If Sunday’s Belgian Grand Prix proved anything it’s come rain or shine very few places beat Spa-Francorchamps for a Formula One race.
It’s one of only a few circuits where 22 cars could have gone around for 44 laps in single file and it would still feel special.
Your love for the sport rises every time an F1 car climbs Eau Rouge, powers up the Kemmel straight, plunges through Pouhon and flies around Blanchimont.
So when a race has all the action and drama of yesterday on top, it makes the heart ache at the thought of a whole year until it happens again.
The thing is, however, while there was a lot of action at Spa-Francorchamps, most of it was down to two factors.
Firstly, with Belgium more like Barbados, Pirelli’s aggressive tyre strategy backfired to the point that even their traditional allocation of the soft and medium compounds struggled in the high temperatures.
But while Spa’s tyre-fest was enforced, it still left fans watching a race where a driver was basically driving on egg shells. Tyre conservation has always been part of motor racing but when it is so prevalent you wonder if anyone did actually push hard for a sustained period in a race what’s the point of actually calling it a race?
And second, DRS. The flap on the rear wing, which the sport does need at some circuits to make overtaking possible, made passing too easy on the Kemmel straight.
To watch a car simply breeze past another really has taken the fun out of overtaking. OK, there are still times when drivers do go wheel-to-wheel, but Max Verstappen showed the level of aggression needed, to even try and defend a DRS-assisted move and not many people liked it.
It has been the same recipe in F1 since 2011 with Pirelli’s designed-to-degrade rubber and DRS combining to try and guarantee exciting races. But after watching a more extreme version of that recipe at Spa it really is time to change.
Next year provided the opportunity to implement a new approach in races and the whole point of the 2017 cars was for everything to be faster.
The Italian tyre supplier has already indicated the new wider wheels and slightly harder compounds will mean greater durability, while continued improvements in efficiency with the power units will hopefully mean more flat-out racing, which is what F1 needs.
But that still leaves DRS, which will be around next year. That’s despite initial hopes when discussions first began regarding new-look cars, that designers would try and solve the ‘turbulent air’ issue that makes following another F1 car closely very difficult.
As it is they haven’t, with the front wings still more complex than algebra, but just how powerful DRS will be is unknown.
The 2017 cars will be more draggy, because of greater ground effect, and that could mean with the rear wing flap open the difference in speed between two cars could actually be higher.
A nice solution in the future could revolve around ditching DRS and use the hybrid power to create a boost which could be used in specific zones and within a certain gap, similar to how DRS works now.
Regardless of how the powers at be could manage it, F1 needs to feel more genuine again. As it stands right now, overtaking feels fake and tyre management too co-ordinated.
An F1 race is an engineer’s dream, not a driver’s and that is certainly not how the pinnacle of motorsport should be.
