How F1 has returned to a 1930s fundamental

It wasn't always Formula 1, you know - and nor, for that matter, was it always the FIA. Close on a century ago, in 1922, the AIACR - Association Internationale des Automobile Clubs Reconnus - formed an international commission to look after motor racing, and it came up with something called 'The Grand Prix Formula'. Not until 1947 was the AIACR reconstituted and renamed the FIA, at which point 'Formula 1' came into existence.

This Grand Prix Formula required only a slender rulebook, the stuff of dreams for people like Colin Chapman and Gordon Murray and Adrian Newey. Fundamentally teams competing at racing's highest level could build pretty much what they liked, but in 1934 a new rule called for a maximum weight limit of 750kg - indeed, this period, which lasted until the end of '37, became known as 'the 750kg formula'.

Going into the 1937 season Mercedes, in its ongoing fight with Auto Union, introduced the W125, whose supercharged 5.6-litre straight-eight engine produced around 600bhp, a startling figure for the time. Look at photographs of the car, of Rudolf Caracciola and Manfred von Brauchitsch scrapping at Monaco, and a big heavy beast it appears.

When Tony Brooks and Peter Collins sampled a W125, in a tribute to Richard Seaman at Oulton Park in 1958, they were shaken by it, as was even Juan Manuel Fangio, when he drove one at the Gunnar Nilsson Memorial meeting at Donington in 1979. A monster of a racing car.

Last week, as I watched the unveiling of the McLaren-Honda MCL32, two thoughts occurred. First, if it pleased me to see orange on a McLaren again - something Ron always refused to countenance, given that it was from the team's pre-Dennis days - quite why it is a sludgy orange, rather than the original vibrant colour, remains a mystery.

Second, 80 years on, in effect we are back to the days of the '750kg formula', albeit now with a phone directory of rules. The McLaren, like other cars making their entrance in the rash of pre-season launches, may have looked all very svelte, but undeniably it's a big car - and it weighs about the same as a Mercedes W125. Quite a thought.

When last year I mentioned in passing to an F1 driver that tyre-warmers were banned in IndyCar racing, he was shocked - and even more so when I added that so also was power steering. 'How did the drivers cope?', he wondered, and I said, 'Well, they just do': them's the rules, so get on with it.

Three years ago, when the 'hybrid engine' came to Formula 1, and the weight of the cars lurched upwards by 50kg and more, the fad of the moment was that drivers had to be absolutely as light as possible.

In the recent past F1 cars had routinely been well below the minimum weight limit, and ballast - to get them up to that mark - could be moved around to aid the car's handling. Designers still wished to enjoy that benefit, but now they didn't have the same 'free weight' to play with, so anything the driver could contribute was strongly encouraged.

One thought of Herr Altbauer, manager of the Schnorcedes team in Peter Ustinov's sublime Grand Prix of Gibraltar: "We believe that the car is the main thing to consider, and that man must be a slave of his machine..."

Mark Webber, then taking his leave of F1, told me he couldn't have picked a better time: "I'm taller than most drivers, and I've been as skinny as a rake 11 months of the year, because of Adrian saying, 'We still need you lighter...' I've had years of being four or five kilos under my natural weight, so now it'll be nice not to live on rabbit food the whole time.

"If it was bad enough before, it's going to be worse now - and for the bigger guys it's going to be a real problem. Given that we live in an era obsessed with safety, it seems a strange way to carry on..."

It did indeed. When the drivers turned up for Melbourne in 2014, most were plainly thinner than before, and showing less muscle, so it was perhaps as well that conservation of the cursed high-degradation Pirellis precluded their driving flat-out for the whole of a grand prix.

"It's a sacrifice I have to make if I want to balance the car perfectly," said Nico Rosberg that weekend. "I've eaten no sugar since early December - for my dream I'm living like a monk. The diet alone is one thing, but training with little food is hell."

It seemed to me insane that drivers should be required to live on close to a jockey's starvation diet. During a team PR event in Sepang, one driver passed out.

Because of his height and size, one who suffered more than most was Nico Hulkenberg, whom McLaren had declined to sign for just that reason.

"As I'm taller than most drivers," he said, "all my career I've worked hard on being as light as possible, so I'm not especially obsessed about it now - in the winter I couldn't lose any more weight than I did."

That said, I smiled when Nico admitted - as if it were a mortal sin - that he had visited a McDonald's in Kuala Lumpur: "This was the exception rather than the rule, but it was an emergency - I was really hungry and needed to have something."

It was all a bit cranky, but if it has long seemed to me unjust that a driver should be penalised simply for being taller - and inevitably heavier - than most of his colleagues, those like Hulkenberg are now in a happier place, for the new generation of F1 cars - bigger, heavier, with greatly increased downforce and hopefully longer-life tyres - are going to tax the drivers physically way more than those of the recent past, and to that end they have been instructed to 'bulk up', to develop muscles like Garth, as needed in the era of the W125.

For Alfred Neubauer read Toto Wolff, but in its fundamentals racing never changes.