Has F1's best training ground been sentenced or saved?

The first Formula 3 race I ever saw was over 27 years before almost-crowned 2017 European champion Lando Norris was born. In fact, at my then-age of almost five and three-quarters, even Lando's dad was only a toddler.

Since then, I've seen literally hundreds of F3 races (it may even be thousands) so, to me, the announcement from last week's FIA World Motor Sport Council that the category will become a one-make, spec-chassis, 350bhp spec-engine formula from 2019 is a very big deal - and a very sad day, even if it's one that had been anticipated.

It brings to an end a formula that has worked since the 1940s, and in its current guise since '74, when F3 switched to two-litre engines limited by air restrictors.

By the end of next year, when the F3 European Championship dies and makes way for the new-look F3 International Championship - almost certainly replacing GP3 at the bottom of the bill at Formula 1 races - that will be 45 years of a concept that, barring a few increases in the diameter of the engine air restrictors, safety improvements and the allowance of ground-up racing engines from 2013/14, has stayed pretty much identical. That's an unprecedented lifespan for anything in motor racing.

Such stability and competition have always been the appeal of F3. Dallaras have dominated since the mid-1990s, but the category has always been founded on open competition. The rolling chassis may be identical when they roll out of the factory in Varano de Melegari, but it's what the teams subsequently do to those cars, within relative freedom of regulation, that has made it still an open class in spirit.

Furthermore, the onus has always been on Dallara to produce the most competitive car it can, pouring resources into research and development for each generation of racer - no room for complacency, in case a rival constructor identifies a weakness and steals the market.

Perhaps the bigger interest has been in the engines, with the war in the past few years fought out predominantly by Mercedes and Volkswagen in Europe, with strong efforts from Toyota, Honda, Toda and ThreeBond/Tomei in Japan.

Some of these companies have been instrumental in helping support talented drivers or able teams at crucial times to allow talent to rise. This will be missing from the new F3 - and anyway it looks extremely unlikely that the new rules will be adopted any time soon in Japan, where the culture of engine competition and manufacturer driver-development programmes is much more prevalent than in Europe.

But in Europe such competition isn't always welcomed so readily, and the rumblings this year over the relative strength of the engines have certainly smoothed the path to a single powerplant in the future.

After a spate of blow-ups, in autumn 2016 VW tuner Spiess made reliability improvements, which are allowed in the regulations for engines post-homologation. It led to a lot of grumbles from Mercedes users earlier this year that the VWs had an advantage - and, worryingly, some voices within the ranks of the Mercedes customers are currently worried about attracting drivers for the Macau Grand Prix.

"Motorsport is so expensive people aren't prepared to take a risk now. They don't want to be lumbered with the wrong chassis or engine. Single-make is a sign of the times"
Trevor Carlin

There's no question that VW's results have improved, but it appears that it's more of a matter of the VW users being able to access the potential previously denied due to reliability fears, rather than having leapfrogged far ahead of Mercedes.

Look at the speed-trap figures of race leaders (ie, those who were out of the tow) from the Monza round this year, and you'll see that on average a Mercedes-powered race leader was faster than a VW-powered race leader. That's with the caveat that speed-trap figures are not the be-all and end-all: you'd also have to factor in how much downforce everyone was running.

The finger-pointing also coincided with a massive development push from VW-powered Carlin, led by new star rookie Norris, as well as the early-season form of the brilliant 2016 rookie champion Joel Eriksson, staying on for a second year with Motopark, and also using VW engines.

There may be very small differences, but who's to say they don't fluctuate from circuit to circuit? Anyhow, Mercedes runner Callum Ilott was able to win at Monza (a circuit where straight-line speed is more important than Macau) and qualify on the front row at Spa (similar to Macau for straight-line speed/downforce demands), while Mercedes-powered Hitech topped both qualifying sessions at the Norisring (another top-speed-dependent track).

But, once people have made up their minds...

"The troubles we have now with the engines is something we can't afford anymore," admits Frits van Amersfoort, who is one of the biggest traditionalists around in motorsport - his team, Van Amersfoort Racing, even runs under the motto 'passion, dedication, tradition'.

"The new F3 doesn't come as a surprise - we knew it was coming, and I welcome it. I'm really sad that the history of F3 as we know it is gone, but we have to be realistic. This will give us new chances."

Van Amersfoort first worked on F3 cars in the 1970s, and it was in the following decade that Carlin founder Trevor Carlin first began spannering Ralts. Like van Amersfoort, you'd expect Carlin to bemoan the new direction for F3; like van Amersfoort, he's accepting of it.

