Why F1 fears the changes that can save it

Formula 1 is so wonderful for those of us invested in it: a compelling concoction of high-speed complexity and adrenaline-filled competition. We 'insiders' hang on its every twist and turn. But step outside the echo chamber for a second and all is not well.

Fernando Alonso is right - F1 is too predictable. Far too often, to the untrained eye and mind, it is simply boring to watch. Now, I know every race cannot be a classic, and it's tricky to produce consistently great racing without resorting to artifice, but sport sold as spectacle cannot simply sit back and hope for the best.

The Singapore and Russian Grands Prix were two perfect cases in point, the outcome settled in each case (unpopular Mercedes team orders at Sochi aside) by the end of the opening lap. Japan, saved by Sebastian Vettel and Daniel Ricciardo starting out of position, was only marginally better, though Lewis Hamilton still enjoyed an untroubled run to victory.

I struggle to think of other major sporting events that can be over so quickly yet drag on for so long...

It strikes me that momentum is key. In most major sports - football, tennis, boxing, to name but three - one party won't hold continuous advantage. No football team enjoys 100% possession; tennis players must share responsibility to serve; boxers only fight for three minutes at a time before the bell tolls.

Momentum always travels in two directions, or is at least periodically arrested, even if one side wins comfortably overall. In F1, momentum too often travels in only one direction: the quickest driver, in the quickest car, gains a headstart in qualifying and races on to victory unchallenged - unless some random occurrence intervenes.

That's why we so often cross fingers for rain, the safety car to appear, the tyres to fall apart, or for the top teams to botch their strategic calculations at the pitstops. At Austin, we had all of this rolled into one. Not for the first time at recent US GPs, rain washed out Friday practice, and teams starved of precious track time and data were forced into a guessing game.

The result was precious - an unpredictable race the polesitter didn't win, in which the top three cars all used different tyre strategies but finished less than 2.5 seconds apart. This did not escape the notice of F1's managing director of motorsports, Ross Brawn, who is now asking whether taking data away from the teams would consistently produce better racing.

Mercedes motorsport boss Toto Wolff counter-argues the teams will simply claw that lost information back through more off-track simulations. But the factories of the bigger and better-funded outfits already burn the midnight oil during grand prix weekends to hone set-ups and chase performance on simulators, so why not make things more difficult for them by taking away something that matters more: their valuable real-world data.

The ultimate goal of all this data and simulation in F1 is to produce repetitive perfection. That is anathema to exciting racing

Respected German F1 journalist Michael Schmidt once told me why he passionately believes grand prix racing should ban telemetry altogether. He is of the old school, and argues convincingly that drivers and engineers should be required to 'fly blind' to make their work more challenging. Unpredictable racing should follow. I'm increasingly inclined to agree with him.

This is the sort of thing that would really put the drivers back at centre stage of the competitive picture. Teams would rely totally on their feel and feedback to be competitive. Engineering would be intuitive again, rather than led by data.

I can hear the cries of 'Luddite!' already, and I concede it's a retrograde step technologically, but there's a reason the recent Motorsport Leaders Business Forum spent time grappling with the disruptive effect of technology on motorsport. It's a well-worn sci-fi cliche to say technology will eventually kill us all, but the threat it poses to motorsport if left unfettered is very real.

The ultimate goal of all this data and simulation the teams do in Formula 1 is to produce repetitive perfection. That is anathema to exciting racing, which depends on difficulty, unpredictability and error. Adrian Newey's 'slippery kerbs' to police track limits also make total sense in this context.

Starving teams of data is the kind of fundamental change that is required to help give F1 more mass appeal by making it more difficult and more exciting to watch - beyond fiddling with aerodynamic appendages to address the "fundamental issues" that so frustrate Hamilton's ambitions to overtake his rivals on the rare occasions he finds himself behind them.

Hamilton's struggles in the US GP further strengthen my feeling it would be useful for F1 to bin Friday practice altogether. As we've established many times already, practice makes perfect, and perfect cars create boring races. If Fridays really are so valuable to race promoters, there must surely be a better way to utilise them than allowing teams three hours with which to make their own lives easier and the racing more tedious.

I understand that we live in an era of severely limited testing, but so what? The rules are too prescriptive now to make endless testing worthwhile in any case. F1 is no longer about pie-in-the-sky experimentation, it is about endless iteration and perfection. But perfection makes F1 dull; imperfection breeds randomness, which breeds excitement.

