F1's most welcome comeback in 2014

It's human nature to grasp for the worst-case scenario. By Formula 1 standards, Red Bull team principal Christian Horner's assertion that half of the field might not make the finish of the season-opening Australian Grand Prix is a conservative one.

With uncertainty surrounding both the performance and reliability of the new 1.6-litre turbocharged engines, there are plenty willing to make far more dramatic predictions.

Some anticipate that the 22-car grid might make the early Renault turbos of 1977/1978 (four finishes in 18 starts) seem dependable by comparison.

But is unreliability a bad thing? Frankly, no.

Clearly, if most of the field disappears in the early laps, that doesn't make for much of a race as the six-car 2005 United States GP proves. But there was once a time when even the most predictable race was charged with a nervous energy.

Your favourite driver may have been leading by a country mile, but there was always the knowledge that the television pictures would cut to an image of their car billowing smoke.

There were also days when the reverse might happen and your hero would inherit victory from a retiree. And even if this didn't happen, there was always the strong possibility it might.

This has happened occasionally in recent years. Just ask Sebastian Vettel whose gearbox gave out while leading the British GP last year, or Lewis Hamilton, who lost wins in Singapore and Abu Dhabi 2012 to mechanical gremlins. But these situations have proved to be the exception rather than the norm in recent seasons.

Predictability is a killer for interest in any sport. If you know the overwhelmingly likely winner before the big event even starts, it can only harm interest for all but the most committed, hardcore fan.

Retirements have become much less frequent in recent years © XPB

As Sebastian Vettel's nine-race winning streak at the back end of last season went on, the knowledge that his car was pretty damned reliable thanks to the remarkable efforts of a Red Bull team that still does not get the credit it deserves for its excellence led to an air of inevitability rather than excitement.

Different sports have different capacity for unpredictability. Football is one of the best examples of a sport where games regularly throw up shock results.

This is because it is a low-scoring game and it is eminently possible for the lesser team to nick a goal and ride their luck. Over a full league season, the usual suspects prevail, but over 90 minutes it is often a different story.

But while a football match can be decided by a few key moments - a slice of luck at one end and a missed opportunity at the other - in a grand prix every lap counts. It is possible for drivers to 'overachieve' in qualifying and find themselves out of position by extracting the maximum potential from their car while others underachieve, but they will usually regress to the mean over the race distance.

This is what has, historically at least, made the wild card of unreliability so crucial. And unreliability has never been as scarce since the world championship began in 1950 as it was last year.

In 2013, a car started a grand prix on 417 occasions. They were classified as finishers 366 times (87.8 per cent) and running at the finish on 351 occasions (84.2 per cent). Both of those are records.

For much of the history of the world championship, finishing rates have floated in the 40-60 per cent range. Using the runners-at-the-finish figures (i.e. cars that actually take the chequered flag regardless of how many laps they are down but disregarding retirees who have completed enough laps to be classified), the least reliable season in F1 history was in 1984. Then, just 39.8 per cent made the chequered flag.

From 1950 (finishing rate 47.4 per cent) to 2002 (finishing rate 56.9 per cent), the average figure was 51.5 per cent.

In 2003, the figure broke through the 60 per cent barrier for the first time in history, with 64.4 per cent making the end, and the general trend since then has been for this figure to rise.

The reasons for this rise are clear. While there has been a general improvement in the quality-control procedures and thoroughness of teams, which as a rule evolve ever more-precise working practices year on year, a major rule change for the 2003 season is key. Namely, the placing of cars into parc ferme after qualifying.

"The reliability is so good now that I don't spend the race worrying about finishing in the way that you used to," said McLaren team principal Martin Whitmarsh late last season. "Now teams have got better. But, oddly, things like parc ferme, which everybody said would detract from reliability, have contributed.

"Not allowing hands to meddle has enhanced reliability and has enhanced the discipline of building the car correctly rather than work through the night and fiddle around with it.

"If you get a load of mechanics and you give them four all-nighters, then act surprised when you get finger trouble, then you need your head seeing to!"

Another rule that many criticised as guaranteed to increase the number of retirements was the restriction of engines that could be used. In 2004, a rule requiring a single engine to be used for an entire race meeting was introduced, yet the finishing rate increased to 72.2 per cent.

Horner reckons half the field could retire in Australia © XPB

And the prevailing trend of improving reliability has continued even with ever-more stringent engine rules, culminating in the eight-units-per-driver regulation that was in force from 2009-2013.

Once the reliability rate had broken the 70 per cent barrier, only in the first season of 2.4-litre V8 engines did it dip back below that, with a finishing rate of 68.2 per cent in 2006.

With the new-for-2014 engines not having run in a real-world situation as yet, it is surely inevitable that reliability will drop. It's also important to remember that this is not dependent only on the engines, but also the new cars and the effectiveness of the engine packaging.

As per Horner's scenario, let's say only 11 cars make the finish in Melbourne, which will inevitably lead to plenty of complaints. That 50 per cent rate would be pretty close to the pre-2003 finishing average of 51.5 per cent and not far short of the overall average of 55.6 per cent for the 64 seasons of the world championship. Perfectly acceptable.

But chances are, any dramatic drop in reliability will only be a bump in the road. The 2014 regulations limit each driver to only five 'power units' for the season, albeit with the caveat that the engine is divided into six different elements that can be mixed and matched.

This means that if your turbo fails in the opening race, you can simply bolt turbocharger two onto the first example of the other five elements. Only once you start introducing sixth examples of any of those elements do grid penalties start to be applied.

Arguably, this is the most serious concern about engine unreliability, as potentially the closing stages of the season could be blighted by chaotic grids as various 10- and five-place penalties strike.

But in the races themselves, where even a dominant car on pace might have a 50 per cent chance of failing, such unpredictability can only add to the drama of the season.

Provided there are a handful of cars capable of making it to the finish in Australia, and given just how good the level of engineering and investment is in F1, that will be the case. The welcome return of unreliability, even if only on a short-term basis, can only be good for grand prix racing.

Knowing that, even on the final lap, the leader could hit trouble is guaranteed to keep a few more television viewers watching until the end.