Our first problem is watching it on tv. The commentary. It’s almost totally about tyres. What compound, how many sets, how long do they last? If you’re deeply into the sport, it’s probably interesting, but for a casual viewer it’s too much. We’ve not tried this and perhaps we should, but we would like to record a whole race and then remove any section that mentions tyres. We bet we could halve the race.
The tv commentary teams seem enormous now. They say things like “Fernando is thinking of…” or “Oscar intends to…”. How do they know that? They don’t, it’s a guess. It may be right, but there is just so much commentary and ‘expertise’ that anything good just gets lost in the noise. And yes, we know it’s other sports too.
Our big problem is the tinkering with the rules, on an almost race-by-race basis. A good one was Monaco. You normally have to do at least one tyre change during the race, but for this it was at least two. I guess it was supposed to make it more exciting somehow, but really it didn’t.
Rather like cricket, and maybe other sports too, the rules change and the sport gets more confusing and more boring.