How F1 is choking its creativity

Formula 1 is over-regulated, almost to the point of obsession.

It strikes me that sport should be about escapism, in the joy of artistic creativity. Participants yearn to push their personal limits and achieve greatness; observers desire to be wowed by feats of wonder.

Formula 1 should be an extreme sport, perhaps the most extreme there is. But somewhere along the way it feels as though Formula 1 has sacrificed this identity at the altar of regulation.

The necessity to achieve results for monetary gain stifles freedom of expression. Everything becomes about the ends - the championship positions and race results - and much less about the means, the methods required to navigate the path to glory.

A certain system of regulation is justified to prevent a win-at-all-costs arms race, and the extreme technological nature of F1 necessarily requires an extreme regulatory regimen to control unjust and unsafe behaviour.

But these necessary systems can do damage in their own right if not monitored carefully. Like any concentration of power, they have a nasty insidious nature.

Instead of a licence to thrill, Formula 1's participants are bound up in reams and reams of the sort of "bureaucracy" that so infuriated Ferrari team boss Maurizio Arrivabene after the recent Mexican Grand Prix.

Some degree of regulation of driving standards, car design, and general behaviour is of course essential. But too much order will stifle the chaos that all sport requires to thrive, and entertain its fans.

F1 has far too many proscriptions, concerning how to drive, how to defend, how to let leaders through when being lapped, when to talk, what to say. That is what is really ridiculous about Formula 1.

Take the rules around wheel-to-wheel racing. Back in 2014, F1 introduced a penalty points system, whereby drivers could be banned if they racked up enough offences of bad driving inside a 12-month period. There was a desire to crack down hard on contact incidents.

Within six months there was suddenly a desire to rein back driving standards investigations in order to promote more battling between drivers.

"You cannot race, you need to only stay on track and wait for problems," cried Pastor Maldonado, rather wolfishly. "If you attack and your manoeuvre is not that clear, or the guy is defending the place and you have a gamble, and you are fighting, you can be penalised. They need to be slightly more flexible."

'Let them race' was the cry from within, and it was heard. Sebastian Vettel escaped censure for hitting Esteban Gutierrez in that year's Austrian Grand Prix, precisely because of this laissez-faire approach.

Formula 1's debate about consistency of application of rules will always rage, no matter how consistently or inconsistently they are enforced. This is true in any sport, not just F1. Whether contact is primarily the fault of a defender or attacker is a minefield that plagues basketball, and football too.

But there was a clear desire to let the drivers have at it again in F1, and sort things out for themselves (not quite NASCAR-style but you get the idea) on the circuit.

But regulators cannot simply leave things be, and here we are, two years down the line, that insidious creep - more investigations, more penalties, more control, more necessary interpretation by officials, more room for inconsistency, which breeds controversy.

Occasionally F1 has a crisis of conscience over this.

"We should get rid of all these penalties and nonsense, if a driver touches another driver that he gets done up or whatever," argued Toro Rosso team principal Franz Tost during the FIA Friday press conference in Mexico.

"We need these interesting races, and if they crash into each other, they crash into each other - this is what people always want to see. Formula 1 is also entertainment.

"Currently, we take too much care about all the safety issues. Formula 1 is dangerous, we know this, but currently at the race track, nothing happens any more.

"Some friends said to me, 'I don't watch F1 anymore because there are two Mercedes in front and if they don't crash in the first lap, the race is gone. This is absolutely wrong.

"If drivers fight against each other, and if something happens and they crash, they should not go to the stewards and get a penalty for this. People want to see real racing, people want to see that something is happening. That is not the case anymore."

Of course incidents did happen in Mexico, but cue controversy about who was right, who was wrong, who was penalised justly and unjustly, who got away without a penalty when they should have had one, and verbal fury from those who felt hard done by.

This was actually quite entertaining in itself, but the system will soon rescind any creative licence. Sanction and reprimand will no doubt follow. Rebellion will be snuffed out.

"What Franz says is absolutely right, the drivers are overregulated on the track," agrees Manor racing director Dave Ryan. "Some of the recent decisions, points and reprimands, are just too far.

"The drivers are discouraged from actively racing. Some of the incidents I've seen that have been penalised, I just don't get. It's just racing, and you're just not allowed to do it now.

"The blue flag situation is also frustrating. I'm not sure the blue flag adds much to the racing. It aids the lead cars, but it really disrupts the racing for the guys at the back, and we're all part of it.

"For me, we need to look at carefully at how the sport is regulated when it comes to racing. It would be a great help if the drivers were allowed to be themselves. There are not many who aren't more than the corporate figurehead of the company - they are not allowed to express opinions, or they are discouraged from it.

"I can understand that side of it, but it would be nice if we had a few more personalities."

Whenever drivers do speak out on controversial subjects, such as the integrity of Pirelli's tyres for instance, they are quickly told by the powers that be to get back in their boxes.

F1 forces itself into this kind of corner repeatedly, because it has created an environment in which its participants are not able or allowed to regulate themselves.

Health and safety requires circuits to be built in such a way that Lewis Hamilton can completely mess up the first corner of a race, drive along the grass, yet emerge with a bigger lead than he held when he went in.

That is the sort of outcome you expect to see on a PlayStation game, not in a world championship grand prix.

