One of the great paradoxes of motor racing is for something that professes to be a technical sport, it has the most Jekyll and Hyde relationship with technology of any area of engineering I have encountered.
A few classic examples are Balance of Performance, which in recent years has got its tentacles into just about all forms of the sport, the dominance of single spec (or near single spec) formulae and regulatory bodies mandating competitors must run x brand of spring, damper or data system.
Add to this the second there is a processional race, the commentators wheeling out the familiar punching bags of aero and technology spoiling the show. Not only do comments like this have no basis: in fact, if not addressed, there is a very real chance they will kill the sport completely. This is what we’ll be discussing in this article.
A budget cap will address this somewhat, but it won’t account for technical infrastructure that is already invested
Tipping point
The reason we are in this mess is that as costs were climbing in the late 1980s to mid-’90s, motorsport regulatory bodies started panicking. The tipping point was when the Williams Formula
