Does radio kill the driving star?

 

This week the FIA has released another technical directive designed to control the level of information being passed from the team to the driver. These regulations are getting increasingly detailed and will, in my view, confuse and complicate F1 racing rather than improve it. It will generate more protests and leave us with situations, as we experienced after the 2016 British Grand Prix, where fans leave the circuit still not knowing the final result of the race.

But aside from the regulatory problems, F1 is and should be the pinnacle of racing technology. We live in the era of big data. You can’t escape it and you can’t put the genie back in the bottle. Every organisation in the world is currently trying to work out what their digital strategy is, how they are going to maximise the use of data to improve performance. What is Formula 1 doing? It is trying to roll back the years to a time when the only communication between driver and team would be via a pit board or frantic hand signals.

Formula 1 is the most amazing exemplar of high performance. In F1 talent combines with technology to create amazing levels of performance, innovation and teamwork. And that is the point, Formula 1 is about teamwork. Drivers are the stars and we want to see them fighting on the track. But we also recognise that it is a team of hundreds (and in some cases thousands) of people that contribute to the on-track performance. We should recognise and celebrate the power of technology in F1. We should use it to the maximum to give fans more insight of what is happening in real time. I want to hear more interactions between the team and their drivers, not less.