I would also turn qualifying into a bespoke event - divorcing it from having a direct impact on the race, but still award championship points to make it relevant. It's still important to prove who is the fastest on any given weekend, but why should that define the ultimate outcome? Cars and drivers starting races in pure-pace order creates the perfect conditions for a tedious spectacle.

That's where reversed grids come in. Starting each grand prix in reversed championship order would not be fake, as Wolff has suggested. It would simply be the rough inverse of what we have now: the best at the back and the worst at the front. It is handicapping, yes, but it is fair, and ultimately reversed grids simply make racing more unpredictable and thus more exciting.

The US Grand Prix showed us that Mercedes is fallible if it doesn't have loads of free practice time to perfect its car set-up; it showed us that offering everyone free choice of tyres before each race, and therefore increasing strategic difficulty, would be a very simple way to spice up the action; and it showed (via Max Verstappen's heroics) that starting quick cars out of position would add extra excitement and jeopardy to the opening stints of races without unduly affecting the outcome.

On Sundays the drivers clearly operate below their capacity and therefore hardly ever make mistakes

Ferrari didn't have free choice of tyres, of course, but Kimi Raikkonen did start on a different compound to the other frontrunners, which added welcome complication to the race. It allowed him to jump Hamilton off the startline, and created strategic doubt in the minds of everyone. One stop or two? Mercedes was surely convinced he'd need to make two, but Raikkonen didn't, and Hamilton was forced to fight on the back foot as his own (imperfect) car abused the rubber.

It's been a while since we had three different cars occupying the top three places while all converging on each other in the closing laps. Verstappen might have challenged Raikkonen, Hamilton might have overtaken both. In the end, Hamilton went side by side with Verstappen and that let Raikkonen off the hook. It was brilliant to watch because you genuinely didn't know, until three laps from the end, who was going to win the race. The virtual safety car helped too, of course, but rarely does it not.

Verstappen made the case for reversed grids with his charge through the field; Raikkonen and Ferrari showed what can happen if tyre strategy is made more complicated; and Hamilton revealed how much more difficult and interesting F1 could be if Friday practice didn't exist.

'Purists' will scream blue murder if this were to come to pass, but people must be persuaded to care in this outrageously competitive media age. Multiple British Touring Car champion Matt Neal recently tweeted that he's long since given up watching F1 because of how tedious the spectacle has become.

The championship Neal races in is controversial because of its performance-balancing methods, but it's impossible to deny that BTCC boss Alan Gow has created a great show. You can argue it's a pantomime, but it's still competitive, the racing is real, and the champion at the end of each season is deserving.

BTCC races are nearly always exciting to watch, because the best drivers in the best cars spend much of their season needing to race through the pack to achieve results. I wonder if forcing F1 cars to do the same would make designers fashion them in that image, rather than focusing primarily on their ability to blast off into the distance after achieving the best grid slot possible.

Would the new aim be to build the best racing car you can, not simply the fastest one you can dream up within the rules? Maybe shifting the balance of priorities would lead to brake ducts being developed for their primary purpose again, rather than aerodynamic reasons...

F1 already has enough problems with its intrinsic inaccessibility, without adding boring races on top of that. Nearly all the excitement is concentrated in the cockpit of the cars - 'excitement' being a questionable description of what is mostly a tyre- and fuel-management exercise on Sundays where drivers clearly operate below their capacity and therefore hardly ever make mistakes.

When the drivers are working hard this just doesn't translate very well beyond their claustrophobic environment. The forces the drivers are subjected to, the speeds they reach, the (now-puny) sounds the cars make - all of it is suffocated by the extraordinary engineering that glues the cars to the circuit and makes them appear too easy to drive, refracted through TV filters that just do not translate F1's remaining visceral appeal correctly.

And therein lies the rub. F1, and all of us invested in it, must find new ways to engender enthusiasm for a world few people can fully appreciate. Finding opportunities to go motor racing, as fans or competitors, is labour intensive, time consuming and expensive, so the spectacle is all that's left if you cannot easily increase participation.

At the very least, make your sport as exciting to watch as it can possibly be. F1's new owners have already laid out their mission statement: to 'unleash the greatest racing spectacle on the planet' - at eye-watering cost don't forget. It's time to get on with the unleashing.