F1's overtaking problem is a myth

Formula 1's trying to arrest a slide in popularity. The 2017 season has been sold on a promise of bigger, better cars, a promise that drivers won't have to drive like small children, a promise that this has everything needed to be F1's most exciting era yet.

After the Australian Grand Prix some of the reaction would have you think, on that last bit at least, that F1's lied.

Drivers are almost universally happy with the toys they have to play with this season, but one area was almost exclusively criticised: overtaking.

"Probably worse now than it's ever been," reported Lewis Hamilton. "Almost impossible," said Nico Hulkenberg. "You need two seconds [per lap pace advantage]," reckoned Sergio Perez.

The season opener was a good grand prix, especially for one at Albert Park, and one in which Ferrari beat Mercedes in a head-to-head fight and Sebastian Vettel gave us hope of a genuine battle with Hamilton for the title. How has F1 managed to engineer negative publicity out of that?

New F1 has tyres that degrade less aggressively and let drivers push harder. Higher corner speeds are testing the people behind the wheel in a manner similar to the fabled noughties, while lap records are due to tumble. Yet despite all these positives, the old overtaking spectre looms.

The good old days are to blame. With bigger, wider cars and more aero - the means to the end of making drivers work harder like they did 'before' - it's no surprise to hear overtaking has been made harder.

Give the best drivers in the world a heap more grip and bigger tyres, and watch the braking zones shorten and the corners pass by quicker. Add more aerodynamic performance to cars that spit out dirty air for fun, and say goodbye to any chance of drivers following each other closely.

The new rules are, therefore, a disaster for everyone except those behind the wheel and lapping in clear air, right?

I'd wager F1's not facing the crisis the reaction to the Australian Grand Prix would suggest. The drivers are working harder and pushing harder, and the new regulations have helped Ferrari bridge the gap to Mercedes at the front. We should also expect Red Bull to join that party too.

It's been a long time since F1's had those core ingredients. So maybe it's not just the drivers these new cars are going to make happy after all - maybe overtaking's a bit of a red herring.

Agreeing with FIA president Jean Todt isn't always a given, but it's easy to feel sympathy over the negative response he received to his claim that a lack of overtaking this year may be a price worth paying for more spectacular machinery.

Overtaking's a part of the spectacle and, granted, there's not a lot of it, but I'm not sure that's a huge problem. Especially when other key areas are improving.

"Last year you had to drive 70% or 60% at the beginning of the stints to achieve a certain stint length," says Carlos Sainz Jr. "Now you just have to manage a bit, you have to drive at 90% for a whole stint - apart from the last laps, when I pushed 100%."

That's a far cry from the F1 of recent years, which was lambasted for being too conservative, for placing artificial limits on drivers, for creating a form of racing that was almost entirely predictable and almost universally dull.

Gunther Steiner's appraisal of the opening grand prix encapsulates this point perfectly: "The race was good, huh? All-in-all it's more challenging. We saw more action, a few guys going off, a few guys having a crash.

"That's what you want. If you're just going around, and they all know exactly what they're doing, people get bored."

How many times has Daniel Ricciardo backed it into the wall on a qualifying hot lap? How many times has the race leader snuck out of DRS range early on, only to be kept firmly in sight and then reeled back in over the opening stint? How many times have the stars aligned to send cars three-wide into Turn 1 at Albert Park?

The point is that despite the lack of overtaking, on a circuit where passing is generally tough, there was still a lot to talk about after Melbourne. In that context, it was a good race and it didn't need a dozen mega overtakes to make it so.

Of course, there's beauty in a well-choreographed overtake and this is an area that F1 naturally struggles in. This need not be the rule for every track, though. This weekend's Chinese Grand Prix could be an interesting litmus test - a consequence of the higher-downforce 2017 cars is more drag, and the long back straight is ripe for slipstream action.

Some might argue that this is no different from DRS, and that DRS is therefore better because it ensures every race has this kind of opportunity. I disagree.

'Natural' drafting makes a battle ebb and flow. Maybe we'll see cars duck back in after being overtaken in the first half of the straight, and then fight back into the hairpin? With DRS, which remains active for the attacking driver for the duration of the straight, that's not likely to happen.

Also worth considering is the possibility that the new era of F1 could help DRS finally achieve its intended target.

Upon its introduction in 2011, DRS nearly doubled the number of passes from 452 to 821. That number was nearly four times larger than those from the late 1990s and early 2000s. But the argument stands that F1 should primarily be about quality, not quantity.

Those that say they want overtaking probably really mean they want a contest. This is part of the DRS problem, but it was never meant to create a scenario of drivers blasting past one another in a straight line. If that was the objective, F1 chiefs should have turned the grand prix cars into Caterhams and held all races on the Silverstone National circuit.

No, DRS was about targeting a key F1 ill: getting close enough to battle in the braking zones. Research before its introduction indicated more than a quarter of downforce was lost following another car through a corner, so DRS was designed to counteract that loss and get the chasing driver back to where they should be by the end of the straight and into the braking zone.

The problem with DRS is it has been married to high-degradation tyres, which neutralised the initial objective. Too often someone would be caught thanks to their rival running fresher or softer rubber, DRS would hand the pursuer an opportunity and the defending driver would not have enough grip to contest the braking zone properly.

Is DRS to blame in that scenario? Not really. So perhaps this new era of lower-degradation Pirellis will be the perfect partner to an artificial solution such as DRS.

All that said, Todt is right when he claims that "clearly we can figure out that overtaking will be even more difficult this year". That's a natural consequence of cars that have an even greater aero dependence than ever. Longer-term, F1 could do with detaching itself from that.

Whatever happens, F1 must not cheapen the value of overtaking on a whim. Making DRS more powerful would make an F1 overtake as meaningless as a Caterham slipstream-fest.

That's something poacher-turned-gamekeeper Ross Brawn knows all too well and, encouragingly, he has made several noises about addressing in his new role as Liberty's F1 boss on the sporting side.

Brawn's technical mind is a great deal sharper than mine, and he seems convinced there are ways to produce cars that have a lot of downforce but can follow each other more closely. On the chopping block could be overly-complex front wings and the aero appendages that line the sidepods and bargeboards, all of which contribute to incredibly sensitive airflow.

Brawn suggested he'll launch an investigation into the likes of IndyCar and sportscar racing - presumably LMP1 - to see why those high-aero cars are more capable of racing each other more closely than F1. This would be an interesting outcome, and probably the 'purest' way to invoke a bit more on-track squabbling.

Whatever happens, fans shouldn't be drawn into the usual comparisons of F1 and 'AE' - anything else. MotoGP bikes are smaller and less aero-dependent, so something would have to be seriously wrong there (it isn't) for overtaking to be less prevalent. If you want a single-seater that really lets drivers go wheel-to-wheel, bin off F1, IndyCar and the like and follow your local Formula Ford 1600 championship.

My point is 'proper' overtaking's never been easy in F1 and it probably never will be. That's why any talk of a major problem in that area right now is premature and inaccurate.

I would prefer to give new F1 a chance than watch the rulemakers hurriedly pursue a miracle cure that may not even exist, or stumble awkwardly through miss-hit 'solutions' that actually degrade the spectacle further.