It was so fierce that Senna decided to hit his rival in the first corner of a race, taking out both, solidifying Senna's championship.
It was exciting too. Since drivers need to take risks with 750+ HP beasts, Senna battling Schumacher, Villneuve battling Coulthard was fun.
Pit-stop tactics was the cherry on top, not the secret sauce. Engines and drive trains were not regulated. After some deaths, non rational gains (Mercedes 7G-tronic was so quick when paired with their engine. It just accelerated uninterrupted so it got banned. Renault's Open Injection engine was so powerful so it got banned a year later) and hey, it's getting too expensive cries (and Ferrari-Gate), it lost its luster for the audience.
Now the war is behind the scenes. Homologated parts, limited testing and simulation (they have yearly CPU instruction limits!) and some good people rule the sport.
It's no longer about the drivers. It's about the car you drive and the people behind it. If you have the season's best engine and Adrian Newey in your car design team, you can just win.
So it feels like the movie "Death Race" if you have a good car, you have advantage and if it doesn't break down, you win. That's it.
I left watching it the day Ferrari admitted that they're basically financed by FIA (by getting 23% more advertisement revenue cut at the end, every year).
Some more points: Standardized ECU just killed a lot of excitement by limiting remote engine tuning. Ferrari's domination slowly eroded excitement for most people. Drivers being immature and getting away with it eroded its prestige for me. I still miss Jaguar's green/gold cars. Boy, they were handsome.
So its golden era is long gone. No wonder Honda is leaving.
An Adrian Newey designed car hasn't won the championship since 2013.
There have always been engine regulations. The drivers are fighting as hard as ever against each other when they get a chance.
Pit stop tactics are not a secret sauce. You can predict the pit stop strategy pretty well before the race even starts.
It has always been as much about cars as drivers. E.g. McLaren won 4 years in the row 1988-1991 and then Williams won 3 years in the row. Ferrari won 6 years in the row from 1999 to 2004.
I really don't think remote engine tuning added any excitement.
There have been proposals such as reverse-grid races or qualifications that would have added a lot of excitement but traditionalists are against them. Maybe having a couple restarts would also help. The cars are now much more reliable than in the past so there is less random chance.
I don't know anything about this sport, but does this mean that you can't buy an off-the-shelf product?
This sounded too ridiculous to me, so I started digging. Lo and behold, [1]. Appendix 8, sections 2 and 3.
The entire thing is a fun read, with pearls such as:
in the case of an Intel CPU with either the Sandybridge or Ivybridge
chipset where the competitor chooses not to exploit the AVX feature; the
competitor must explicitly declare and be able to demonstrate that they are
not using the AVX feature in the CFD solve process. If the non‐usage of the
AVX feature is proven to the auditor, the Intel Sandybridge and Ivybridge
chipset cores can be rated as 4 FLOP/cycle/core rather than as 8
FLOP/cycle/core.
The rules seem mostly focused on computations rather than hardware.
I'm not that familiar with the hardware-level stuff they're talking about, but it seems likely that there are situations where a CPU is preferable to a GPU under these rules.
Of course, the people who made that rule probably just looked at the cost of a GPU vs the cost of a CPU without realizing that per operation GPUs are much cheaper to run.
EDIT: I originally heard this on Reddit and after looking I can't find any real sources, so this could be inaccurate.
They even have an equation governing the supply of car power units.
See Appendix 9, section b.
The details still aren't out yet but Ferrari literally managed to cheat the fuel flow sensor last year - this is probably the most important rule in the sport, for the cars at least.
I have connected to supercomputers and ran expensive experiments (not for F1 :)) from all kinds of devices, from phones to borrowed crappy netbooks, and from all kinds of places, like bars, the beach, etc... so I don't understand how that kind of regulations could be enforced unless they physically lock the engineers up for the season.
I do agree rules have killed some of the fun, it seems to be the reliance on aerodynamics as a means to gain an advantage after the limits on engine power and lifetime (top teams having a "qualifying engine" that was destroyed after one qually session, and race engines designed to last one race was crazy though).
Aero being so important means following other cars for an overtake puts the car behind at a real disadvantage, hence the "DRS" hack.
The trouble with F1 is that the "anything goes" environment they had until the 80s/90s will always be more exciting than the rules they have now to stop drivers killing themselves. They did seem to choose rules that disproportionately worked against creating fun races though.
The Netflix series covering F1 is fun to watch.
People find competitive races more exciting than individual time trials. I don't think that's really unfathomable is it?
Generally I think people find racing more exciting.
So the driver wins on the track, and not the pit crew in the pits.
What I mean is, passing usually requires some sort of screwup or random external force (race start mosh pit, engine failure, flat tires, etc.) and rarely does it happen because one driver out maneuvered another.
Races can be exciting, but if the end of the race has basically the same order as the qualifying time trials, then it really doesn't matter. Might as well say the qualifiers is the race.
The cars can store and deploy energy. Often times the optimal strategy is to alternate storing and deploying energy on consecutive laps. So there is a ton of skill involved in staying as close to the driver in front while on a "harvest" lap so that they can pass the driver on the next "deploy" lap.
This is just one of the many, many ways that skill comes into play.
For more detail, I suggest watching the "track guide" videos by former Champion Nico Rosberg. He basically does sim laps while commentating the details that separate a pole position run from a 4th place run.
F1 is more of an engineering competition than a driver competition, but both are extremely important. There are very few similar motorsport series. Le Mans used to be that way (and died a slow death due to rising costs), Dakar is like that, rally? I believe is like that, but really don't know any others.
I am an F1 fan and I really like the engineering aspect of it.
I expect the answer to that involves how well (or how poorly) rallying is televised.