Patently, it isn't. They've conclusively proved they don't give a damn about history other than for marketing purposes. They're not still driving in open cabins and leather helmets the way Fangio did. Nor are they driving on slick tyres with massive superchargers the way Jackie Stewart did. There is almost nothing about the modern, titanium and carbon fibre, computer telemetry monitored, wind tunnel tested V10 car driving around a purpose built F1 circuit in Dubai that has anything to do with the history of F1 other than the ethos that it's designed to go very very fast.
If F1 is actually about anything, it's about progression. It's about pushing the technical envelope. It's about looking forward, not back.
The idea that F1 cars
have to have 'non enclosed cockpits' is entirely arbitrary. They've chucked away huge lumps of the sport's 'history' when they became non-profitable. After Sirtess and Massa, if another driver gets badly injured due to a head impact with a piece of debris, it will get
very expensive indeed for the F1 teams. Look at what happened with Senna - Ratzenburger got killed, they didn't fix the reason, then Senna was killed the same way. The result is the F1 powers spent christ knows how long in Italian courts and spent millions of pounds on lawyers and then had to spend millions more to make sure it didn't happen again. if that looks likely to happen this time round, do you honestly think the likes of Bernie Ecclestone will give a second's consideration to 'history', or will he just immediately do whatever most efficiently protects his arse?
Well that's a wonderfully eloquent straw man argument but it doesn't matter a bag of beans. I suspect nobody wants them to stop driving around at 200MPH, I certainly don't. That's the whole point of the thing. However, legal responsibility and possible litigation require them to make it as safe as possible for the people doing so. Recent events seem to have been pretty good evidence (to me at least) that having the driver's head sticking out of the thing with only a helmet between them and whatever is flying around out there is one of the things that they may look at and say 'well, I don't think we can live with that any more'.
To be honest I don't see what is particularly 'sacred' about F1 cars having open cockpits. Given they all wear entirely enclosed helmets, you can't see the drivers anyway. The cockpits are now designed so you're essentially coccooned other than your head when sat in one and at best you can see the top half of their helmet and not much else. The neck protection systems they've installed post Senna mean they're pretty much rigid in the cockpit anyway. What you're saying is you desperately want to see a roughly 30cm diameter piece of painted carbon fibre for an hour or so that occasionally wobbles about a bit. Err... why?
It's not like bikes, where you can see the rider's weight shifting and how they are manipulating the centre of balance. You're not going to learn anything from it. With an enclose cockpit you'd still get the camera view of the driver's steering wheel so you'd see what's going on. What exactly are you missing?
As I say, nobody has yet come up with any sort of decent explanation of
why F1 cars have to have open cockpits. Given virtually every F1 team throws away virtually all of the car every couple of years, given the drivers helmets are essentially just another place to put corporate sponsorship and given F1 is the sport that hardly gives a tinker's whatnot for vast swathes of it's history, what exactly is being 'saved' here?
Jon
