Nigel Roebuck: How F1 has lost its way

As race time nears in Peter Ustinov's Grand Prix of Gibraltar, Schnorcedes team manager Altbauer instructs his driver it's time to blow his nose: "A handkerchief would have to be carried in either the left pocket or the right - which would completely destroy the balance of our revolutionary new car!"

Life imitates art, they say. Sixty years on from Ustinov's glorious pastiche, Ferrari, aping Red Bull, goes into 2019 with matte paintwork, rather than gloss. "The reason is
 not aesthetic," explains Mattia Binotto (and he can say that again), "but exclusively technical. Eliminating the shiny element gives us a few hundred grams, which may not sound much, but when you push everything to the limit even this has an effect..."

Given that in today's world a driver can be fined for wearing illegal underpants, nothing should surprise us, but saving an ounce or two on matte paintwork reminds me of a conversation years ago with Bernie Ecclestone.

"When you think," he said, "that these people's gear ratios last for 400km... it's a bit cranky, really, isn't it?" That's the word, Bernie, cranky.

"These gearboxes are like a Swiss watch, but the guy in the grandstand has no idea about that - and if he had, he wouldn't care. What he does care about is that the racing isn't very good..."

No, it wasn't, but it was better than now, and I know from talking to fans - be they Ecclestone's man in the grandstand or such as David Coulthard and Martin Brundle - that I am not alone in believing Formula 1 has lost its way.

The 1000th 'world championship race' is being celebrated in China, but this figure includes 11 runnings of the Indianapolis 500 (unfathomably a round of the championship until 1960), and I'd have thought it more appropriate to commemorate the 1000th grand prix at a rather more fitting venue than Shanghai. Monza was, after all, 
on the calendar 69 years ago, when Formula 1 was born.

So, too, were Monaco, Spa - and Silverstone, where the world championship had its baptism. Back then the airfield circuit was marked out with straw bales and oil drums, and the race was won by the Alfa Romeo of Giuseppe Farina, his headwear made of linen.

Although Ferrari people love to stress that the Prancing Horse on the yellow shield is the one link between 1950 and 2019, Enzo did not send cars to this inaugural race, having failed to agree starting money with the organisers. Periodically this would remain a Maranello ploy until the early '70s, when Bernie unionised the teams.

"For both spectacle and overtaking, downforce has been disastrous - and so has telemetry" Dan Gurney

Quite a bit else has changed in the course of seven decades. In 1951, for example, crash helmets were made mandatory, although it would be another 15 years before safety became any kind of issue in the sport. Fatalities were once regarded as an inevitable adjunct to an activity that could never be safe. If this spawned a camaraderie among the drivers long lost now, so also it instilled a discipline on the racetrack: interlocking wheels, after all, could get you killed.
 With run-off areas unknown on the tracks of the day, what awaited were trees and walls.

Over time the safety aspect - to both cars and circuits - was transformed. As safety increased out of sight, so too did financial reward. A superstar today earns upwards of $30m a year; in 1959 Dan Gurney's stipend at Ferrari was $163 a month.

Then there is the technology. Time was, as Stirling Moss says, you fiddled with tyre pressures, and perhaps changed dampers, but that was about it. One revolution was the move to rear-engined cars, pioneered by Cooper in the late '50s, and another was the dawn 10 years later of downforce.

Not long before he died, Gurney contemplated how the sport had changed. "Jochen Rindt hated wings from the start - he said they reduced the importance of car control, and he was right. For both spectacle and overtaking, downforce has been disastrous - and so has telemetry, because anything that diminishes unpredictability might be great for engineers, but is terrible for spectators. Both the 'Ds' - downforce and data - were inevitable, but when people look back on the sport's history, they'll surely see them as wrong turnings."

What was it Bernie said to me all those years ago? "What we need to do is get the aerodynamicists together, and say, 'What you're doing is bad for racing - we want you to find a way for us to get rid of you!' Then we have a meeting with the engineers, and say the same to them..."

Now, in the hybrid era, we have cars weighing as much as an Auto Union of 80 years ago, with monstrously expensive engines that make an insipid noise.

"At Goodwood," says Coulthard, "we heard the cars being fired up, and my son said, 'Daddy, why are they all so loud?' I said, 'Well, that's what a racing car was - and should be'. These cars... the weight limit is 740kg, which is a joke. Fifteen years ago, my V10 McLaren weighed 605kg - and had 20-odd kilos of ballast!

"Any of the top six cars could start in the pitlane, and finish in the top six" Martin Brundle

"What we've got is the result of all the hybrid, 'road car relevant', bullshit that attaches to F1 these days. Because the cars are so bloody heavy, to get them to go round corners we've got a ridiculous amount of downforce, which is terrible for racing! We've lost so much of what Formula 1 is supposed to be..."

Then there is the crippling expense of it all. Formula 1 has increasingly become a financial arms race, with Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull now operating on a wholly different level.

"The rest," says Brundle, "mostly get lapped, don't they? Any of the top six cars could start in the pitlane, and finish in the top six - the haves and have-nots just get further apart. It's vital that the FIA and Liberty get the regulations right for 2021, and don't allow themselves to be bullied by Mercedes and Ferrari. The fact is, Formula 1 has always been about the drivers - it's not an engineers' championship, but I'm afraid it's become one."

As we mark 1000 races, the future of Formula 1 looks far less secure than it did. "If it fails down the road," says Brundle, "the beginning of the failure was these bloody hybrid engines..." Anyone remember the Matra V12?