Max Verstappen can balls-up an attack on Nico Rosberg, and a defence of position from Sebastian Vettel, and get away with his errors scot-free, requiring a subsequent debate about whether he should hand positions over to his rivals or not.

Vettel puts the squeeze on Daniel Ricciardo, trying to desperately defend position late in the race, there is contact, but both use expert judgment to somehow make it through the corner side-by-side.

This feat of skill is not celebrated, it is derided as a contravention of the rules.

Except what Vettel did is what every driver does when trying to defend position, and there is no mention of the fact Ricciardo lunged from way back and was not alongside when they both started braking.

Whatever Ricciardo says, racing does not take place in lanes on a motorway, and Vettel did not make an abnormal change of direction in the Verstappen mould. He also left just enough space for both cars to make the corner.

Verstappen's moves have been the subject of continual scrutiny, and now a rules clarification, yet he himself has never been penalised for one of these moves.

Why? Because the moves were OK, or because he always left enough space, or because the other drivers always took evasive action and avoided a collision? We don't really know; it's all a matter of interpretation.

If Vettel was penalised for his movement in the braking zone in Mexico, why was Daniil Kvyat and not Sergio Perez punished for his driving during their lap-one battle at the previous race in the US?

Yes it's true Kvyat did not get alongside Perez in the same way Ricciardo eventually did with Vettel, but he committed to trying to pass on the inside line in a heavy braking zone, his space was choked off, so Kvyat found himself with nowhere else to go except into the back of his rival.

On and on it goes. In MotoGP there have been just 14 rider penalties handed out this season - five of those to riders for jumping the start of the same race - and only four of those for contact. We've had five in the past two races alone in F1.

MotoGP riders often rub fairings, knees and elbows in races, force each other to take evasive action during overtaking moves, or go off track on their own. But the racing is allowed to flow, and generally speaking if they crash they crash.

Of course it helps that rider mistakes are more often than not punished by a crash. The laws of nature would not have allowed Valentino Rossi or Marc Marquez to get away with what Hamilton did at Turn 1 in Mexico.

F1's controversies are just symptomatic of its wider problem. Vettel's radio outburst at race director Charlie Whiting takes place in a sanitised environment, where all the drivers are now conditioned to expect regulation of their conditions.

Because the environment is so sanitised it cannot self-regulate, so higher powers are required to step in, with endlessly controversial results.

Wind back a few sessions to free practice in Mexico, where Vettel was caught moaning on team radio about Fernando Alonso's McLaren-Honda holding him up during long runs in FP2.

Alonso is not required to move out of another driver's way in free practice, yet Vettel moans that his fellow world champion is "an idiot". Carlos Sainz Jr said something similar about Renault's Kevin Magnussen.

Drivers should not generally be required to move out of someone else's way at all. The prescriptive nature of blue flag regulations is now bordering on a joke. Let the drivers sort it out for themselves. Negotiating traffic should be part and parcel of the skill of being a professional driver.

I'm sure the drivers would accept that responsibility, except the system now conditions them to expect an environment in which they no longer need to think or act for themselves, or deal with un-prescribed situations.

It's better to moan and expect the rulebook to deal with it.

Even the reaction to Vettel's expletive-laden outburst at Verstappen, and Whiting, becomes the target of sanction and vilification post-race. As soon as a piece of free expression takes place, there is a desire to see that person regulated back into silence.

He must be quiet! Passionate, adrenaline-fuelled outbursts are not allowed!

But all this would be rendered moot if the basic environment in which Formula 1 takes place was better conditioned. Races that take place on vast expanses of smooth asphalt - with only white lines to denote the limits - naturally require outside regulators to determine what is and what isn't acceptable.

Pretty much any piece of driving beyond slamming full-on into another car, or riding up over its wheels, will go unpunished by the environment itself.

As Ricciardo said after the race in Mexico, "stick a fucking wall there and they won't do it". Walls, gravel traps (Paul Ricard's super-sticky run-offs?) - these are maybe part of the solution to the endless problem of track limits. We also need cornering challenges that bamboozle the drivers, and push them to the edge of their comfort zones and beyond.

The Devil makes work for idle hands, and brains with too much spare capacity.

There needs to be immediate, natural consequences for bad driving, rather than simply the will of a regulator atop an ivory tower, dictating what is and what isn't allowed in any given moment.

"We need to get a bit more excitement into the racing itself," says Force India's Bob Fernley. "There are ways we can deal with cars are going off track limits - give opportunities to drivers behind by de-rating [the engine of the offending driver], or whatever. That technology is available.

"We can do a lot more to get it more exciting without endangering the drivers in any way, or without making the tracks so that they are F1 specific."

Maybe the super-fast 2017 cars will be so difficult to drive they will solve the problem all on their own? We can but hope. Like Magnussen said after trying the controversial halo in Friday practice in Mexico, F1 has bigger priorities than its current obsession with cockpit protection.

He is right. Instead of focusing on trying to make F1 cars uglier, and like they belong on a rollercoaster, bolstering further its incessant health and safety crusade, F1 should take a wider look at what it has become and what it is becoming.

It has become overregulated, over-managed, sanitised and staid. F1 has too many rules, too many limits, too much control from the vice-like grip of a rulebook that chokes off creativity and artistic expression, both on and off the track.

F1 has become a nanny state. And its high time it was rolled back.