Is F1 too boring for the modern world?

As the media landscape changes rapidly, and people gain increasing freedom over what they watch and when, Formula 1 faces enormous challenges in adapting to expand its audience.

Whenever F1 makes substantial alterations to its regulations there is usually some reference made to improving 'the show' as justification. This is natural. Grand prix racing has long ceased to be the amateur pursuit of like-minded enthusiasts. Modern F1 is a multi-billion-dollar sports entertainment business, and as such it depends on a big following.

But audiences are diversifying rapidly, and F1 faces increasing competition as other sports grow and the modern media landscape allows them to build bigger followings of their own.

Sports fans typically have less time on their hands and more choice available than ever before.

F1 faces a tough existential question. Can it maintain a show that is exciting and relevant enough to audiences without undermining aspects of its pure sporting contest?

"Ultimately any sport has to be an entertainment, and sometimes Formula 1 is guilty of confusing itself between being a technology showcase or entertainment," argues Red Bull boss Christian Horner.

"Formula 1 for me is about entertainment. It's about putting on a great show. [But] the entertainment should be the result of the sporting product.

"It needs to be a pure sporting contest. It shouldn't be false. It shouldn't be WWE wrestling, or contrived in any way.

"And Formula 1 needs to appeal across different generations. Sometimes we lose sight of that fact."

This concern for 'the next generation' is something that also worries Williams technical chief Pat Symonds, in an age when car ownership seems increasingly less relevant.

"I'm of a generation where cars were something you definitely aspired to," he says. "You got your driving licence when you were 17 because if you wanted to see your friends you needed a car.

"You don't need that now. Your friends are in the palm of your hand on smartphones, so you don't need that element of transportation in quite the same way.

"This is the age of data, instant gratification, instant knowledge, short attention spans. An hour and a half of racing is too long for young kids.

"There is absolutely no reason in the world why we have to race 300 kilometres; it's a tradition. It's time for a few traditions to be broken, to put a little bit more showmanship into what we're doing."

As a key sponsor, as well as technical partner of F1, Pirelli is also an advocate of making more effort to improve the show - by expanding races into bigger and longer events, or experimenting with different formats that better show off the skills of the drivers.

"The television audience is primarily European, so if we want to become a major product in the Chinese market or the USA, then you've got to review the way we do things," says the tyre manufacturer's motorsport boss, Paul Hembery.

"We can't compare Formula 1 to football, because football is very tribal - you follow a team when you go and watch them at 10 years old and you follow them until you die. It's a very different type of passion.

"However, if you look at the way the English Premier League and the Spanish league have grown their fanbases outside of their national boundaries, the Premier League moved itself into Asia before everybody else and it took hold.

"You see a lot of pre-season friendly games, or the Premier League teams going there to create the interest - for specific tournaments as well. That was a strategic decision to take that market, and that bit is missing [in F1].

"You can't really turn up for a race, be there for two or three days, then disappear - and then for the rest of the year nothing happens. That doesn't keep the sport in the forefront of people's thoughts.

"If you walk around countries that don't have a history of Formula 1, they might never have seen Michael Schumacher race, or they might not know who Nigel Mansell, Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost were, which for a European would be shocking.

"Certainly in China they weren't watching Formula 1 when those great drivers were racing, so it's really a question of what do you want to be?

"You are already the pinnacle of motorsport, but do you want to compete with other sports to become a compelling sporting product that the whole world wants to watch?

"If you want to do that then you must have a radical rethink. The conundrum of taking Formula 1 forward is tough.

"Motorsport is relatively niche in the sporting world. Not everybody loves cars. It's not that you can say, 'If we did this we would become five times bigger'."

The counter argument to radical reform or intervention is that F1 is still expanding. It is still hosting new races in new territories, and still attracting a massive following around the world.

"Formula 1 attracts huge audiences," says Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff. "If you compare it to our direct competition in motor racing, there is nothing in sight. MotoGP, or World Endurance Championship, even DTM, are not visible in terms of audiences.

"If a Formula 1 grand prix generates 70-80 million live spectators, the next best series will probably generate three or four million, and this is a phenomenon that is still ongoing.

"What we see is a change at the very core of the media environment - the switch from traditional print and TV into the digital universe.

"The same is happening in Formula 1. We see massive gains in audiences in all the various digital formats: the internet, in social media.

"We see nevertheless that in some core markets the TV numbers are up, in some the TV numbers are down, because also we have switched the model from free TV to pay TV.

"Some markets are down due to the lack of local heroes. Spain could be a good example of that. But overall I would say that Formula 1 is in good shape."

Like Horner, Wolff believes F1 should not become contrived just to chase bigger audience ratings.

"The fans are following Formula 1 because it is a sport - it is a pure competition among the best drivers and the best teams," Wolff adds. "If we were to set up a fake entertainment framework around the whole thing it would be flawed.

"We would not only lose our core purist audience, which is very important, but also everybody out there who isn't interested in a fake competition.

"Having said it is very difficult to get the balance right between a purist sport that needs to stay a purist sport, and at the same time not forgetting that we are doing all of this for the audience.

"If F1 becomes uninteresting and we lose the audiences and are not able to generate the revenue, then you are in a vicious circle."

Wolff argues that F1 has struck the right balance between pure sport and entertainment, but hasn't worked hard enough to highlight its positive qualities, such as the speed of the cars and the innovative technology contained within them, instead focusing "too much on what could be improved and washing dirty laundry in public".

Mercedes technical chief Paddy Lowe is also fairly content with F1 as it stands. It is often criticised for not listening to what fans want, but Lowe argues that placing too much emphasis on fan input can be counter-productive.

"We don't ask theatre fans to write plays, or design ballet," he says. "In the end we've got to go and produce what we think will be a good show and sporting contest and get the right balance.

"The only aspect in which technology has given a little bit away to the spectacle is the noise. Other than that I've seen no damage at all, only good from what we've done.

"It's the most incredible thing we've ever done in Formula 1 to adjust the type of engines [to V6 hybrid turbos] and we will fix the noise [within] another couple of years."

There is certainly a strong suggestion that F1 simply needs to do a better job of promoting what's already there, before thinking about drastic changes to snare bigger audiences.

"There is more that we can do to put spectators at the heart of what we do," argues McLaren acting CEO Jonathan Neale.

"Access is a problem for the promoters and it's something that needs looking at, particularly when you've got other ways that people can invest in sports.

"You don't wall off all of your heroes in a cage that nobody can get to unless they've got the golden pass.

"It's exactly the right time to be thinking about how we can do this differently. Let's experiment a bit, let's shake things up, let's put more of the drivers onto the TV, and let's actually promote it from the centre.

"That's one of the things I'm actually quite surprised hasn't changed over the 15 years I've been doing this. We are still not centrally promoted in a positive way."

As Neale points out, this is a question of leadership. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the present sporting spectacle - whether the product itself requires drastic reform or not - F1 needs to work harder than ever simply to maintain its audience in a rapidly changing media landscape.

F1 was quick to become a global sporting phenomenon by harnessing the expanding power of television, but that was decades ago. The rest of the sporting world caught up long ago.

In a competitive and evolving global environment, just doing the same old thing because it worked in the past simply won't suffice.