Has F1 forgotten the key to good racing?

Racing is at the very core of what Formula 1 is all about - pitting 22 cars and drivers against each other on a circuit with a set start and finish point.

For all the talk and politics and "bullshit" (as Kimi Raikkonen puts it) in F1, it all comes down to this. Most people describe F1 as the pinnacle of motorsport, but it's doubtful that it also represents the pinnacle of racing.

In fact it wouldn't take long to come up with several forms of motorsport that produce closer and more exciting racing more regularly than Formula 1 does.

"That's something Formula 1 needs to examine - to understand what is good racing," Williams chief technical officer Pat Symonds tells Autosport.

"To me good racing is about two things: it's about spectacle and it's about not going to an event knowing who's going to win. It's about that sort of unpredictability and uncertainty. Spectacle is made by close racing."

This is certainly an area in which the drivers feel F1 is letting itself down, and was a key theme of the open letter they published recently on social media.

We have also heard impassioned pleas from reigning world champion Lewis Hamilton on this subject. He feels that an F1 focused on tyre management and fuel efficiency undermines the wheel-to-wheel battling that makes motorsport so appealing to him in the first place.

"All us drivers are doing what we do because we love cars, we love racing, we love wheel-to-wheel," he says. "We all started in karting and aspired to be like the greats of the past.

"When you're driving and not being challenged in the way you should be challenged, whether it be physically or mentally, by the car - and the rules are taking it in the wrong direction -we can't just stand still and let it happen.

"I miss go-karting. It was some of the best racing I've ever had. It was the wheel-to-wheel racing that excited me, and it's hard to have that today.

"It's like you have $100 [of tyre energy] and you have to spend it over 40 laps. If I spend $90 of it trying to overtake one car, then I'm not going to get to the end of the race.

"People don't care - people want to see me race to the end. They want to see me sweat my nuts off and make a fantastic manoeuvre.

"We want to make racing better. It has to be physically draining, you have to be exhausted at the end, you have to be able to race all the way and not have to do all the fuel economy stuff.

"People watching the race don't know all these different control switches, they just want to see wheel-to-wheel racing.

"People have fallen out of love with the sport and we don't want that because it should be the greatest sport in the world."

The concoction of ingredients that makes for good racing is not easily distilled. It depends on the technical make-up of the cars, certainly, but it also depends on the conditions, the circuit layouts, the tyres, the format and the drivers.

"We are limited by tyre wear today, because the aerodynamics of the car are very efficient," says Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff.

"It's a very difficult exercise for Pirelli because they could easily bolt the rock-solid tyre on, like you have at Le Mans, and the whole thing would last 90 minutes, no pitstops, the drivers would enjoy themselves and would be flat-out.

"The question is, is it about the drivers enjoying themselves and being flat-out for 90 minutes, or do we want interesting strategies?

"The various tyre strategies and the tyres degrading has actually given some very interesting racing.

"If I could have a Christmas wishlist for the tyre, I would like one that is not blown up like a balloon [with high pressures], for integrity purposes, but where the driver is able to push flat-out with a stable degrading slope, which still allows various tyre strategies, which allows different drivers with different compounds with different degradation on track to overtake, but equally hard racing.

"You know if the tyre degrades too much - if it gives various strategic choices - some people will complain; if the tyres are rock-solid and there is only one of them and there is only one strategy, or the tyres last until the end, others will complain.

"It is not an easy task."

Pirelli says the current tyres have reached 'saturation point' as F1 cars have got faster, so the Italian firm now needs a redesign. This will come for 2017, when the technical regulations change substantially and cars are expected to become several seconds per lap quicker.

Pirelli says this will mark the end of 'high-degradation' tyres in F1, which means the nature of the racing is also set to change.

"The car is now reaching a point of downforce that won't actually give you more performance," says Pirelli motorsport boss Paul Hembery. "So what the drivers are feeling is actually less about the high pressures, which will make them feel peaky; it's just they've reached the maximum cornering load of the tyre, so the tyre needs to change.

