I've never seen any promises from F1M about midfield teams on the podium on a regular basis, nor that the top teams would all change, nor that the margins would grow significantly smaller through the entire pack. Not even close. Maybe someone has some links showing otherwise?

What they did clearly state was major changes to car design to allow for closer racing for extended periods, reduction of "dirty air" to allow this, and hopes of more passing on track. The budget caps and aero limits allowed a means for lesser teams to develop more than the better teams and give them a chance to catch up vs the previous regs, which would tighten the field strength.


And in my opinion, the regs worked just fine. On track passing increased by about 30% through the year, and many of those passes involved multiple cars in close proximity for a number of laps. Cars on differing strategies could finally fight when they didn't have the pace advantage for a DRS fly by pass. Though the top teams remained the top teams, the order in WCC standings changed. The largest gap was 1-2, and the 2-3 fight was tight and fighting until the end. The rest of the field shuffled completely with only a single team (AM) finishing in the same position as the previous year. The bottom several teams also scored more points than the previous year, so the spread of points through the pack was not as great as with the old regs.

Now in only the second year, the lowest ranking teams will benefit even more, and the highest ranking teams will have stiffer penalties. I seriously doubt if that is going to allow things to get nearly as spread out as the previous regs, money is now in the picture along with the aero and CFD caps.

If the first race is any indication, the WCC deck will shuffle once again. We've already had a team ranked 7th last year on the podium, as well as a 10th ranked team score a point.



I'm not for gimmicks and restrictions in F1. They make a box and make the constructors stay within the box. The constructor that does it best wins, and their drivers benefit from better cars. If it reaches a point of reverse grids, ballast, and other such nonsense they may as well just make it a spec series. The spec series already exists in Indycar, and with budgets similar to F1 they would probably be almost as fast. But even with their current series which is essentially a spec car, the racing is only but so close, and a good part of that is due to strategy calls and luck of refueling windows vs track accidents and such. Certain teams still rise to the top even though in theory they should not.

Maybe they should ballast on each stop and then apply a formula to allow cars and drivers to be more equal. After all, they could just regulate it until everyone gets a trophy.