The 2017 Formula 1 season is rapidly drawing to a close. There are two races left to run, though with ever-decreasing stakes. Mercedes' Lewis Hamilton sealed his fourth championship in Mexico at the end of October after a series of component failures, own goals, and general misfortune at Ferrari put Sebastian Vettel's chances to the sword. The really interesting developments in the sport aren't happening on the track but in conference rooms and press releases. The reason? The proposed changes for 2021; specifically the cars' engines and hybrid power units.

Liberty Media (the sport's new owner) and the FIA (which writes the rules) are trying to respond to disenchanted fans, but it's a tricky job. All three engine manufacturers (Mercedes, Renault, and Ferrari) have turned their noses up at the new engine regulations, with Ferrari CEO Sergio Marchionne even threatening to quit the sport should things not go his team's way.

None of this is new to F1. Power struggles break out every time new regulations or contracts threaten the teams' self-interests as they jockey to retain advantages and not lose out, even for the good of the sport. Bernie Ecclestone showed over several decades that he was more than up to the task, dividing and conquering the paddock in the name of F1. But this will be the first big test for Liberty.

New rules usually mean new winners; Mercedes did such a good job in preparation for the current " hybrid era " of the sport (which began in 2014) that it has had no real competition at all until Ferrari caught up at the start of this season.

Right now, an F1 car uses a 1.6L turbocharged V6 with a pair of hybrid systems. There's the relatively conventional motor-generator unit (MGU)-K, which recovers kinetic energy from the rear wheels under deceleration, and the much more fiddly MGU-H which is spun by a shaft from the engine's turbocharger to recover excess heat from the exhaust gases. The MGUs send that recovered energy to a lithium-ion battery—up to 2 megajoules each per lap, where it's then used either by the MGU-K to provide a 120kW (160hp) boost to the rear wheels for up to 33 seconds a lap or to spin the turbocharger to improve throttle response.

This is all fiendishly clever but also fiendishly complex and expensive. As mentioned, Mercedes got it right straight out of the gate. Ferrari caught up first, and Renault has been making ground. But Honda, which decided to build power units for the McLaren team a couple of years after those other programs began, has continued to struggle to catch up. Its efforts have gone from bad to worse, such that McLaren has engineered a swap with Renault-powered Toro Rosso for 2018 in the hopes of returning to the sharp end of the grid.

Louder, cheaper, faster, better?

The changes are meant to make the cars louder and less complicated—which means less expensive—without losing "road relevance." The main casualty is the MGU-H. Not only is it tough (read expensive) to get right, it appears to be a dead-end with regard to road car technology as well as other racing applications. Porsche used a similar system (a GU-H, really) with its now-canceled 919 Hybrid Le Mans racer, but peers Audi and Toyota refused to mess with the concept. Ditching the MGU-H would go some way to making the cars louder, since it's currently diverting energy that would otherwise be turned to noise.

To make up for the loss of the MGU-H, the MGU-K would be more powerful. It would also be down to the driver to choose when to use it. This was true of the earlier energy recovery systems used pre-2014; since then the teams preprogram different recovery and deployment strategies into the cars before each race.

The internal combustion engines would remain 1.6L turbocharged V6s but with much less technical freedom to discourage expensive development programs. Turbos, batteries, and control electronics would be standardized. More decibels would come from raising the internal combustion engine's rev limit and fuel-flow restriction; while a 2017 F1 engine is technically limited to 15,000rpm, in practice the requirement to stay below 100kg fuel/hour means the engines barely see 12,000rpm. There would also be a crackdown on the fuels themselves—right now a topic of contention with some teams accusing others of burning excess oil for a power advantage.

Pram > Toys > Floor

In theory, all of this sounds great. Engines would be cheaper, and the cars would be lighter and noisier. But Mercedes and Renault wasted no time in coming out against the 2021 rules. "It's going to open an arms race again, and it will open up the field," Renault boss Cyril Abiteboul told Autosport. His counterpart at the Mercedes team, Toto Wolff, shared concerns that even the subtle changes proposed to the V6s would require a lot of extra time and money to implement. "It's all-new engines, with new harvesting and deployment strategies for energy. All of us accept that development costs and sound need to be tackled, but we shouldn't be running away with creativity in coming up with new concepts, because it will trigger parallel development costs over the next three years," Wolff said.

A more extreme—if perhaps predictable—reaction came from Ferrari. Threatening to leave F1 for pastures new is not a new tactic for the team from Maranello; it has repeatedly banked on its star power being sufficient to win it concessions. Marchionne must have dusted off Enzo's old playbook, telling an analyst call that the team was not in favor of more engine standardization. "The fact that somehow powertrain uniqueness is not going to be one of the drivers of distinctiveness of the participants' line-up. I would not countenance this going forward," he said.

His team is contractually bound to the sport until 2020 thanks to a hefty pair of golden handcuffs. Those were placed there by Ecclestone, and they mean Ferrari gets a special bonus each year that sees its earnings outstrip other teams that score more points. The chance for more equitable profit-sharing among the teams necessarily threatens this, so it's unsurprising that Marchionne wants to play tough with Liberty. At the same time, it's hard to see where Ferrari would go.

The World Endurance Championship is a global series, and it's much more road-relevant than F1. But it's also nearly as expensive as F1—but with a fraction of the audience. (Plus it has its own big problems right now.) Formula E is also a global series, arguably with at least as much road-relevance as F1, for a fraction of the cost. But it too has a tiny audience compared to Ferrari, and plenty of spec parts. Likewise IndyCar—the Indy 500 still has its own star power but offers almost no technical development at all. A move to either Formula E or IndyCar would be hard to explain given Marchionne's criticism of standardization over innovation.

The three pillars of racing

Like all sports, F1 is losing audience, and, as a good owner, Liberty wants to listen to those who are losing interest to find out how to reverse the decline. But doing that means squaring a triangle of competing interests. Every motorsports series involves some balance between being a sport, being entertainment, and being a place to develop new technology. And the relative importance of those three factors will be different to a company spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year than to a fan watching on TV.

Back when Bernie ran things, he'd usually start off with some ludicrous proposal (like swapping drivers between teams randomly during the season) as a distraction before offering up the real plan. Ross Brawn, F1's managing director of Motorsports (and poacher-turned-gamekeeper) will probably try things differently, but there's still a long time between now and when 2021's rules have to be ratified for solutions to be found. Messing with the engine regulations was always going to annoy the car companies that have already invested hundreds of millions of dollars, but time and again we've seen those same companies drop motorsports programs at their convenience, without regard for the health of the sport at large.

But allow me to be pessimistic for a moment. Changing F1 powertrains is all well and good, but we all know it's not the real problem. Ask any racing driver what the secret to good racing is and you'll get the same answer: more power, less grip—and what grip there is should be from the tires not wings. There's nothing in the plans so far to address that problem, but we can live in hope.