"Changing tyre size allows us to do a dramatic redesign of our philosophy. We've listened to the drivers and their bosses and the controlling people. We are not being asked to give them high-degradation tyres anymore, we're being asked to produce something that has high thermal resistance and low degradation."

How the tyres are designed to behave, and the impact this has on how the racing plays out, is at the heart of a battle F1 faces over whether to focus on the quality of its racing to the cost of all else, in the hope of attracting bigger audiences.

Should it use all technical tools at its disposal simply to improve 'the show'?

Should good racing be an aim and the audience the focus, or should F1 avoid trying to spice up the show, focusing instead on simply being an elite competition between teams and drivers, with the spectacle merely a natural consequence of that sporting contest?

"There are many football matches that end 0-0 and yet people turn up and they've been blown away because they actually saw Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo," argues Mercedes technical chief Paddy Lowe.

"They think, 'Shit, I've seen two of the greatest footballers on the planet', and OK it was a boring 0-0 match, but they are still happy.

"Also they accept that not all matches or contests are the most exciting ever. That's the nature of sport - you have good days and bad days.

"Like all premier sports, Formula 1 should be very wary of heading down the kind of 'rigged for a show' route. We're not here to create a show above providing a proper sporting contest, because people will switch off."

The recent Chinese Grand Prix is probably as good an example as any of the current conundrum facing F1's racing showcase.

Incidents, cars running out of position and mixed-up strategies created some thrilling battles, but ultimately that's of limited value when all that competition is for minor positions and the race is dominated by one guy who wins by nearly 40 seconds.

F1 needs to be a close competition at the very front to be truly interesting, regardless of the actual amount of overtaking that goes on.

"MotoGP is a good example of how a very, very good competition at the very front between the two or three main guys can keep a series alive," Wolff points out.

"In the last five years only two teams have won races, only four riders have won races, but the controversy and the fight between Lorenzo, Marquez and Rossi is still able to generate a huge buzz."

This is why Fernando Alonso claimed recently that F1 doesn't actually need much overtaking, so long as the fight for victory at the front is close and unpredictable.

He cited the 2005 San Marino Grand Prix as a good example - nowhere near as much overtaking as China 2016, but a thrilling spectacle as Michael Schumacher's Ferrari attempted unsuccessfully to hunt down Alonso's Renault for victory.

Narrowing the spread of performance across the grid is something fellow world champion Sebastian Vettel advocates to improve racing in F1.

"I'm not saying all of the cars should be the same, because that would be against my understanding of the nature of Formula 1," he says, "but if we had a more equal spread across the field it would help us to race harder even more.

"Aerodynamics are a good thing, because they give you a fantastic sensation of cornering speeds, but the way it's currently set it's very difficult to follow another car, which means it's difficult to overtake."

Vettel wants "a more simple approach to make Formula 1 a little bit more raw and wild, so that it's great for us, great for the fans at the track, [and] great for the people at home".

Why not have both? Surely a Formula 1 where teams and drivers are evenly matched across the grid, coupled with cars that can overtake more easily, will be more compelling to watch than a Formula 1 where one car dominates and nobody can overtake?

"People won't watch anything that's not entertaining, just because it's Formula 1 and taken to the extreme," argues Hembery. "If there was no overtaking and it was 'round and round', people just won't watch it.

"The racing is only going to improve if the performance of the cars is closer together. If you have three seconds between cars, then you are not going to have 20 cars battling for every corner.

"In motorsport people want to see overtaking, we want to see incidents and people battling - that's what makes them watch any form of motorsport.

"That's something that Formula 1 will always have to have in the back of its mind, and that's the subject of the vast majority of the discussions of how to improve the show - and 'the show' distinctively means how to improve overtaking."

But perhaps not at all costs. Overtaking is important, but not in isolation. As with much of F1, it's a complicated chemistry that's about much more than the mere fact of one car being able somehow to drive past another on the circuit.

Whether the racing in F1 is any good is as much about close and uncontrived competition as it is about overtaking. F1 would do well to remember that.