Formula 1 cars are about to go through a big change, but is it good?

Ever since Liberty Media bought Formula 1, it has been working on plans to improve the sport. There is a lot for it to do; during its tenure as owner of the sport, vulture fund CVC Capital Partners had no interest other than sucking as much cash out each year as possible. Some of the problems are structural, like the extremely inequitable financial situation that rewards some teams (like Ferrari and Red Bull) more for just showing up than others could possibly earn through race results. Other problems also involve money—more specifically, how to cut the costs involved without diluting the sport's essence. And some are a question of physics, like how to improve the quality of the actual racing.

Let's leave aside the thorny issue of revenue sharing and focus on the technical issues, specifically, the proposed technical changes to the cars for the 2021 season.

Cheaper engines, simpler aerodynamics

The thinking behind dropping the MGU-H is that it would make F1's engine rules more attractive for new entrants, but none of those appears to be on the horizon. Meanwhile, the four existing engine manufacturers (Mercedes-Benz, Ferrari, Renault, and Honda) all appear to be in favor of maintaining the status quo since they've all invested hundreds of millions of dollars by this point in getting the things to work.

A more visible change to 2021's F1 cars will be to make the aerodynamics of the cars simpler. Front wings will grow wider but with less of the complex flaps and vanes they currently sprout. The cooling ducts for the front brakes will become simpler, and the rear wings will also become wider, taller, and less complicated. All of these tweaks are intended to make it easier for one car to follow another into a corner; currently, the wake of disturbed air behind an F1 car is so huge that the lap time penalty for following someone is massive compared to running in clean air.

Have you tried buying 13-inch tires recently?

The most recent proposed change involves the tires. F1's current contract with Pirelli expires in 2019, and just before last weekend's German Grand Prix, we learned that the sport had issued a tender for a new supplier for 2020-2023. The really interesting bit will happen in the second year of that contract, when the cars will ditch the 13-inch wheels they've used for decades. Instead, F1 cars will run on 18-inch rims, as is common in prototypes, GT cars, and even Formula E. The rear tires will remain a hefty 405mm wide, but the fronts are going to shrink considerably from 305mm to just 270mm. And the practice of using tire-warming blankets is to end.

I've heard a few reasons for sticking with 13-inch wheels for such a long time. Some say the tires keep teams from fitting bigger and bigger brakes, although I find this a bit unconvincing because the rules can easily specify a maximum diameter of brake disc independent of any wheel-size regulation. Others claim the tires have stuck around because there's so much resistance to change in the sport, something I'm more inclined to believe. Either way, it is a little ridiculous that the supposed pinnacle of motor racing still uses such tiny wheels—at this point even 18-inch rims are on the small side of things in the road-car world.

Michelin in particular has been uninterested in returning to Formula 1 until it moved to bigger wheels, but the current plan to only do so in the second year of the contract is still a potential stumbling block, according to a report at RaceFans.

Forget evolution, think revolution

Evolving a sport where there are hundreds of millions of dollars at stake each year is obviously not the easiest thing in the world, and the tweaks that F1 has proposed all sound fairly reasonable from where I'm sitting. But I wish we could get a bit more radical. Instead of just evolving the current rules—which get more and more proscriptive each season as loopholes are closed—why not tear the book up completely?

To start, we can keep the existing powertrains if they make the engine manufacturers happy, but I can't be the only one who thinks the sport would be better off ditching the turbos and going back to high-revving, naturally aspirated engines—let's say 2.5L in capacity, either V10s or V12s. It's time to be honest and accept the fact that F1 has never been about road relevance; that's why we have endurance racing. And if we're getting rid of the hybrid systems, we can reduce some of the weight F1 cars have gained in recent times. 575kg should be reasonable, no?

Next, the time has come to lose the wings. As just about everyone knows, aerodynamics has ruined racing. And each time F1's rules change to reduce downforce, the teams spend tens of millions of dollars each season to negate those losses. The cars can still be open-wheel single seaters but without the plethora of carbon fiber appendages they currently sprout to shape the air. No wings will mean much lower cornering speeds, which in turn means drivers having to brake more. More braking means more opportunities to overtake, which in turn means less predictability during a race.

While we're at it, I'd like to see the width of the cars reduced significantly from the current 2000mm down to a svelte 1500mm. Once you combine narrower cars and lower cornering speeds, you've now made the cars suitable to return to all those great racetracks of the past. You know, the ones with all the character that we bemoan as the sport heads to yet another identikit Tilkedrome.

I know, I know—the odds of this happening are more remote than seeing Williams or McLaren dominate the championship next year. But a man can dream.