Baku showed F1 must stop overcomplicating

The European Grand Prix at the new Baku circuit had all the ingredients to be a real dodgem-car race, but it didn't turn out that way. We probably saw the cleanest grand prix in a long time in terms of driving errors - but it also flagged up some problems Formula 1 needs to address.

The circuit has a good mix of fast and slow corners and wide and narrow sections, and it needs to be treated with respect otherwise you pay a heavy price. That's how it should be. The straights are long and wide, and with the DRS it's a bit like sitting at the side of a motorway watching the traffic overtake - which is not my cup of tea.

One of the main things that I believe needs to change - and this applies to most circuits, not just Baku - is the safety car line. This is the line at which racing gets back under way after a safety car period.

At Baku, this was located on the main straight, a little after the pit entry and parallel with the start of the chicane in the pitlane.

This seems to be a completely random place for it to be located, and the GP2 races showed that none of the drivers had a clue where it was or, it seems, what it was for.

In the second race in particular leader Nobuharu Matsushita seemed completely perplexed by the restarts, catching the safety car before it pitted at the first and having to abruptly back right off, and then at the second still driving slowly and weaving at the restart line when most of those behind had begun accelerating.

Chaos followed in both cases, and Matsushita ended up with a race ban. He was also taken out by Raffaele Marciello at the third restart, a move that drew applause in the pitlane from some of the drivers who'd been victims of the previous incident.

Every circuit has a start/finish line, or a start and a finish line because they aren't always one and the same. So why is this not the line that's used to get the race back under way after a safety car?

Having these other lines confuses everyone: spectators, viewers, commentators and even the drivers and the teams themselves.

Perhaps the most famous recent example of this confusion was when Michael Schumacher overtook Fernando Alonso on the last lap of the 2010 Monaco Grand Prix.

The last lap started under the safety car, but it pulled in at the end of the lap.

Schumacher jumped Alonso out of Rascasse and into the final corner to nick the position. He was given a penalty on the basis that if the race finishes under the safety car, you can't pass.

But the argument made by Mercedes that race control had said 'safety car in this lap' and issued 'track clear' messages, as well as showing green flags and lights, seemed pretty convincing at the time.

There are other examples, but you get the picture. This line causes confusion.

You can keep the lines to denote where the safety car sits and waits for the leader, or where it peels off to allow the restart - but allowing no overtaking until the finish line seems to make sense.

On the subject of white lines, Kimi Raikkonen's five-second penalty seemed to be given at random. He was towing along behind Daniel Ricciardo's Red Bull and ended up, albeit by accident, with all four wheels on the inside of the pit entry line.

The regulation says that if you have all four wheels inside that line, you must go into the pits. So surely a better, and fairer, penalty for the other competitors - albeit worse for Raikkonen - would have been a drivethrough.

That would have allowed the penalty to be served there and then rather than post-race, which again confuses everyone. Fortunately, in this case, it made no difference to his fourth place.

Talking of confusion, on to Mercedes and its little radio problem.

I've always said that the easiest thing to do is to make things as complicated as possible, while the smart way is to offer all the functionality in the simplest way possible.

We have seen from Mercedes that it seems to favour complexity. It cost the team both cars at Barcelona, when Nico Rosberg was in the wrong engine mode; and it could have cost the race win for Rosberg in Baku, and certainly kept Lewis Hamilton off the podium, as both drivers suffered from a similar problem.

Everyone can complain about the radio regulations, but they are what they are. They have done what the were created to do: make the drivers drive the cars alone and unaided, as the regulations state they must. If I were in charge I'd go a lot further, but more on that shortly.

Can you imagine Hamilton or Rosberg or anyone at Mercedes having any sympathy for Sebastian Vettel or Ricciardo if they had had a similar problem? I don't think so. As my four-year-old grandson often tells me, "Grandad, rules is rules".

Why do the drivers not have a simple reset button - a control+alt+delete, if you like - that will always put the car back into the mode that they believed was best for starting the race? Then, if the driver gets lost, they can press reset and work from there.

But perhaps that's too simple.

Going back to the rules, I'd change them to allow the driver and engineer to have open communication while the car was in pit-limiter mode. Engine-mode changes could only be made in that setting. As a consequence, you'd only be allowed to have those discussions in the pits.

Hamilton would have been able to drive through the pits, get the required information from his engineer and make any necessary changes. Yes, he would have lost time and positions, but that's the price you pay for not doing your homework properly.

It would also mean a lot more effort would have to be put into the initial race-start mode, because what you start with would be what you have to use until the first pitstop.

After watching both GP2 races, I have to say the driving standards leave a bit to be desired. But I do believe Antonio Giovinazzi - who won both races - is a man for the future.

Ferrari needs to convince itself that youth is the way forward, sign him up now on a three-year contract from 2018 onwards and maybe just stick with what it has for '17 given that Rosberg seems to have re-signed for Mercedes.

The experience will serve it well in 2017 and allow Vettel to become the new Schumacher at Ferrari as undisputed number one.

I would also like to add a special 'well done' to Sergio Perez and Force India. The team had a really fast car in Baku, with Perez qualifying second, demoted to start seventh after a gearbox change and then a great drive to third.

But Ferrari should still leave him alone and get a young Italian hot-shoe in that Italian car, and allow Perez to keep doing good work at Force India.

To all involved, and especially the old Jordan boys that have hung in there through some tough times, really well done.