Ben Anderson

And like John said, it hasn't worked, so it can't carry on.

But at the same time, Formula One's moving into this show-busy entertainment over sport era that Stefano's so happy with.

I wonder if they might just go all in on that for the next rules and go, do you know what, finally, kind of what Christian Horner wanted,

He was banging that drum for ages in the early part of the hybrid era, obviously partly because his hybrid engine from Renault was so terrible.

But he was saying, oh, it should just be loud, fast, exciting.

It doesn't really matter about the road car side, which was easier for him to say because he wasn't at that stage building up an internal powertrain division and wasn't bothered about road cars and all of that kind of stuff.

But certainly there was a kernel of truth in it that Formula One should be about exciting racing cars

As John said, drivers driving flat out, all the while we've got drivers going slower to go faster.

Formula One is broken, in my opinion.

So we have to get away from that.

But maybe just ditching the whole kind of, we need to be road relevant to the manufacturers is the final step.

They will gain enough in exposure from just being...

stickers on the cars stickers on simple engines just being present within that environment without the need to say oh you know this is a showcase for our latest technology blah blah blah that by that point people have switched off on uh my father-in-law had this theory he's followed motorsport for decades and he he couldn't understand from the fa's point of view why you couldn't just have formula one as the uh

petrol or combustion engine formula Formula E is the electric and sports car racing is the hybrid it seemed like a neat fit that every segment of track racing had its own technology

bubble that it fitted in but there's there's like a feeling that formula one has to be kind of a nod to everything and i'm not sure that works i think it's a compromise it doesn't need and maybe this car crash of a regulation set that we're under now is the final push you need to just go you know what simplify everything just make formula one about as simple cost-effective exciting racing as you can

Okay, so that explains a lot.

I mean, I like the idea of having my cake and eating it.

Who doesn't?

Maybe I went too far with how much F1 can afford to sideline the manufacturers in terms of technology relevance, but I do...

I still do think that Formula 1 is getting... If it stays on this trajectory and the interest on the US side especially keeps ramping up, then they don't need to be beholden to them.