FORMULA ONE drivers have announced they will survey fans to try to generate new ideas to help spice up the sport amid concerns over falling television audiences.

The Mercedes team is dominating this season and the sport has come under fire for lacking excitement. Former Scottish driver David Coulthard has criticised the fact that cars are not as fast as they were 10 years ago and has laid the blame on Pirelli's tyres.

The Grand Prix Drivers' Association chairman Alex Wurz, a former competitor himself, has announced the new plan to engage with fans but remained tight-lipped about details only saying more information would be revealed at a Friday press conference in Monaco. Social media interaction is expected to feature heavily in the survey.

The Austrian said: "To make sure this sport remains at the pinnacle and gets ever more popular, we would like to engage more with the fans.

"How we are doing this I don't want to go into because this will be announced in Monaco in great detail.

"I hope it's cool. The fans will tell us if they like it or not and that's what we want . . . we want to give a little bit back and communicate with the people who love the sport equally to us."

The F1 chief executive Bernie Ecclestone is reportedly considering changes to spice up the sport and in a recent article Coulthard, who was runner-up in 2001, weighed in on the "hot topic issue".

In a blog for the BBC, he outlined that particular problems, such as the cars being too easy to drive and not being designed well enough, were detrimental to the excitement of the sport. He also wrote: "There is no competition between tyre manufacturers. Refuelling was ditched five years ago. The cars were slowed down for safety reasons.

"They might not say so publicly, but I know that the current drivers are all a bit disillusioned with the current F1 because the cars are so slow compared to previous years, and the drivers are so far within their ability levels during the races.

"Without exception, no-one in F1 likes the construction and compound range of the current tyres. The tyres are clearly part of the problem of the lack of overtaking in F1 at the moment. They are so sensitive. There is so much tyre management.

"Now . . . the times the drivers are completely on the limit during a grand prix are a small minority. Sometimes they never are. A corollary of this is that if the drivers are not pushing, they are far less likely to make a mistake. You don't see so many as you used to. And mistakes add excitement."