No excuse for F1 sleepwalking into the future

As the pinnacle of single-seater competition, Formula 1 naturally wants to be at the forefront of everything this represents - drivers, racing, technology, speed, business and entertainment. But it seems that F1 clearly cannot be the pinnacle of all things at once.

So F1 needs to decide what it wants to be. Is it about the greatest drivers and making them into heroic figures for the public, or are they merely servants of the teams?

Is it about great racing and daredevil antics in wild machines, or is it just a technological arms race between car constructors and engine manufacturers within an ever-tightening regulatory framework?

Should F1's technology be the primary focus, or should it be subservient to the spectacle of racing?

What is F1? Read the full eight-part series

The technological battleground provides a serious element of pure sporting competition between constructors and engine builders - a constant theme throughout F1's history. But should this competition be better framed so that it is simpler, and more likely to be hotly contested?

What should F1 cars be? Should they be speed machines capable of extraordinary lap times, or wild, untameable beasts, extreme and nearly impossible to drive consistently?

This cuts to the core of what many perceive as the essence of F1: Drivers trying to defy the laws of physics and being pushed to the limits of their skill while battling each other to prove they are the best in the world.

But within this dynamic it seems they can either be astronauts on earth, driving high-speed, high-grip 'perfect' rockets in pursuit of ever-quicker lap times, or extreme sportsmen, doing battle in raw, imperfect, challenging racing cars.

"F1 is not an extreme sport," says Pirelli motorsport boss Paul Hembery. "That's what's missing from its DNA."

You could argue both of these versions of F1 are 'extreme' in their own way, but the sport has to decide the path it wants to take.

Safety, cost and years of tightening regulations suggest it's moving gradually towards the latter, but is keen not to completely lose the legacy of the former.

At the moment it's caught between those two identities, trying to balance them out with degrading tyres and drag-reduction systems, as well as special exhausts to recapture the raw emotional appeal of lost engine noise.

Here is the heart of F1's real angst. Does it want to be a global entertainment business, focused on the fans that enjoy its show? Or does it want to be a niche technological battle for manufacturers, with public interest confined to the margins?

Or does it want to continue trying to be both at the same time?

"You need to differentiate between what's really happening and how it's being perceived by the public," argues Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff.

"Formula 1 was always a competition between engineers. The priority will always be the competition between drivers, but they compete in the most sophisticated cars.

"We need to be careful how we balance engineering and innovation against simple entertainment. The audiences need to be entertained. If the sport is boring, but we have the highest sophistication in our cars, it doesn't serve anybody.

"Equally we don't want to oversimplify the car, because it wouldn't be Formula 1 anymore - it would be reduced to what GP2 is. Getting that balance right is not easy, but we shouldn't try to streamline everything.

"For the future, the tyre supplier, the FIA, the commercial rights holder, the teams and the drivers need to pull more on the same side in order to design a spec-sheet of what the racing should look like, and then support each other in coming up with the best solution.

"I think we are not far off. We have seen some very exciting races this year, and in my opinion it doesn't need surgery - a strong pill is enough."

Formula 1 faces a fundamental battle to reach this consensus, between those who feel the competing elements that make it what it is can be balanced against each other, and those who feel a rapidly changing media and automotive landscape means hard choices must be made and certain cherished totems ditched.

Renault F1 managing director Cyril Abiteboul: "I have a young daughter, and a person from Honda told me, 'Your daughter may never have to take her driving test'. Maybe in the future humans will be forbidden to drive because they will be much more dangerous on the road [than computers], so how is Formula 1 preparing itself for such a radical change of the concept of mobility?

"Maybe it's not for tomorrow, but clearly if Formula 1 wants to be in the footstep of the automotive business you will have to take away the driver, which is just inconceivable.

"On the basis that we cannot do that, it means we will have to divert completely from the road car business and take a completely different route.

"The automotive industry is getting ready for those changes, anticipating, making plans. Unfortunately, in Formula 1 we are not really good at making plans."

Does this mean F1 can free itself of ties to the automotive industry through technology, or does it mean driving itself becomes irrelevant and thus the sport should be purely about technology and nothing else?

Formula E's 'Roborace' concept gives us a glimpse of this potential future for motor racing in the real world, and that's without considering the impact of the rise of professionalised online racing competitions.

F1 needs to work harder to find clarity over its key contradictions, and decide a firm direction to take. It should then be possible to devise a mission statement based on this clarity, to frame what F1 is and what it should become.

It's impossible to have proper strategy if you don't know what you're trying to achieve, and why you're trying to achieve it.

"If you've ever run a business where you have got lots of divisions, lots of customers, it's quite difficult to find where true north is," McLaren CEO Jonathan Neale tells Autosport.

"At the moment there is not a well-defined sense of where true north for the sport is; those principle values against which everybody can align.

"That's a leadership issue. The relationship between the commercial rights holder and the sport's regulator - the FIA - is really important.

"They have to have a shared sense of true north, but I don't think it's ever made clear enough what we are trying to achieve, and whether what we are trying to achieve is aligned with our sense of true north.

"It's called a strategy. You'd be shot if you were the chief executive of a business and you didn't have a real sense of where your market is, what your proposition is, what you are going after, what threats are emerging, the landscape around you, how you are going to respond to the digital era, how you respond to autonomy as a technology.

"If you leave somebody in a job doing the same thing for too long it's not surprising that they run out of ideas, energy and steam. There is a good reason why FTSE 100 organisations rotate their chief executives every three to five years, because you need fresh eyes on the process so you can refresh the strategy.

"There's a lot we can learn from the normative processes in the running of companies."

This is another of F1's key battlegrounds: proper leadership to determine whether it must take bold steps to confront this challenging new world, or stay its present course, fiddling at the margins and broadly maintaining the status quo.

Either way F1 must decide what it is, and what it wants to be. F1 is a living contradiction and there are no easy solutions, but that's no excuse for sleepwalking into the future.