If the FIA was actually serious about increasing overtaking they should revert to car designs similar to 1990, with the addition of ground effects - no winglets, wider cars, smoother surfaces on those cars which means more space for sponsors, so everyone wins. I fail to understand how there can be moaning about the lack of overtaking and 'field spread' year on year without people calling for designs that generate downforce from an area far less susceptible to turbulence/interference.
Problem is, as soon as those innovations were found in the first place - winglets, and the like - then you can't actually ban them properly, without resorting to spec cars.
Look at the engines. They're basically identical now, with the power-difference between best and worst estimated at around 30-40HP. Kinda puts the 1500HP Vs. 650HP Turbos of the '80s to shame?
Field-spread is, I believe, no longer an issue. It has come to the degree of closeness where even crappy drivers, like Christijan Albers, in crappiest cars, like the Spyker, are only lapped once or twice. That's as close as it gets, considering the results from previous decades.
At the same time, you can't just tell F1 to "forget" what was developed and honed for the past few years. Ultra-advanced winglets and flow-conditioners are all over the cars, but those are easy to ban. But how do you "force" a team to smooth out the surfaces, when they have found, through research, that curvatures are more efficient? You could just as well tell them to return to the '60s days of four-wheeled cigars. You can restrict, but that has to be done with care if you don't want NASCAR.
You can restrict the size of wings, the number of planes, the number of objects - but, life has shown us - whenever you restrict grip, someone claws it back in an even more instable way: The FIA banned slicks? Laptimes were just as fast just shortly afterwards. Overtaking was rarer. No traction-control? No ground-effects? Whatever happens, whenever a simple, foolproof idea that's overtaking-friendly is banned, the next solution is less overtaking-friendly.
If a team has $400 million to spend, they'll find something to spend $400 million on. No amount of cost cutting will stop that.
^ I still think this is the best response in the thread. No windtunnel? No engine-developement?
"No tyre-developement? Fine, we'll develop [INSERT PART HERE] instead." The significance of said part will be less important though, considering the three most important aspects are now restricted.
I just don't get it, they try to cut cost, and yet the bigger teams would just waste more money on other things (Ferrari's hub caps to be precise) so whats the point at making these rules? Why not just have each team to spend a certain amount of budget to build an F1 car? The smaller teams can have more funds developing their cars while the bigger teams have to use their resources carefully. That would be much more even.....
