F1 overtaking should be quality not quantity

If Formula 1 has proved one thing in recent years, it's that you really can have too much of a good thing. And that's equally true of something that is believed to be a good thing.

To be precise, you can have too much overtaking, something Fernando Alonso highlighted in the build-up to the Russian Grand Prix in a heartfelt discussion about the state of F1.

When F1 went through a period of soul searching towards the end of the last decade, this need for overtaking was considered to be paramount. And not without reason, for it was what the fans demanded. So give the fans what they want.

The result was the DRS, a regulation that has proved divisive. Whatever your position on it, it was an effective solution to the problem that passing was damned difficult when a car following another through a corner of any serious speed was losing somewhere in the region of a quarter of its downforce.

So you wanted more overtaking, there it is. Overtaking statistics are pretty nebulous, which is why there's little point into delving into them too deeply. But look back to the last season before the DRS was introduced (along with the high-degradation Pirelli rubber, which has also played a big part in this equation) and by any objective measure the number of passes has gone up.

While the 2010 season produced a fascinating title fight, with four drivers going to the last race in the hunt for the title and Sebastian Vettel seizing his first world championship, it was a great season rather than a season of great races and rather predictable one-stop grands prix were the norm.

The thing is, the fans did want more overtaking - but nobody wanted an increase in the kind of trivial passes that mean nothing.

Take Sunday's Russian Grand Prix, for example; how thrilling was it to watch Lewis Hamilton and then Valtteri Bottas breeze past the yet-to-stop Fernando Alonso after the pitstops? You probably can't even remember it happening, even if you might recall Hamilton mugging Bottas at Turn 2 while running behind Alonso.

The idea that the quality of overtaking, not the quantity, is important is hardly a startling conclusion. An overtaking manoeuvre in itself is nothing without context and the context is that something must be at stake. In short, what people actually want is race-winning passing moves.

Ideally, we'd have a pair of drivers swapping position multiple times in a race - something that is vanishingly rare in the history of grand prix racing, at least since the demise of the great slipstreaming circuits.

I can remember arguing that quality of overtaking was the key in the days before the DRS, only to meet strong disagreement. The same thing has happened when pointing out that the DRS/Pirelli era has given fans exactly what they were demanding.

Equally, there were nonsensical arguments that somehow you can create lots of overtaking while simultaneously making it incredibly challenging to do, which is symptomatic of the muddiness of thinking.

This is where things get a little more complicated. As Alonso pointed out, a race can be thrilling even if there was no pass. He cited the 2005 San Marino Grand Prix, when Michael Schumacher's Ferrari chased his Renault to the flag for the final dozen laps.

It was a memorable finish, certainly. There was no change of position, but that didn't matter. What made that race thrilling is not what actually happened, but what might have happened.

Alonso also cited the same grand prix a year later, when he was doing the chasing while Schumacher led, as another example. He might also have referenced the 1992 Monaco GP, when Nigel Mansell desperately searched for a way past Ayrton Senna after pitting with a late puncture.

It's easy to use that late pursuit as a glowing testimony to the 2005 cars and regulations but, in reality, it was an outlier. The '05 season was a very good one (the Japanese GP, when Kimi Raikkonen passed Giancarlo Fisichella to win on the final lap stands out), but the average margin of victory that year was still just over 12 seconds.

In fact, that Imola race was the 13th closest in the 928-history of the world championship (ignoring the anomalous Indianapolis 500s of 1950-1960). For reference, Rosberg's 25s 2016 Russian GP victory lies 670th in the list.

The real lesson in all this is that, actually, fans don't want overtaking. They will say they do, but overtaking in itself can be meaningless.

What fans actually want is something of which overtaking can be a symptom: a contest. That's what made those Imola races so memorable.

This is what has been so frustrating about the 2016 season. The four races to date have provided plenty to watch, but we've yet to see a true contest for victory thanks to Lewis Hamilton's many problems. Walkovers are simply not interesting for anything other than the most hardcore and dedicated enthusiasts.

After all, the battle for victory is what really matters. Most of the fights in grand prix racing capable of really catching the imagination have been for victory - the notable exception being the breathtaking scrap for second between Rene Arnoux and Gilles Villeneuve at the 1979 French GP. Few ever talk about Jean-Pierre Jabouille's victory in that race...

So let's go back to the significance of context in an overtaking move. Let's say you've got a successful pass, there are certain key characteristics that make it interesting. Yes, it will ideally be an on-the-limit move contested hard by the driver being passed. But it must also have high stakes. A pass for first will always be more thrilling than an identical one for 10th.

So in that regard, Alonso was right. But there is one aspect of his argument that is difficult to agree with.

"I don't think we need to put a finger on one thing to improve the show, because when we were having those races with two or three overtaking moves we were asking for more overtaking to improve the show," he said.

"It's a constant need to create news or to change Formula 1 to improve it. Sometimes, as it is now, it's a little bit too artificial and the cars too slow."

It's that last sentence that raises the question marks. F1 cars should be the fastest, and they are - a recent analysis of the relative pace of the world's top categories around road courses showed F1 is just over five per cent clear of its nearest challenger (Japan's Super Formula, pictured).

But the casual lumping in of car pace with the need for more contested overtaking is dangerous. Already, the watching world is criticising the new 2017 regulations - rules, it must be stressed, which again include some of the things fans have called for, including wider tyres, bigger and (very slightly) more aggressive-looking cars - because they won't improve the racing.

During the Bridgestone era, there were plenty of complaints it all looked too easy, and contrary to the argument that drivers were attacking all the time too often they were having to hold position between pitstops and attack on out and in-laps to have any chance of making a pass. That, frankly, is too far in the other direction.

Alonso has a point that people would like to see the cars being driven more aggressively in race conditions. This is less about the need to conserve a little fuel (nobody seems to complain about the lift and coast that happens in LMP1 in the World Endurance Championship, even on qualifying laps) than to protect the tyres. Tyres, of course, which are there to create the kinds of variables that lead to more interesting racing.

Make no mistake, good racing is about variables - if you line up the cars in pace order and then let them circulate at that pace, you have to expect a procession to be the result.

So if you swing the dial back to where it was and F1 will end up being very satisfactory for the drivers but not for the fans. When F1 was producing races in the refuelling era when each lap was balls out on remarkable Bridgestone rubber, there were complaints that it was too boring.

While it's not a criticism I entirely agree with personally, for some of those races were fascinating to watch, it makes sense that to the wider world it's difficult to appreciate the skill going into driving the cars in those conditions. Virtuoso drivers doing their thing, and doing so brilliantly in that format, is something that can be difficult to appreciate.

So concessions do have to be made to create the variables that create good racing. Again, the key is creating a contest, and ideally an unpredictable one. But it's very difficult to create that kind of on-track contest without creating the constraints that actually go against it being a true contest between teams and drivers.

F1 should never become a spec formula (and for all the criticism of the restrictive nature of the current regulations, it still is a long way off that). So it comes down to creating the best conditions to make this happen.

The old chestnut of a fairer distribution of the championship's income is crucial to making that happen. And there is validity in looking at the race format (the much-derided reverse grids would actually create the conditions for the kind of racing many are demanding, much as they rail against it). But the bottom line is that if you are going to have a genuine sporting contest it's very difficult to guarantee delivering it.

Especially when, in the simplest terms, people are asking for more overtaking, but not too much because then it becomes meaningless.

Everyone seems to think they have the easy answers for how to guarantee that contest: but once again the case of overtaking shows that things are a lot more complicated than most believe.

After all, the definition of a great race, a great contest, is not as easy to pinpoint as you might think.