Nostalgia is stupid

[tfp]

I am quite nostalgic about late 90's and early 00's and like to watch memories on YouTube. But this is a different kind of nostalgy. Because the era co-incides with my child-/youthhood, when I was getting into F1. So I had very strong feelings and emotions at the time. So this era sort of remains special for me. With all those unique cars and liveries (green Jaguars, Orange Arrows, yellow Jordans, Stewarts, dark blue Prosts, etc), "classical drivers of the era" like Herbert, Salo, Panis, Irvine, Frentzen, Alesi, Häkkinen, Verstappen, etc.

But I am aware that racing at the time was more boring than it is now. So from excitement point of view I wouldn't swap anything. Competition was more boring too. Usually McLaren and Ferrari were well above others and only in 2001 Williams started coming good. While now we have five teams, who could win races on merit.

There is one thing I genuinely miss though and this is the 1 hour-12 lap qualifying format. I cannot say that it is superior to the current version, which is very much a matter of taste and the current one provides a lot of action. But I personally liked the gradual rise of tension of that format. In the first 5-10 mins no-one is on track, so you are just pondering, what could happen, while everyone is smiling out of their cars. Then the next 10 mins backmarkers come out. Then midfielders. And from half-way through frontrunners start banging in laptimes.

But at the moment we have a situation, where the first two sessions (50 mins all in all including breaks) don't count at all in terms of pole position and basically only the last minute decides the top10 order. While back then if someone put in a very strong lap half-way through the session, you knew he would be high up on the grid even if he crashed and didn't improve the time. And not to mention - often you could see a full lap of a front-runner with all sector times and his driving technique. While now there are so many cars on track at once that you really can't concentrate on the driving art of anybody. Nor do you have tension - "does he beat the pole-time or not?!"

cant say I agree with this about the qualifying. The first part of qualifying is mainly focused on the back markers, who is the quickest of them and who can mix it in with the midfield. The back markers get very little attention in races even if there is no action up front (Valencia 2011) so this is their time to shine.
I wouldn't be happy if they went back to the 1 hour format, although it was entertaining when they chucked a bit of bad weather in.
Although I can't remember these times, they should bring back qualifying engines

[call_me_andrew]

I remember the years between Michelin's departure and Pirelli's arrival were pretty dull.