Hacker News Reader

Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

> Of all the forms of immortality, my favorite is participating in a competition in such a brilliant, incorrect way that a rule is permanently added just for you.

That's precisely why car races are boring these days. Everything is forbidden and over-regulated so there's no space for innovation anymore. Look at F1 and its bloat of regulations.

View on HN

But in F1 it's exciting because you never know what rules they are gonna enforce this time and for whom. /s

Edit: on a more serious note: The regulations are so tight to keep it exciting. Frustratingly, if the regulations are more open, one of the better funded teams will just run away with the best car. That already happened in some seasons, but would be even worse without tight regulations.

I have a historic car that ended up banned at Le Mans over rules and caused Lotus to stop competing while at the same Ferrari did not get banned from the same race despite also falling afoul of some different rules. at least according to legend, anyway.

According to Adrian Newey's book it came out in 2015 that Ferrari had a secret deal with the FIA that allowed Ferrari to veto any regulation changes. It also is interesting how cars in the early 90s started to have more advanced electronics like active suspension which Ferrari never got to work and then those things got banned.

There is definitely precedent. In ‘62 Ferrari threatened to pull all their cars from Le Mans over some ruling they disagreed with. Lotus went home and didn’t go back to LM for many, many years.

(Reading the Wikipedia article, looks like they only mention two Lotus 23s going but I think there were more)

I think many of the regulations in F1 are because people generally don’t like to watch other people die. F1 drivers killing themselves all over the track is bad for business.

That's definitely another source of regulations. Many of the very specific regulations that dictate minute details are about more competitive races though. For example the current regulation changes that called in effect in 2022 were all about aero that allows for better following and thus wheel-to-wheel racing. Mercedes' wing that flexed a few microns too much had nothing to do with safety

With the cost cap these days, I wish they would let up on so many of the 'this is to expensive to develop for everyone' regulations.

Give us back mass dampers, active suspension, flexi-wings, dual-axis steering, and similar things. None of these are driver aids, and they aren't inherently unsafe (flexi wings might be more fragile). They were banned because it would be too expensive for everyone to have to develop it.

But the cost cap solves the problem of 'too expensive for everyone to develop it'. Everyone gets the same choice, and if a properly tuned mass-damper takes 30 million to get right, and 10 million to sort-of-work. Then people get to pick where the best cost-benefit trade-off lies.

> one of the better funded teams will just run away with the best car

There's one way to quickly solve this. Just mass-produce the cars and give everyone the exact same car. Then we will know who is the best racer.

You just invented Indy racing. And it's excellent.

> because you never know what rules they are gonna enforce this time and for whom.

Narrator: "It was Gasly."

Motorsports are different than other sports because the drivers' lives are under very real risk. A lot of the regulation is to keep the drivers alive. It comes at the expense of excitement but we would all agree it's necessary.

So the next step is to remove the drivers and have a more exciting race. I feel like there's a missing league of F1 autonomous driving cars.

I don’t disagree that the racing itself could be more exciting in that scenario, but without the human element, I just don’t think people would stay interested

People like expensive crashes. Just look at Facebook:p

> I just don’t think people would stay interested

Make fake AI drivers with a backstory and AI-generated faces and stories and people won't see the difference

I think we could already run them from simulators cockpits. So just throw in a few cameras and network and let the rules to be lose.

There was an attempt that failed.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32183567

Motorsports are not unique in this regard. John Delamere pioneered the forward somersault long jump technique [0], which was then banned for fear that athletes might break their necks.

[0] https://vault.si.com/vault/1974/07/29/the-flip-that-led-to-a...

> That's precisely why car races are boring these days. Everything is forbidden and over-regulated so there's no space for innovation anymore. Look at F1 and its bloat of regulations.

Does rally (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDGJoPmR_8U) count as car racing?

Here's another one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2F7EaeDbHY&t=158s

Got to wonder what the spectator body count is at an event like this.

Well, Group B was peak rally popularity, but as drivers (and public) started dying, it had to be regulated to oblivion.

Rally is just going to be another example. As of this year, all the cars are econobox facades over space frames. No trickle-down innovation or 'win on Sunday sell on Monday'.

Probably don’t paint the entire sport with one brush. Lots of racing is very exciting, especially to the people who are doing it (the vast majority of racing is amateur/club/etc.) Bergmeister vs Magnussen wasn’t that long ago…

have you tried watching BTCC/British Touring Car Championship? it's a lot of inches-apart racing with a lot of actual contact and some incredibly skilled drivers. can be quite thrilling!

Besides the Can-Am series lenient regulations, what auto race series didn't have regulations?

And yet here we are!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com