How F1's misleading engine rules created a disaster

Although he declines to talk about future goals, Lewis Hamilton must be starting to think about Michael Schumacher's 91 grand prix victories, a total believed beyond reach, but increasingly on Lewis's horizon. He has, after all, amassed 62 wins of his own - and 40 have come in the last four years, the era of the hybrid power unit, during which Hamilton's Mercedes team has been essentially unassailable.

Whatever happens in 2021, the current engine is with us until then, so if Hamilton continues at his rate of 10 victories a season, he has just time to beat Schumacher's record before the rules change. If rabid Lewis supporters have savoured this recent era, for others it has been one to forget.

Unless you happen to support the driver cleaning up, after all, domination by one team soon becomes wearisome. Fifteen or so years ago I remember leaving for the airport every other week positively knowing that, whatever the destination, Schumacher and Ferrari would win.

Later the torch was passed, in the 'blown diffuser' days, to Red Bull, Sebastian Vettel reeling off four consecutive world championships, at one point winning nine races on the trot. Then came the hybrids, and the age of Hamilton and Mercedes.

Of course there have always been times when one team has stolen a performance march - think of the Lotus 79 or Williams FW14B - but invariably others swiftly caught up: what has been different about the 21st century is that three teams have successively ruled for seasons on end. For fans of other than Michael, Sebastian and Lewis, it has been a very lean time.

As well as that, of course, the sport has done a very good job of slitting its own throat. As dominant as Schumacher may once have been, there were those - notably Mika Hakkinen, and later Fernando Alonso - who sometimes threatened him, and in the three-litre V10 era the cars were undeniably spectacular.

With the new engine rules, manufacturers were supposed be queuing to get involved. What we have had, in the F1 of the last four years, has in my opinion been largely a disaster

How could it have been otherwise, when they had 900 horsepower and didn't weigh very much? And topping it all off, of course, was the muscular scream.

Then, in its wisdom, Max Mosley's FIA concluded that power was getting out of hand, that in the interests of safety it had to be reined in, and thus in 2006 we were landed with the 2.4-litre V8, which the drivers unsurprisingly found anaemic. No surprise that Juan Pablo Montoya's Interlagos lap record, set in '04, went unchallenged for a decade and more.

As well as that, if the smaller engines kept the volume high, they all sounded the same - a blur of raucous 'white noise'. I wasn't sorry to see the back of the V8s, but before long began to remember them wistfully.

That said, I thought I understood the necessity for change, for a set of engine regulations that would pique the interest of manufacturers heading increasingly down the hybrid road. Ultimately the announcement came that from 2014 on it would be turbocharged 1.6-litre engines, their power supplanted by sundry ancillary systems.

Initially these were to have no more than four cylinders, and for once we had cause to be grateful for Ferrari's overweening clout in Formula 1: Luca di Montezemolo demanded that the engine should be a V6, and lo, it was done. If we think the hybrid engines have made an uninspiring noise with six cylinders, imagine how they would have sounded with four...

More than any other company, Renault pushed for hybrids, and while, like such as Patrick Head, I never saw any need for F1 to justify itself by 'improving the breed', on this occasion I swallowed the argument that unless we had fundamental change the manufacturers - whose boards' interest in racing is confined largely to R&D - would soon wash their hands of it.

As well as that, the hybrid lobby affirmed, with the new engine rules, manufacturers will be queuing to get involved, and I could see some logic in that, too. In this, and so much else, I could not have been more wrong. What we have had, in the F1 of the last four years, has in my opinion been largely a disaster, and it seems - from too many empty grandstands and falling TV figures - that I am not alone.

What can we say about the grand prix car of the current era? Certainly it has power aplenty - more even than the best V10s - and achieves it with remarkable fuel consumption, but comes at incredible cost. For one thing, it has been financially ruinous for the smaller teams, obliged to beg - and buy - engines from one of four, ultra-powerful, suppliers, who have not, as was confidently predicted, been joined by such as Audi.

For another, given the burden of all the systems, batteries and so on, today's F1 car weighs about the same as a Mercedes W125 from 80 years ago, and that is frankly grotesque. Thirteen years on from JPM at Interlagos, speeds are about the same as then, and an unfathomable amount has been spent simply in marking time. Yes, the saving in fuel has been extraordinary - but when did F1 ever tell anyone about it?

Last week Ross Brawn, looking to 2021, had this to say: "The current engine is an incredible piece of engineering, but it's not a great racing engine. It's very expensive, doesn't make any noise, has componentry that, in order to control the numbers of uses, is creating grid penalties that make a farce of F1, there are big differentials of performance between the competitors, and we are never going to get anyone else to come in and make engines. We can't leave the engine as it is..."

Brawn's right, whatever such as Ferrari and Mercedes might think. Indeed, the pity is that we're stuck with it for the next three seasons - and for 2018, of course, the drivers are restricted to three apiece.

You think you've seen grid penalties?