12/05/2025
FEATURE BY MAX NOBLE
While few Aussies are likely to greet you with "G'day, sport!" any more, one can still hear the odd exasperated "Oh, c'mon sport!" At sporting events around the country as one's team/child/friends go down in a blaze of non-glory.
So it is with the current Liberty Media, FIA dance around car parts. More specifically how unique they need to be for "jolly fine racing". The ECU is already a common part. The tyres are sole-sourced and thus common, while aero is decreed to within a micron.
Now the FIA is suggesting that "gearboxes don't matter" and "engines need parity". Really? Sounds more like "Hello and welcome to a one make series!"
Come with me dear reader as we explore these concepts. First "gearboxes don't matter". Well where does one start? Let's try the beginning.
While horses can walk, trot, canter and gallop without complex supporting equipment increasing speed, it is more tortured to-do for your average reciprocating engine. Pistons go up and down, the crank shaft turns this into rotational energy... and as more fuel is pouring into cylinders, so the rotational speed increases. So far, so jolly.
But ICE units have optimum revs for peak power and peak torque. Couple this with a maximum possible number of revolutions per minute and one rapidly hits a natural maximum speed. Enter gearboxes, differentials, wheels sizes and tyres to greatly increase the flexibility of the system.
Then with Miss Physics being the demanding soul she is, one needs the further complication of a clutch mechanism to detach the spinning engine from the spinning wheels during gear changes, so one does not "have a moment" or break something. Or both.
Anyone with slightly more than a passing interest in cycling knows the impact of differing gear ratios. In cycling the idea is to have one's legs ("the engine") spinning at your preferred rotational speed regardless of the terrain. Steep hill? Easy gear, legs spinning at preferred RPM with a low speed result. Flat ground? Legs spinning at the same speed for a higher rate of progress. Lovely sweeping down-hill? Now you need a big gear to have your legs spinning, and still be able to drive the rear wheel faster than gravity alone is achieving. Different people all have differing desires for the gear ratios for each scenario as we each have differing preferences for an 'ideal' RPM and different power outputs!
So it is with race cars. The power and torque curves for your specific engine. The Apex speeds you want at a specific circuit - to avoid mid-corner gear changes which unsettle the car - all shape the precise gear ratios you want this race.
Mandate the gearbox and by extension you are forcing a mandate on the engine and the differential. Differing teams have also made different solutions for the clutch, which these days is a highly complex affair designed to more or less eliminate the momentary loss of drive as one switches cogs. Then you have varying driver preferences for entry, apex and exit speeds. No two drivers take a corner in quite the same manner.
Mandating a standard gearbox is going to force every engine to perform in the same manner, and for driving styles, and lines, through corners to converge. In short we will remove variety and racing as the equipment demands an increasingly homogeneous approach to racing.
Why? As ever dear reader, nothing to do with improving the racing. Everything to do with improving profit margins for each team. You cannot stick sponsor's logos on the inner workings of the gearbox and gain additional income. So why not make them as cheaply as possible, improve profit margins, and forget the whole thing?
F1, more than any other sport, possibly with the exception of the America's Cup, is about human skill intimately combined with the genius of human design and engineering. That is motor sport, and that is why we all fell in love with F1. This remarkable combination of skills, cunning, planning, development and then delivering it all on race day with spirited driving.
Why not standard gearbox boxes, then standard suspension, then standard wings? Heck. Why not just have custom seats for each driver, and make everything else standard!? Imagine the profit margins! The only problem being the entire engineering genius side of the sport has been crushed. It would be like equalising the America's Cup by making each team use a Hobie Cat. Sure it reduces cost but it will also kill all interest... and the talent within the America's Cup teams would all drift off to something more challenging.
Given advances in medical science, why not standard drivers? I'd say a witches brew of 30% V. Max, 30% Sir Lewis, 20% Oscar, and 20% Alonso should produce the ultimate driver! 20 identical cars, piloted by 20 identical drivers! Can you imagine the fun!? Every single race would finish in grid order. All qualifying times would be within 1,000th of a second of each other, and as a result indistinguishable! So the grid would need to be decided by the team principals playing "Rock, Paper, Scissors". Can you imagine the excitement with WWF-style commentators screaming in ecstasy and grinding live soft rock/hip-hop/rap driving the audience manic? Surely each season would be perfect bliss as we fans are sent direct to Heaven every race!
Sorry, I'm joking. We'd never standardise Team Principals, that would be silly. No one would win the first round of "Rock, Paper, Scissors" because they'd always know what the other was about to do. Now where would the sport be in that?
So like monks chanting in a medieval monastery we here at Pitpass sing on about simplifying the rules. Make them less prescriptive, set physical bounding boxes for cars and fuel flow rates/energy usage rates for engines. Then coupled with a sensible cost cap... go have at it!
What with the FIA pressing to standardise underwear and language we have little left other than non-offensive official tee shirts and musical acts, with which to express our freedom.
Can we please keep the motors within the cars, and keep the sport in the business? To achieve this we have to stop standardising everything which now appears as a "cost saving" rather than as an "area of cunning advantage". Sport before excessive profit would be my tag line. Because rather like the madness of using the Goose that lays the Golden Eggs to make pate, Liberty appear incapable of seeing that if you kill the sport in the name of profit then the profits will fall. We the people are not quite as air-headed as Liberty appear to believe.
I imagine Liberty and the FIA laughing as they claim, "What would the fans know about gearboxes!?" Then, when the FIA people with half a clue leave the room, one Liberty media exec might turn to another and say: "Actually, what is a gearbox? Does my pick-up truck have one...?" "What do you drive?" Asks exec number two. "Oh! I think it is a Tesla Cybertruck!" "Oh well then," beams exec number two. "Your truck is so advanced it has four gearboxes! One for each wheel...!!" Delighted with how advanced his truck is exec number one hums a happy tune as he walks back to the car park and jumps into his Dodge RAM... Such is their knowledge and love of cars.
If anyone in power wants to maintain a beloved sport they need to stop the profit-chasing rot. They need to sit down, breathe and let the teams be competitors once more, not franchised profit-centres. Real sport has winners and losers. It has emotion, grit, suffering and triumph. That's what causes fans to fall in love with a sport. In the case of F1 which is loved for the amazing marriage of technology and human grit it also needs to earnestly avoid a single-source common gearbox. None of us fans want to arrive at the day when we can say; Motor? Yes! Sport? No.
Max Noble
Learn more about Max and check out his previous features, here