Formula One in 83-89 followed the turbo domination and was eventually banned just like Group B. Ayrton Senna began his Formula One career alongside his rival Alain Prost. Sheer talent and raw power was witnessed by the worlds famous circuits, which now are excluded in present time Formula One seasons.
I'm not
quite sure what you're on about here. It sounds as though you're suggesting that current F1 cars carry a lot of the burden; more so than in decades past. That isn't actually accurate, however. Aside from having more modern, more efficient transmissions, current F1 cars have no driving aids. Their downforce doesn't even make them easier to drive, but instead simply increases the abilities of the cars. Today's F1 drivers still have to feel where their cars' performance limits are and drive them right at the edge of the cliff, just a hair from disaster, just as they'd have done thirty years ago, but it's just that today those boundaries have been picked up and placed somewhere else.
In generations past, not just anybody could sit down in a Formula One car and tear about at the speeds that the greats did, but this fact hasn't changed any today either. In some ways, modern F1 cars are even harder to drive, as a result of their increased complexities. When Tony Stewart participated in the "Seat Swap" with Lewis Hamilton, Stewart struggled to even get the F1 car going, even though he had plenty of NASCAR experience and some modest IRL experience. Stewart stalled the car repeatedly just trying to get it going. Then the steering wheels have so many functions built into them that you almost need to take classes for a semester just to learn how to operate it. To compete in modern Formula One, you have to make full use of every knob and button on your wheel, making frequent adjustments while weaving through a circuit at 200 MPH.
The 1980s Group B and F1 days are also known as the Turbo Era. In this time Both machines were turbochargerd but, rally was more popular than F1. Motorsport in the 1980s was all about the turbocharger.
I'm not quite sure where you got that rally was more popular than F1.
Turbo cars had so much power, sometimes the drivers couldn't even control their cars.
2. There were more actions and overtaking in the turbo era than the current Formula 1 and WRC. Many cars were being overtaken, passing and re passing in almost every lap. That was the pure joy that we miss today in the current Formula 1. From 2000 through 2007, the races were predictable. Whoever takes pole, then the driver will surely win. There's hardly any overtaking.
Blah, blah, blah.
Non-turbo F1 cars still saw 1000+ horsepower a decade (give or take?) ago. So..., "meh" on the insistence that "the cars had so much power that they were uncontrollable".
Then we get the classic American stock car perspective that the quality of a race is measured by the number of arbitrary passes. I've often heard this complaint from Cup fans, who contend that NASCAR is far more interesting because they have so many passes, but it's sort of like financial inflation. You can print out a bunch of money and flood the market with that new currency but your dollars have been dramatically devalued as a result. Likewise, in Formula One you spend many laps or even entire races working on overtaking someone, and when you do it's an enormous accomplishment of great value, but in a sport where you swap positions repeatedly an overtake is more trivial because there's so many of them and you can lose the position moments after you gained it so you never really gained anything of value.
If we're competing in a race wherein you have to work your butt off for twenty laps to catch up with me and struggle to take my position, you've really accomplished something when you've gained my position. It then becomes my monumental chore to try taking it back, and if you outdrove me to gain it then I might not be able to outdrive you to get it back, so you've earned you something solid. If we're in a race where you and I can shuffle positions on every lap, or even multiple times per lap, you overtaking me means nothing because I'm just as likely to take it back from you here in another thirty seconds, so your gain is trivial.
Regarding predictability and winning from pole - that makes sense. If you have a sport where your performance comes down to a good car with a good setup and a good driver behind the wheel, it would make sense for the best car/driver combination to find himself on or near pole, followed by the next top car/driver duos and working back to the weakest drivers and cars. A mediocre car/driver shouldn't be on pole unless there's something wrong with your sport. If a driver and his car were good enough to earn pole, then they should be just as capable of continuing that performance in the race to win it. They shouldn't be great on qualifying and then suddenly mediocre during the race, losing positions to a bunch of inferior cars and drivers.
In short, the things it takes to earn pole are also great for winning races. Granted, flukes happen, so this is just a generalization.
