23/01/2018
NEWS STORY
As Liberty Media seeks to improve the show, the man charged with spearheading the technical revolution is Ross Brawn, and since being appointed Formula One Management's technical boss he has been assembling a team of engineers whose aim is to produce the regulations that will provide the best racing... at the right price, thereby not only winning over the fans but hopefully attracting new teams and engine manufacturers.
One of the former colleagues recruited to Brawn's team is former Williams technical boss Pat Symonds who reveals that going forward there are three areas of the car of particular interest.
"F1 technical regulations are split into 21 sections," he told the MIA's Entertainment and Energy-Efficient Motorsport Conference. "As we go through those sections, we can see some of them aren't very relevant to the spectacle. So we decided that what we wanted to do was technically, we wanted to have three performance differentiators.
"Those would be aerodynamics," he continued, "it is interesting to a lot of people and no one could write rules that didn't make it a performance differentiator so we might as well expect it and make it one of the things that matters.
"Equally, the power unit. For manufacturers involved in F1, it's important to them. It interesting to fans so let's make it a performance differential.
"Finally, suspension, and by that I mean the way we treat the tyres, the way the teams use the tyres. Those are the three technical differentiators that we want to see."
However, at a time Liberty is also looking to improve competition by levelling the playing field in terms of prize money and also what teams are allowed to spend, Symonds admitted: "Costs are making it difficult for those further down the field to make an impression on the leaders.
"We want to get rid of predictability," he added. "Over the last couple of decades, the worst times in racing have been when the result has been predictable. We had a little bit of it with the Mercedes domination. At least for a couple of years we didn't know which driver might have won.
"We want to look at the spectacle, we want visual appeal, we want to recognise the role of the driver. We need to look at the problem of the live audience and the TV audience as they have different requirements.
"And we have to look at the race week experience. It's no longer good enough to think about just what happens on Sunday."