I don't like excessive asphalt runoff, but I understand the reason for the existence of sealed runoff areas, and it's not entirely a safety thing.
The first point in favour of sealed runoff is it allows a driver who has left the track to regain or retain control of the car, avoiding dangerous and costly crashes in most cases. With grass, the driver becomes a passenger in most cases at high speeds, leading to major crashes, and with gravel, the car can dig in and flip, or can skip across the top of the gravel, neither of which are good for safety. The other point to make in favour of it is that a driver who is bumped off the road through no fault of his/her own won't have their race ended in the gravel.
Now the point to make against it is that it gives the drivers an incentive to drive beyond the track limits to gain an advantage, as there's no danger of ending your race by running as close to, and beyond, track limits. This point can be fixed by proper policing of track limits, which has been so inconsistent for years, but which the FIA has recently come out and said it will be much more strict on from this year onwards (here's hoping they stick to it). Another point might be that driver's bravery isn't rewarded like it used to be, which is true, but that's just an unfortunate bi-product of the modern professional era of motorsport, where people don't drive on tracks with power poles and trees lining them. But this is not unique to F1, as all major motorsport series are very professional now, whereas things were very amatuer and simple 50 odd years ago. The same things can be said about V8 Supercars when compared to Australian Touring cars of the 60s and 70s.
As for the Halo, well you know where I stand on that abomination.
Well we've all got Nico Rosberg to thank for that. Seemingly he's only got any pace when the pressure is off him, which is sad. Although, even though I'm not really a fan of Hamilton, I'd much prefer to see him win than Rosberg. Rosberg is just such an entitled little princess, it's funny seeing him spit the dummy, especially when you've got Vettel winding him up at every press conference lol.
As far as the lack of competition goes, we've had that more times we can count in the past. The rose tinted glasses eras of the 60s, 70s, and 80s people regularly pine for were full of utter domination and a lack of competition between team mates. I still love seeing old GPs though, even though you'd regularly only have a few drivers finishing on the lead lap.
Not saying youre wrong, but the street courses of this era (Melborne, Singapore, Sochi, Valencia) are not the same as the street/road courses of the 50s, 60s, 70s or even 80s. Hell even Montreal lost its high speed esses. He was used to watching racing at tracks like Nurburgring and Montejuic. Lucky guy actually got to go watch racing on the original Brno in the late 50s and 60s. I've tried to get him to warm up to the modern version of F1, but I think I sort of get it when he says it just does nothing for him anymore.
