Should Formula 1 ban engineers?

A Formula 1 engineer recently suggested, in jest, that the pinnacle of motorsport should ban engineers. This was too good an opportunity to miss, so Autosport pressed the point and asked a few more questions to see just what the benefits - and drawbacks - would be.

The first question, of course, is why? What would the advantage of banning engineers be?

"A lot of what the 'good old days' had that we 'lack' in modern F1 is unpredictability, largely due to unreliability, or just errors, such as people running out of fuel," says the source, who perhaps unsurprisingly wishes to remain anonymous.

"Admittedly, a lot of the improvement in reliability has been driven by cost-saving regulations [as opposed to just engineers] - it's now far more penalising to have an engine or a gearbox fail, for example. But there are also countless painful experiences that engineers have learned from and mitigated against, the result of which is better reliability and therefore more predictable results."

Expecting engineers to think in a different way is not sensible. We see that every time there is a rule change - they simply find the best solutions to make cars better, rather than to achieve what the regulations might actually have been aiming for.

"The main thing that sparked the thought is what happens whenever a group of engineers are together - even something that's supposed to be 'fun' will suddenly start to become optimised, particularly if there is an element of competition," says our engineer.

"The key character trait that defines an engineer is someone that looks at an everyday situation, something that other people have accepted as the norm, and sees opportunities to optimise the process. We tend to want to do this in bars when the system is suboptimal, or when a shop is laid out illogically.

"This has its benefits, but bringing together a group of people with a strong sense of logic can have something of a buzz-killing effect, when fairly quickly the 'correct' way is established and that becomes the norm.

"We tend not to see magic or wonder in the world; we see cause and effect and like to boil things down to black and white. Anything grey is turned into a model and statistical analysis performed so that 'grey' can become a defined likelihood of black or white.

"Clearly engineers have brought some exciting and creative innovations to the sport, but our tendency to improve and optimise has probably led us to converge on similar solutions across the teams. If decisions were made with more passion and less logic, we would probably see a bit more randomness to results."

Race strategy without engineers could also be a lot more interesting. It could even increase the chances of a smaller team springing a surprise result.

Considering no team outside Mercedes, Red Bull and Ferrari has won a grand prix since the start of 2013, that would surely benefit F1.

"Without the professional timing information the teams use, there would be a lot more strategic mistakes resulting in unexpected results," the engineer says. "The fastest teams would probably adopt relatively conservative strategies with tyres, fuel etc. This would therefore leave opportunities for slower teams to take a chance on more aggressive strategies, which if they paid off could result in surprise wins and podiums.

"To an extent, I think we saw this when we first had the high-degradation Pirelli tyres [in 2011] and there were people 'dropping off the cliff' and a number of different winners. Fairly quickly, though, the engineers at all of the teams began to understand the tyres and the racing order became more predictable.

"I think there would also be more examples of an ordinarily strong team/driver package having a particularly off weekend if there were no engineers to help understand poor Friday form and come up with fixes."

If this is sounding rather promising, the next question is: would F1 actually work without engineers?

"Realistically, I'd struggle to imagine the sport without engineers, but I'll have a go.

"The team would be a team manager, the drivers and mechanics - I suspect we might have to allow a systems technician and/or engineer and perhaps another for the engine or we might be left with the drivers pushing their cars around!

"We'd ban anyone with a degree in engineering, or maths, science, etc, and probably anyone over 40 because they've built up too much experience. Technically the drivers would be managing their own tyres, set-ups etc, but we'd probably let them bring a friend along to help keep track of everything.

"I imagine tyre choices would be biased towards the fastest, but shortest-life, option. I think we'd see more variation in selection of downforce level - you'd have some drivers deciding more downforce is always better, but then others might be tempted by higher top speed for overtaking.

"In races, the driver would run until his tyres were finished, which could come as a bit of a surprise and therefore less warning of pitstops for the teams - this could well end up with less-slick pitstops, more situations like Daniel Ricciardo in Monaco [in 2016], where a bit of confusion has a big impact on the race result."

It only seems fair to mention the downsides too. There are some big ones and 'our' engineer is quick to cover them off.

"One of the attractions of F1 is the high-tech nature of the sport, which would quite clearly be diminished if you were to ban engineers. Also, the fact that F1 is clearly a large team-effort is a big part of what makes F1 different to other sports.

"Another area that might suffer would be portraying the tension and emotion of the sport during a race. As the drivers are necessarily so enclosed in the car, the audience doesn't get to see their body language. What we do see a lot of is engineers sweating, looking tense, or occasionally crying...

"In other forms of motorsport, the engineers are far more like spectators while the race is in progress, so they are often as surprised as anyone when there is a car issue. In F1, the engineers tend to be aware of situations that are unfolding, so you can see in their body language when things are a bit tense."

Of course, banning engineers is never going to happen. Despite all of the valid and interesting points about randomness and unpredictability, we probably wouldn't want to either. Isn't part of F1's appeal its engineering excellence?

But perhaps engineers don't have to be sacrificed for F1 to get some of the positives mentioned above. Instead of banning the people, restricting what they have access to - and the things they can do - would help reintroduce some of that desired unpredictability.

F1 has long since tried (and often failed) to restrict the pace of the cars through rule changes by limiting the technology that can be in the cars themselves. How about limiting the technology those clever engineers have to work with instead?

For example, reducing the amount of data that they can take from the cars after a session. Perhaps the parameters they are allowed to measure could be specified to create more unknowns.

That way the engineer's 'buzz-killing' desire for optimisation can still be pursued, but its influence will be limited. There would still be missing pieces of the puzzle.

F1 could thus be about excellence and randomness.