Take engineers, give them a brief, and then wonder why the result looks odd but does what it's supposed to...

Nothing ages like an old Formula One car, and nothing advances as quickly as technology. Anyone who has watched the classic F1 race highlights on the BBC red button has seen angular, slab-sided cars with huge tyres being wrestled by heroes balancing one-handed driving against a manual gearshift, with the type of big, smokey engine blow-up that is increasingly rare in modern F1. Seeing highlights from the 70s, 80s, 90s and 00s really shows the advancements in aerodynamics as the bodywork becomes more sculpted and shinkwrapped around the mechanical skeleton underneath, and more detailed in its extremities.

The problem is the increased wake created by a leading car, the increased sensitivity of the aerodynamics, and the improvements in suspension make the car setup an increasingly fine knife edge that when there’s anything interfering with that optimal running, the car suffers disproportionately.

Being full of some of the cleverest people in the world, the F1 technical bods have put their heads together and come up with ways to produce cars that can slipstream more easily, are more fuel efficient, more challenging to drive but should be as quick as the current cars. The problem is that being clever engineers, they’ve fulfilled the brief, but not come up with good-looking cars…

If you haven’t already, go and look on YouTube for “Zonda R Monza”, then listen to the exhaust note. Large capacity, relatively low revving V12 at full scream is incredibly evocative of Ferraris of old, the booming rumble bouncing off the stands and mental images of Villeneuve, Mansell or Alesi in a scarlet car dicing with their foes. Instead we’ll have a moderately high revving 1.6 four-pot sounding like a Vauxhall Corsa being ragged in a McDonalds car park.

The aero package is being tweaked, too. Smaller wings creating less downforce with underbody-shaped floors – which are far less affected when following another car – generating more. A great solution in theory, but look at the image at the top of this page. That is what a car with skinny wings looks like. It’s not attractive, it’s out of proportion and reduces the available area for sponsors logos; not good at a time when sponsors are increasingly hard to find.

If it were up to me – and let's face it, it should be – I would not go down the route of smaller wings, but bigger ones of a fixed shape with reduced efficiency. A large, ineffective rear wing looks good on the car, creates a nice big hole in the air for the car behind, and forces teams to reduce front end grip to find an aero balance. I’d also mandate some aero pieces – maybe wing end plates – to stop the countless increasingly complex and expensive iterations of this tiny aero pieces being brought to each race.

If you reduce the avenues for this complex development, maybe the teams could spend more money on actual testing instead? OK, so testing got silly during the recent manufacturer era, but how can the fastest, most difficult to drive and intellectually demanding cars in motorsport be driven by drivers who struggle to get a day’s running before the season starts, then none during it outside of race weekends? What about reserve drivers who might have to step into a car having not driven it for 9 months or more?

Plus, being a car geek, I’d rather have a multi-team test session I could actually go and watch for a minimal fee than drivers squirreled away in simulators which I can’t. After all, what could be more fun that spending a cold, wet Tuesday at Silverstone?

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