Banish three things to make F1 better instantly

Firm believer that I am in the importance of creating a raft of new national heroes for the F1 grids of the world, I do nonetheless concede that this may take a couple of years or three.

What, then, of the short-term?

I'm not massively impressed by the new aero regs for 2019, if only because they'll inevitably be tweaked and re-tweaked by brilliant F1 engineers over the next six months to the point where...guess what? It'll still be difficult to follow another car closely. I'm still smarting, I guess, from Pat Symonds' revelation in early 2017 that F1's Strategy Group had been commissioned by Mr E to make the cars faster without any consideration at all to making them easier to drive in traffic. I can understand Bernie not really caring about any of this stuff, but why did the Strategy Group acquiesce? We're still undoing the damage...

Anyway, if you want a quick fix for next year, here are my three absolute necessities for improving the racing in F1.

Get rid of the Virtual Safety Car

I can see its beauty: it's quick to activate (much quicker than a real safety car) and it maintains those hard-fought gaps between cars, even if Sebastian Vettel is concerned about the couple of milliseconds that can be shaved from the legal VSC delta by clever use of certain sections of road.

Let's remember, though, the reason we had safety cars in F1 in the first place: Ecclestone introduced them in a hurry in 1993, when IndyCar's ratings began to soar. He felt no fear from the American cars and circuits - but he wasn't happy about Nigel Mansell's defection and needed an instant reply.

His answer was the Formula 1 version of the pace car - the safety car - an apt re-casting, as it turned out, because F1's early versions were anything but pacey.

In time, though, the whole F1 safety car thing became not only a part of the scenery but also a neat, Mercedes-financed source of income. There were many glitches, of course - not the least of which was the problem of unlapping the back-markers on long circuits
like Spa - but in general the safety car concept has worked well over the past 24 years, bunching up the cars for re-starts and improving safety conditions for drivers and marshals in just about equal proportions.

I don't think anyone was negative about the VSC concept when it was mooted three years ago and then perfected: the drivers felt it was fairer, and the race directors thought it much faster to implement and thus safer - a major plus in the aftermath of Jules Bianchi's accident in Japan.

No-one, to my knowledge, raised the obvious point: with the VSC, the whole safety car system was also losing one of its key components - its ability to re-bunch the field. The theme was safety, safety, safety - and who could argue with that?

Well, I think it's time that someone does. We've got a major image problem in F1 and it's to do with a lack of overtaking and/or close racing.

Admittedly, safety cars can be time-consuming to deploy, and lapped runners can take forever to find their correct position in the line-ups, but the upside of bunched re-starts is the punctuation they supply to otherwise processional narratives.

Get rid of blue flags

This goes against my natural grain, flag marshal that I was, and so I've come to the conclusion only reluctantly.

If we don't have enough overtaking going forwards, let's back ourselves into it - use the slower cars to break up the processions at the front.

Again, I'm the first to admit that it's never been safer to pass slower cars: a driver about to be lapped listens to clear radio warnings before he faces an electronic blue, and usually the slower driver then backs right out of it, losing 10-15 sec in the process.

Sadly, though, that has taken away one of the great arts of high-speed driving.

James Hunt won the 1976 Canadian Grand Prix by his strategic use of the back-markers; Carlos Reutemann out-fumbled Niki Lauda to take the lead around a back-marker at Brands Hatch in 1978.

OK, Jochen Mass had no idea what he was doing when he moved over on Gilles Villeneuve at Zolder in 1982. And I'm certainly not suggesting that drivers should be left to do exactly what they please, with no thought at all being given to rear vision.

What I am saying is that the pressure should be on the leaders when they approach a mid-field bunch late in the race. They should effectively be plunging into the dark - and the speculation should be about which driver will make it easier for which front-runner.

There is an art to it - to making the move at the moment that causes maximum issues for your nearest rival - and it's something you always associate with the great drivers, from Stirling Moss to Jim Clark, from Jackie Stewart to Alain Prost.

To Lewis, even, in his GP2 days.

We should still penalise slower drivers who do something stupid but that's it: otherwise, let the race take its course. We have enough cars to make a motor race: let's use 'em all.

Get rid of Drag Reduction Systems

They're chasing their own tails. They artificially help some car/driver combinations in some conditions, but we've overdone it - added more and more zones until there's no point in running low downforce at circuits like Montreal, or giving drivers like Daniel Ricciardo so much speed differential at circuits like Baku that they have nowhere to go when they're suddenly staring at a rear wing in front of them.

There's a theme here, of course, and it's called Return to Nature.

Racing drivers by definition are designed to overtake or defend, not to stand aside and say obediently, "After you, Claude." And the Drag Reduction System is swallowing itself in a plague of detection and activation zones that bear no relation to real racing.

That's in the short term. Medium term? It's going to be all about drivers, as I keep saying. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with F1 that a new era of Chinese, UAE, American, Indian and South American drivers won't put right.

We just need a system to make it work.