Motorsport often gets a bad rap for being “boring”; watching cars and motorcycles going around in circles for upwards of an hour and a half? Lots of people would rather do just about anything else. At first, I thought I would be the same. I have a short attention span, and even 10-minute-long YouTube videos can quickly lose my interest. To my surprise, however, I do actually find racing entertaining—or at least, I thought I did.
I only started watching Formula 1 and other forms of open-wheel racing recently and caught the 2023 season at the back half. The races I was able to catch were practically done by the opening few laps—one man, Max Verstappen, rode off into the sunset while the rest fought and failed to gain positions in the midfield. I enjoyed watching the races more for the nothingness of it; while the roars of engines and the screeching of tires sounded from the TV, I got to work on whatever reading or math homework I had to complete that day, only looking up every so often to check where my favorite driver was in the order.
When the 2023 season ended, I searched for something else to occupy myself during these Sunday study sessions, turning to older races from the 2010s that I found on a barely-legal website. Expecting more or less the same dominance from a previously successful driver, Lewis Hamilton, I dove into my work, only to be frequently interrupted by a now rare occurrence: overtaking. Cars were actually racing each other, passing each other, making risky moves and pushing as hard as they could no matter where they were in the order. Not only that—a fight for the lead, something that is harder to find in races from recent years. While there were still drivers in the 2000s and 2010s who dominated the track (often in top teams like Mercedes and Ferrari), the midfield was much more unstable, and there was constantly a skirmish happening somewhere on the course. So how did Formula 1 go from the pinnacle of motorsport to a barely-competitive snoozefest within the span of just one decade?
It turns out that F1’s main problem is also one of its biggest attractions: it’s not fair, and it’s not meant to be fair. Unlike other athletes such as swimmers or runners, drivers don’t operate with the same equipment, and how successful they are in the season is just as, if not more dependent on the car rather than personal skill.
One of the most significant aspects of the sport is the engineering behind it, the fact that every car is built separately and, therefore, differently. This makes the team one drives for imperative and the engineers themselves essential. However, quickly developing technology has caused the differential between the top cars and the bottomfeeders to become bigger and bigger every year, with the 2023 season showcasing just how much this has come to impact the sport.
The Red Bull team built a car that far surpassed others on the grid in terms of speed and efficiency. Their two drivers, Max Verstappen and Sergio “Checo” Pérez easily clinched the top spots in the championship, despite the fact that Checo endured arguably his worst season in the sport. By the end of the year, the difference in points between the team in first and the team in last was 848. That’s almost 100 points more than the 2022 season point differential, which clocked in at 751—that, in turn, is around 140 points more than the 2021 point differential, which was 613.5. New, effective tech is expensive to develop, and it’s becoming clearer and clearer that the teams with more sponsors and personnel are enjoying significant advantages over the rest of the field.
Of course, it’s easy to complain about things like this, but is there a good solution to this problem? I would argue that there is—it’s just not one that many people would like. Standardized power units, while controversial, might be just the thing to save Formula 1.
As of now, power units (which are essentially just hybrid engines that combine an internal combustion engine with an electric motor) can be designed or bought individually. That is, a team could make their own engine, or they could buy it from an outside producer (like Honda) or another team (like Mercedes). This results in a difference in engine reliability and pure horsepower between teams.
Standardized power units developed by an independent party could level the playing field. Other parts of the car could be developed independently by the teams—aerodynamics and weight-saving engineering could remain within the teams’ domain. However, the amount of raw power each car has would be uniform, and the reliability of the engine would be more predictable.
Although some would argue that more equal machinery takes away from the engineering aspect of the sport, which is one of the core features of F1, I would point out that another core feature of F1 happens to be competition. Without the standardization of performance-determining parts of the car or a different solution such as an equal budget for each team, it doesn’t matter how amazing of a machine F1 engineers have built—there will barely be a sport for it to compete in.
