Ferrari boss Luca di Montezemolo fears for 'taxi-cab' F1

A new limit of 100kg of fuel per race is set to make fuel management a major strategic concern in 2014.

Di Montezemolo fears that dynamic, coupled with the constant need to look after tyres, will reduce the spectacle of F1 while simultaneously making the races harder for fans to understand.

"I don't like his sort of taxi-cab driving," was quoted as saying by Autosprint.

"What I don't like is this complexity in the interpretation of the race, both from the drivers' and the spectators' point of view.

"Up until yesterday you'd only look at tyres: most of the attention went to tyre management.

"It was misleading to see a driver in the lead, while realising that you can't consider him really leading because he would soon pit for a tyre change anyway. It was difficult to fully interpret a race.

"These days, on top of all that, you need to add fuel consumption and managing of a race with a limited amount of fuel.

"I prefer the sort of F1 where you need to always push at the limit."

Despite such concerns, di Montezemolo stressed that he was fully in favour of F1's new era.

"We can't be among the ones who don't push for a more technological and innovative F1, because we then transfer this knowledge on production cars," he said.

"For us it [has been] like piecing together a jigsaw puzzle: some things have gone the way they were supposed to, others haven't.

"The difficulty has been the balance between the combustion engine and the electrical one; the thing that has pleased me the most was seeing correlation between wind tunnel and track data, which has always been our problem for the last four years.

"These new 'hybrid' F1 cars represent an extremely complex project. The difficulties also encountered by the others demonstrate that.

"Reliability will be important; it will be interesting to see how many cars finish the first race."

Translation by Michele Lostia