racing.

The other thing is such extreme downforce.

If the driver controlled the car himself it would help racing. And if F1 would outlaw downforce production you would see much better racing. It wouldn’t be as fast as now, but it would be interesting competition with the driver’s skills making more difference. And since cornering would occur at about half the speed in any given corner, it would be safer still.

Of course manufacturer’s would prefer to take it out of the driver’s hands. They feel if it was car only they could manage never to worry about the drivers. One less headache.

F1 hardly qualifies as racing now. And mentioning qualifying, well the top few spots are mostly determined by qualifying position. Mechanical problems and mistakes in pits are about all that shake up the first few positions. If that doesn’t happen, qualifying is the race with so little passing going on. Or rain, I forgot about rain. That rain in Hungary made it the best F1 race of the year.

Turkey, however, is exactly what we’ve been waiting for from Tilke. Today’s race was awesome, and there were a lot of great passes. That’s not a great win/loss record for the Tilke tracks, but maybe it’s a sign that he’s figured things out.

If it were up to me, I’d drop Imola, Spain, Hungary, and one of the German tracks. And I would NOT drop Suzuka for Fuji as they are doing for 2007 (grr). It wouldn’t have to be permanent cancellations; give other tracks a few years to prove themselves.

That said, I wish someone would find a way to combine today’s safer racing conditions with a circuit that offered some of the drama of the older circuits. Shanghai and Bahrain (to name two) offer up magnificent architecture… but bland racing.