"Back in those days people were prepared to take a risk for a chance of something different," he says. "But motorsport now is so expensive people aren't prepared to take that risk. They don't want to be lumbered with the wrong chassis or engine.

"It would be great if we built a Carlin F3 car, and if Prema built a Prema F3 car, but there isn't the money or resource to do that. It [the single-make future] is a sign of the times."

Prema Powerteam chief Rene Rosin is younger than his contemporaries, but his father, team patriarch and founder Angelo, has an F3 history stretching back to the 1970s, so there's tradition here too. But Rosin comes out fully in support of the FIA.

"The prescription of the FIA is very sensible for the good of the sport," he says. "For now GP3 and F3 are struggling, even if the numbers [of competitors] at the moment are not that bad.

"The cost of F3 is really too much. We need to reduce the budget side - even if on my side, as one of the leading teams, it was OK, even for me it's difficult to keep up."

One of the selling points for F3 is that development in free competition has always enabled the drivers to learn so much more, grounding them much better than rival series for a future in F1 or other high-tech race series.

Similarly, it has also schooled engineers and mechanics in real-life development - as opposed to academic theory - and led to them taking jobs in the top echelons of the sport. But with the world economy as it is now, tied with the increasing expense of competing, a formula that only a privileged few are able to afford could prevent deserving talents from making their mark at that level.

Perhaps the time for open competition on chassis and engines has simply run its course. It is an integral part of the history of the sport. I'm going to miss it like hell...

Talking of the engineering challenge, Rosin adds: "Yeah, it's true that we need to prepare engineers and mechanics, but we also need to prepare drivers.

"In the last two or three years there has been too much emphasis on the technical side rather than working on drivers."

Prema arguably did more than any other operation to move in this direction on development and costs, but if not this team, it would almost certainly have been someone else any time soon...

At the opposite end of the scale from Prema is Euro F3's least-resourced team: Motopark. And team boss Timo Rumpfkeil - a handy F3 driver himself at the turn of the millennium - is also a supporter of the new regulations.

"For me it's a positive, I have to say," he says. "As far as I understand, it will follow the DNA of this car [on the proviso that Dallara wins the tender] - an efficient, high-downforce car, but with more power, which has been missing for a bit. And to take the DNA of this with the chance of cost control sounds good.

"What we have now is perfect to develop a driver, but the costs are borderline and it's expensive to run and labour-intensive. To keep the costs down in an open formula like we have today is probably not possible."

As well as chassis and engine, the task of promoting the F3 International series is to be put out to tender by the FIA, although pretty much everyone is expecting Formula 2 overlord Bruno Michel to be in charge.

Currently the F3 European championship is promoted by a subsidiary of the ITR under its flagship DTM, and ITR chairman Gerhard Berger told me: "We'll have to see, but I don't think so," when I asked if the organisation would be interested in the International series.

Berger added that his option to revive the old F3 Euro Series and outlined to Autosport in July, using the current generation of F3 cars, is unlikely to be pursued.

"I said if the teams all want it, under these regulations, I am happy because you can collect what is here," he said. "But now it will be a different regulation and the teams were anyway not convinced [to carry on with the current cars].

"No problem. I would have done it, I would have focused on it, but for me it's fine - other things are more important [for example, the rather pressing subject of the future of the DTM]."

Berger is a traditionalist, a guy who raced in the European F3 championship in 1983, and then in '84 with a Ralt RT3 taken to British championship glory the year before by Ayrton Senna, and he also was the architect of the revival of European F3 in 2012 in his then-role as president of the FIA Single Seater Commission. What does he think of the new rules?

"You know I am not so much in favour but times change. The people who are involved at the moment need to know what is the best. But I like F3 as it is, honestly."

Don't we all? But perhaps the time for open competition on chassis and engines at this level of the sport has simply run its course. As a 10/11/12-year-old kid, I used to regularly watch the F1 stars of the future in F3, racing Marches, Chevrons, Ralts, the odd Argo - and Martinis when the top French talents came over to the UK.

Open-competition F3 is an integral part of the history of motorsport, from its earliest 500cc iteration unearthing stars such as Stirling Moss. I'm going to miss it like hell, as will a lot of people - even those who talk in an upbeat way about the new F3's future.

But at a time when the very sustainability of the higher levels of motorsport is under threat, with manufacturers pulling out of established series due to the diversions of marketing pushes into the electric market, is it really that big a deal?

In a world where uncertainties over the financial climate are putting an ever-greater squeeze on the sport, and the world's most dangerous, deluded despot worries us all over his standoff with Kim Jong Un, F3's path to a single-make future perhaps isn't the most pressing of concerns. And the change could even save it.