19/10/2015
NEWS STORY
Bernie Ecclestone and Max Mosley agree that today's F1 is about the engineers more than drivers.
In a rare joint interview, Ecclestone and close friend, and former FIA president, Mosley, admit that F1 has lost its way and needs a radical overhaul.
At one point, when interviewer Volker Gruber mentions 55-place grid penalties for Fernando Alonso, Mosley laughs, clearly agreeing at the nonsense of it all.
"The people from Honda spoke to me at the weekend," says Ecclestone, "they said, 'we're trying another engine', because they can change as many engines as they like, they said 'we can't go any further back on the grid'".
Never a fan of the new hybrid formula, Ecclestone, when asked why the sport went down this controversial route, looks at Mosely and says: "It's Max's fault we've got this engine".
"The idea was to have an engine where the research was road relevant rather than racing relevant," admits the former FIA president to ZDF. "What we'd had for a hundred years was trying to get the maximum possible power from a limited capacity, and what I was saying was 'we need to get the maximum power from the least fuel’.
"However," he continued, "it was essential to do the engine in such a way that an independent supplier, like Cosworth, could do it at an economic price. If I'd been doing the detailed regulations, apart from the principal, I would have gone to Cosworth and asked them to draft some regulations where you can follow the principal but produce the engine for a sensible amount of money."
Asked the cost of developing the current breed of F1 engine, Mosley admits he doesn't know because the manufacturers won't reveal the details.
"The important factor is that the research is road relevant," he says, "so that what they discover for Formula One is going to be directly applicable to the road car.
"Road car engines are in the 30% efficiency bracket, F1 engines are up at about 40%," he continues. "When you buy a litre of fuel, a third of it propels the car, a third of it is lost in heat and a third goes out the exhaust. If you could start using some of that two-thirds that is currently wasted it would be enormously efficient. That was the objective.
Mosley believes the current engine manufacturers enjoy too much power and the sport needs an independent alternative.
"The difficulty is that you have to have an independent engine supplier who can supply on a commercial basis," he says. "The great strength of Formula One from the late sixties until quite recently was that we had Cosworth, Mecachrome and other people making engines so we weren't in the hands of the manufacturers.
"The moment you have one or two or even three manufacturers and they are involved at board level so Mr Zetsche can talk to Mr Marchionne or Mr Ghosn then they control Formula One, you don't control Formula One. At that point the need for an independent engine supplier becomes acute."
The pair are also fearful that the boffins have too much control in the cockpit.
"When people say to me who do I think was the best driver, the name I come up with, and most people don't agree with me, is Alain Prost," admits Ecclestone. "Prost had to look after his brakes, gearbox, everything, and he did a good job. So he finished more races and finished in a better position, whereas today they don't have that. They sit there on the starting grid and there is an engineer who starts the race, it is just not on.
"It should be when the lights go off they are on their own," he adds. "They don't need somebody telling them your teammate is using that through this corner. It is just not on. It is an engineers' championships more or less.
"I am not saying Lewis is not a super driver," he adds, "but he is given a hell of a lot of help. I would like to see him in a GP2 car with the GP2 drivers... I am not saying he would not win, but it would be interesting."
Ecclestone uses his favourite analogy, that of the decrepit house, to describe the current state of the F1 rule-book
"The rules are like an old Victorian house, people keep doing things to it, but it needs pulling down and starting again," he says. "You can't cross this line and add that, or cross that line and put this in place of that. We need to rip it up and start again."
"I would want the cars changed so the driver has to take complete control of the cars, including the gearbox" says Mosley. "I would even insist of gear changes because that's part of racing.
"At the same time I would bring in regulations about the cost, that would mean all the teams could spend the same amount and couldn't spend more. So the cleverest engineer would make the best car not the richest engineer. A combination of those two things, I think, would make a radical difference.
"The fundamental thing is that a lot of the technology is so complex that nobody understands it," he continues. "You can look on the internet and see a picture of a modern F1 steering wheel with all the buttons and so on, I have followed it for the past 30 or 40 years and I could not tell you what most of those buttons were for.
"We brought in a rule that driver aids were prohibited, meaning the driver had to drive the car and not a computer. It is a constant battle to stop the computer taking over more and more of the functions. I think there is a big argument for back to basics, where the driver has a steering wheel and maybe even a gear lever, and brakes and an accelerator and a very powerful engine and he has to get on with it.
"It is supposed to be a double competition: men and machines but if the engineering competition starts to take over from the human competition, F1 in my opinion loses an essential element."
The former FIA president, unlike Ecclestone, doesn't believe the rule changes have to be that radical, indeed, in some cases they simply need tweaking or stricter enforcement.
"There is a rule we brought in in 1994, it is very simple and says driver aids are prohibited," adds Mosley. "The teams agreed to that at the time because they said you can never define what a driver aid is: and they forgot that, if you are the regulator, a driver aid is whatever you say it is.
"So you have the possibility of eliminating all these outside helps from the engineers, radio and computer control, by enforcing rigorously that rule. But you cannot do that without upsetting people."
"We mustn't forget that we are in the entertainment business," concludes Ecclestone. "So we ought to have rules that the public want. We should be asking the public, 'what do you not like about Formula One today, and what did you like about Formula One before'.
"We need a complete re-think," he admits.