Why it's time for F1 to think single-make

The cacophony of criticism against the current state of Formula 1 has grown steadily and relentlessly, underlined by increasing unpopularity - with its shrinking fanbase, as well as its own participants.

F1's top drivers - those who should be its greatest champions - bemoan its flaws. Lewis Hamilton is exasperated by tyres that turn to mush if he drives too fast; Sebastian Vettel talks of F1 being overly complicated by technology only a minority of boffins understand.

Jenson Button says Formula 1 has "a long way to go before it's good again", while his McLaren-Honda team-mate Fernando Alonso suggests F1's off-track political circus has become more engaging than the on-track contest that is meant to be its centrepiece.

Beyond general discontent with the style of racing in current F1 - with its dependency on fuel and tyre management - what unites these critics in their unhappiness is a lack of genuine competition on the grid.

No one can get close to Mercedes in the V6 era. Win the odd race maybe, but a title challenge? Forget it. The technical regulations change substantially for next season - the cars will be faster and the tyres should be better - but it's still difficult to envisage a massive swing in the competitive order.

This is the root cause of angst. Even Hamilton - who benefits most from driving F1's best car - prefers his early days of 2007-08, when he had to fight off the Ferraris as well as his own team-mate to be successful.

To improve this state of affairs, Alonso argues F1 should afford its participants "more freedom" from the stifling effects of over-regulation.

"Relaxing everything a little bit would be good, like it always has been [traditionally] in Formula 1," says Alonso, who also feels the regulations applied to drivers means they are "allowed to breathe and not much more".

"Teams had the possibility to choose their weight distribution, their own cambers on the tyres, their own tyre pressure, their own philsophy of rear wing, even putting six wheels on a car.

"Now if we paint all the cars black we would not know which team that car was, because the cars all look similar but in different colours.

"The rules are quite strict: we need to make the car like this, this wide, this high. It's a little bit strange.

"It would be nice to have a better show like we had in the past. I've been here 16 years and I could not walk in this paddock on a Thursday for many years, and today it's only us."

By "only us" Alonso is referring to competitors and journalists, underlining the feeling F1 has lost its way, and its popularity too.

Recapturing past glory by deregulating the sport as Alonso suggests would be fantastic - in theory.

Insanely fast and challenging cars, top drivers better showing their class, and wild competitive swings as teams find innovative ways to add performance.

But decades of history tell us this is a pipedream for F1. Such a move would create a nuclear arms race among the teams, the financial implications of which would be catastrophic for independents. And knowledge cannot be unlearned, so they would likely settle on similar technical solutions regardless.

What's more, the governing body would never permit such technical excess on safety grounds, because of the wholesale circuit redesigns greater speeds would necessarily entail.

You also run the real risk of technology overpowering the drivers, something F1 is constantly grappling with. The drive to be relevant to the automotive world seems to necessitate more automation.

In the World Endurance Championship I'm told clever computers cut the combustion engines automatically to save fuel. At least F1 drivers have to do their own lifting and coasting!

Back in the real world, where the technical freedom Alonso advocates is not realistic, I would regrettably argue F1 actually needs to do the opposite and become a spec formula.

The desire to retain manufacturer competition at all costs has led F1 down its present path, introducing expensive and complicated hybrid engines that have added fuel to the flames of entrenched competitive inequality.

Making F1 single-make would automatically reduce this inequality, making the competition between drivers and teams closer. It would also make F1 far less expensive to compete in and therefore more sustainable, at a stroke eliminating a long-running and tedious debate over cost controls.

It would also bring F1 into line with the rest of the single-seater ladder, making it more relevant to the wider motorsport world rather than an outlier, and perhaps encourage more new entrants in the Gene Haas mould.

For those who worry this approach would reduce F1 to a technological shell, remember the car can be whatever you want when designed to a spec - as loud, fast and thrilling as you like.

If you fear the single-make route will make F1 too easy, just ensure the rules are written to make it challenging - continue to have multiple tyre compounds for each race; offer huge varieties in brake, suspension and aerodynamic set-up configurations; maybe even allow a certain amount of free development beyond the basic specification. But give everyone the same basic platform - chassis, engine and tyres.

F1 is ultimately a show for fans and sponsors, so it should be about the best teams and drivers competing in the fastest form of circuit racing in the world. Why not leave the WEC, and its Le Mans 24 Hours showpiece, as the place for manufacturers to develop futuristic tech for the road?

