It’s difficult being a Formula 1 fan at the moment. We’ve just come off of the back of a rather dull season (or “record breaking” if you insist on finding a silver lining) and while 2014 could be the start of a new era with a shaken up pecking order, I’m not sure it’s an era I want to be a part of. This is all because of monumentally idiotic decisions on the part of the FIA. Allow me to elaborate…

First of all everyone in the twitterverse and beyond is laughing at the silly new noses, and rightly so. Thus far every car that’s been launched, bar the Mercedes, just has not looked right. Ferrari appear to have made their initial scale model out of Babybel wax before an intern accidentally left it out in the hot Italian sun and, after discovering the nose had melted, just hoped nobody would notice. However I suppose even this is better than Lotus’ “tuning fork” solution. Meanwhile every other car has taken inspiration from an elephant shrew, a bottle nosed dolphin, an anteater or a… umm… “marital aid”.

It remains to be seen if these decidedly phallic solutions will still be present when we get to the first race in Melbourne. But even if they disappear completely I feel that this is indicative of a larger problem. As much as I enjoy tittering at each increasingly well-endowed race car, I think this whole fiasco neatly represents how broken F1 has become. Teams are coming up with these solutions because the rules are so constrictive that this is where they’ve ended up. They are out of options. Actually that’s a lie; They could all have pretty low noses but the cars would be slower. Now that the designers have realised they can get a big aero benefit from a high nose they won’t make a low one for fear of being behind the competition. They can’t unlearn that trick. In the same way that the exhaust blown diffusers all magically reappeared after the FIA tried to ban them the first time.

In principle I do not object to F1 cars looking weird. Over the years many innovative designs have looked ugly. In 2008 the cars looked mad. My problem with the current state of F1 is that the 2008 cars looked silly for completely the opposite reason. Back then the McLaren sprouted all sorts of weird growths because there was a lot of freedom in the rules. The X-rated 2014 noses come from an environment with very little wiggle room. In theory, under the current rule structure, these are the fastest cars that can be built and aesthetics are a secondary concern. We might not like it but that’s the reality.

However, despite all of this, the daft noses are not my reason for writing. True, nowadays if an F1 car rear-ends another then strictly speaking it should not be shown before the watershed. But that can be fixed rather easily (either through adjusting the regulations or by pixelating the Toro Rosso’s naughty bits).

The main issue, I think, is the new “power units”. Simply not being able to call them engines is reason enough to get riled up. However, what annoys me is that FIA seem to have gotten their environmentally friendly strategy utterly upside down. I like the new engines… I actually think they sound rather lovely… I’m happy that F1 is doing its part help save our planet…

But.

They’re doing it all wrong.

If the aim of these new very costly kind-of-hybrid engines is to help advance the technology then I’m sorry but they have no place in F1. The FIA already has a “green” racing formula: Formula E. That is the racing series that should be focusing on evolving battery technologies and increased efficiency, not Formula 1.

You may dismiss this post as simply another person who doesn’t like change and wants to keep the screaming V8s forever and ever, or better yet bring back V12s.

That is not the case at all.

I think the FIA missed a golden opportunity here. They didn’t change F1 enough.

My solution for making F1 greener would be to do away with fossil fuels entirely and switch to hydrogen combustion. We could rename F1 to H₁! (Not really, that was a joke for the Chemists). Aston Martin have already raced a hydrogen fuelled ICE car (not a fuel cell) around the Nürburgring so it is certainly feasible. I think that this would be preferable to 2014’s power units for several reasons. First, the design isn’t too radically different to the V8s. It’s still an internal combustion engine, you’re just using a different fuel. The main issue is containing the fuel and ensuring safety. But petrol is incredibly dangerous in its own right and batteries will explode catastrophically in a fire just like a hydrogen tank would. Second, if F1 switched to hydrogen we could keep the ear-splitting noise so adored by every fan who has ever witnessed a car racing in anger. The current Formula E prototype sounds like a big RC car. While the 2014 power units sing to my ear they don’t to everyone and they certainly do not sound as good as the old V10s. If F1 went fully hydrogen then RPM and engine capacity would no longer matter. We could have 10 litre W16 engines if we wanted. Designers could do whatever they wish because any configuration would still emit zero carbon dioxide. Furthermore the trickle-down effect of the 2014 units intended to help road car technology would still apply to hydrogen, F1 would simply help develop hydrogen technology instead of hybrids/electric.

This could have been F1’s time to shine but instead the FIA have stuck us with a less than ideal solution. I like the new engines. I think they’re very clever, absolute triumphs of engineering. However they could have been so much more than that. They could have been a revolution. Not a gigantic effort to ultimately produce a much loathed evolution that, frankly, many teams can’t afford anyway.

Converting F1 to hydrogen power need not be instantaneous either. I would propose slowly bringing it in via dual-fuel systems and then getting rid of the petrol over time. Basically set them up like LPG cars on the road where they can run on petrol or LPG (in this case hydrogen), having the ability to switch between the two whenever the feeling takes you. Aston Martin did this with their racer, if memory serves, and that car was capable of going around circles at a fair ol’ lick so it could work for F1 too.

Sort yourselves out FIA. I didn’t even mention double points.