Does the past hold the answers for F1?

Back to the Future has been a recurring theme this year. And it's not just because we're closing in rapidly on the October 21 2015 date to which Michael J Fox as Marty McFly and Christopher Lloyd as Doc Brown travel in the film's sequel.

We've had that McLaren-Honda teaser trailer and nostalgia-fest thanks to the renewal of the iconic Anglo-Japanese relationship that thrilled us so much in the 1980s and '90s. And now there's a growing momentum behind a push to make F1 cars as glorious as they were in the past. We already have sparks back, and now the Strategy Group has approved plans to get more challenging cars - with more power, more downforce and wider tyres - by 2017.

While the intentions of these efforts are laudable - F1 needs to respond to falling audience numbers - it's equally important to understand that times have changed. Trying to wind back the clock because things were perceived as being better in the past is not necessarily a guarantee that you'll improve them in years to come.

McLaren-Honda partnership has an evocative history in Formula 1

The push for 1000bhp engines makes sense because it's an iconic number that is easily marketable. And more power can never be a bad thing. But the issue of how to make cars more challenging, faster and more exciting is much more complicated. It's also difficult to achieve because of one of F1's great qualities: that everyone who works there is so, so good at making extraordinary cars.

Spend any time looking back at old onboard video footage and it's impossible not to be mesmerised by the superhuman efforts required from drivers such as Ayrton Senna, Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Nelson Piquet to complete just one lap at speed.

They battled to control the power, the cars were skittish under braking, they fought to stop the back end stepping out in corners, and the steering wheel was a blur of motion as they held on with all their might to prevent their cars flying off track.

Part of the magic of that time comes from the fact that technology and the understanding of car dynamics were nowhere near as advanced as they are now. Power steering hadn't been developed for racing cars, suspension concepts were far more basic so a car was hardly ever fully optimised for every corner. Brakes were much less efficient too. Drivers had to take their hands off the wheel to change gear, and revs had to be carefully balanced.

Highly detailed telemetry data of hundreds of parameters, optimised torque-delivery curves and the ability to change differential settings for each corner were the stuff of fantasy. And simulators? Forget it - not on the computers they had then.

F1 was attractive back then because it was, in essence, so basic compared to now. The scope to get it wrong was immense, and that's what put more of an onus on the drivers and exaggerated their role in the whole package.

Take a peek at onboard footage now and it's a world away. Semi-automatic gear changes are made on paddles behind the smooth flow of steering wheels, whose fluctuations and efforts are softened by state-of-the-art power steering and tonnes of downforce.

Computer simulations before each race weekend have already delivered near-perfect set-ups, and drivers know where they should brake and how fast they should take each corner. So much now goes in to ensuring that no stone is left unturned that success has become sanitised to a certain extent.

Engineering in F1 is much more of a science than it was in the past © LAT

F1 teams hate variability and too much randomness. Just remember how drivers were so critical of Pirelli's high-degrading tyres in the past because they failed to deliver the perfectly controlled and predictable platform on which they could ply their trade.

Teams are chasing an impossible dream if they think that more power, more downforce and wider tyres will magically rekindle the great things we saw 20 years ago. How many times over the years have we heard that, in F1, you cannot unlearn what you've learned? The knowledge of what is required to produce a fast car can't be eradicated from the designers' and engineers' brains.

The new-found hunger to make a change to F1 cars should not overtake the reality that teams are now so good at spending tens of millions of dollars trying to dial out the characteristics of cars that make them challenging and difficult to drive.

Every rule change to make F1 cars harder to handle will result in a push-back from engineers to negate this. That's why proper research is needed in deciding exactly what F1 has to become in five years' time. We need proper analysis of what fans really want.

Just saying that the cars must be more challenging or more difficult is not enough. We need to define exactly what we want the end result to be, and only then can we work out how to get there.

We cannot pursue a romanticism based on the past. We've got to work back from the future, not to it.