Independents can barely compete at all in the top class of that series, and for those who fear a lack of proper manufacturer competition would reduce interest in F1, remember three major car-makers compete at the front of the WEC but it still attracts a fraction of F1's audience.

At the moment, F1 is not the best show it could be. It is about tyre degradation and engine management, and manufacturer-backed teams developing massive advantages in barely noticeable ways over the rest of the field. This is mildly interesting to a hardcore audience, but what about the rest?

Other than when Hamilton and Nico Rosberg collide, or Mercedes otherwise slips up and allows another team to win, F1 is boring.

If the racing, or more specifically the competition, is boring - ie not close - then people won't watch it. If people don't watch, F1 makes less money in TV rights. If F1 makes less money in TV rights then its teams become poorer and so does the health of the competition. It is a vicious negative spiral.

I'm not necessarily arguing F1 has to become a cheaper sport - though that is a potential side-effect of a single-make series - but it will become a richer one if it can better appeal to spectators.

Simplify things and that will surely help. It won't make it any easier to succeed - the best teams still win consistently in junior single-seaters - but it will create a more level playing field and closer competition, which is central to the appeal of other team sports, such as football and basketball - or even individual sports like tennis.

In these worlds the role of the athlete is more significant, the role of the science and technology surrounding them secondary.

In F1 the balance is very different; the technology is increasingly dominant. This is great for engineers and innovative cottage industries, but it is not good for the drivers and it is clearly not doing much for the sporting spectacle.

Williams technical chief Pat Symonds makes the argument that GP2 races on the same bill as F1, and says F1's multi-make nature sets it apart. But I would argue the reason millions more people watch F1 than do GP2 is simply because F1 is the pinnacle. If GP2 became F1, people would watch that instead.

Some senior F1 insiders admit that GP2 is actually more interesting to watch presently than the main attraction...

Stoffel Vandoorne's view is interesting, because he's won GP2, raced in F1, and now drives in a high-spec single-seater category in Japan.

Super Formula cars can near enough match F1 in the high-speed corners (which is part of the reason McLaren sent him to Japan), and certainly they use better tyres. Vandoorne enjoys pushing flat-out every lap, but says the racing is pretty boring.

This is a valid argument against pushing F1 down the single-make route - that all the participants will become so evenly matched it will become little more than a qualifying formula.

But it's important to remember that Super Formula cars are underpowered - only 550bhp compared to approximately 750-800bhp in F1 - which is the same problem that afflicts Formula 3.

What are needed in Japan are bigger circuits and more powerful cars. When F3 cars race at Spa there is slipstreaming galore.

If you specified F1 cars to be enormously powerful as well as quick in the corners they would be difficult to drive, which would mean more mistakes, which would mean overtaking - earned rather than given over cheaply to tyre degradation and DRS.

The DTM is perhaps a better counter argument to this alternative vision of F1. That series has excellent drivers and top teams representing three major manufacturers, using closely-matched high-tech cars, yet the audience is small.

But the problem there is again one of standing and promotion. This is a German national touring car championship, not F1. The interest will always be regional rather than global.

Plus it still clings to a semblance of manufacturer competition, which means the core sporting elements are often undermined by politics.

That said, three of the top four drivers in that championship drive for different manufacturers and there are only 22 points (less than one race win's worth) covering all of them.

In F1 that same spread is 95, almost four wins worth of points...

There would undoubtedly be pain involved if F1 were to make such a radical move - manufacturers would certainly quit and take their vast budgets with them; teams would have to drastically revamp their infrastructures and redistribute their staff. Jobs would certainly be lost.

Alonso is right when he says there is no easy answer; in fact there are only difficult choices. But I would argue following the single-make trajectory not only positively impacts several problem areas simultaneously, it is also perhaps inevitable at some point anyway.

Periodically, the customer car debate surfaces, as independent teams regularly teeter on the brink of collapse. If F1 has to go down this route eventually, or even ape the halfway house Haas model more widely, the final consequence will be a gradual creep towards a single-make formula.

It has effectively happened in IndyCar and Formula 3. The BTCC is not far away. Eventually it will probably happen in Formula 1 too. Why not pre-empt the inevitable? Before the world really has switched off for good.