Outside Line: Stefano Domenicali no matter how you spin it, this is not Formula 1!

Typically opting against the grain just for the sake of it, I decided to ignore them as a tidal wave of despondency descended from the preseason Formula 1 reportage predicting what a disaster these engines were going to be.

I thought, come on, it cannot be that bad. And to be honest, against my instincts, I decided to wait and see. I said I would let you know how I felt after Melbourne was upon us. It is now, and today, after witnessing qualifying, I was deeply troubled.

To start with, for me the highlight of any Grand Prix weekend is watching Max Verstappen go about his business. He is clearly one of the greatest drivers I have ever seen, and for sure the benchmark of this era. We know Max is a machine, no matter what he is given to drive. And for him to hit the brakes and lose the Red Bull in such a snappy style, in a manner he could not even describe afterwards, left me and most pundits perplexed about what actually happened.

What I saw was this: out of the blue, Max hit the brakes. Clearly, the setup was wrong or something amiss, and the snap was so sudden that there was no chance of keeping it in check. And we're talking the greatest driver in the world. 

This formula is a journey to nowhere. An expensive one. A careless one. A needless one. And it is going to do a lot of damage to our sport. This is not Formula 1.

On Saturday, I saw that the four big teams have an alarming advantage over everybody else. The gulf is bigger than ever before. Until last season, we had narrowed the gap to about half a second, covering the entire grid. Now we have a situation where we are counting the gaps in seconds again, back to the old days. Making a mockery of the cost caps intended to level the playing field. We have regressed.

This is like switching off one formula and adopting a completely new concept, and a formula that whoever conceived it should be held accountable for, fired, and never allowed in a motor racing paddock again. Who thought this was a good idea? Who approved it? Who demanded it? All those people deserve to be fired on the spot. Idiots.

They have taken the sport in a direction that only Stefano Domenicali can claim to see the benefits of. And of course all he has to do is pacify the board and as long as F1 rakes it in like now, who cares?

As long as Formula 1 is making as much money as it is, they do not care what we think or what we want. They will shove whatever they want down our throats.

All Stefano, in my opinion, is like a pimp flogging a hooker to punters, but the punters do not like what they see. But he cares not, it seems. Shame on him, I thought him to be a better man considering his racing pedigree and his roots with Ferrari.

As Max said, this is anti-racing. And I will add it's also not Formula 1.

It does not end there. Cadillac were embarrassing. How can they even get an entry into Formula 1 with the kind of show they are putting on? I am told we have no idea how bad and how ill-prepared this team actually is. They have basically arrived at a machine gunfight with a knife, and they are going to burn themselves badly.

I see a team that does not deserve to be in Formula 1 on merit. Whatever budget they thought Formula 1 could be conquered with, they'd better add a zero. And they better get some real people running that show. Everything I see tells me the leadership is completely out of its depth. I hope to be proven wrong, but honestly, Cadillac looks like a farce.

Let us not even talk about Aston Martin pointing the finger at Honda, with two cars that cannot do more than 30 laps, they say, before Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll will start losing teeth from the rattling.

This one falls on Adrian Newey. He decided to come out of the shadows of the technical director role and become team principal. And now he has to deliver.

Do not give me excuses that Newey arrived too late. This was his car when it looked so pretty at unveiling, but now it's not! In Formula 1, you have to deliver on demand. The higher you climb, the less hiding place there is. As Team Principal, Newey has the spotlight on him to recover this massive ball drop. That's his job. The buck stops with him, not some blokes in Japan.

Aston Martin is the most expensive project in the history of Formula 1, maybe in all of sport ever, with supposedly our sport's greatest minds in the trenches and a Lawrence Stroll wallet that seems endless.

When you mess up, the best advice is to fess up, raise your hand and say you got it wrong. Do not pass the buck to partners you have been working with for a year or more, only to suddenly discover they had juniors on the job. Seriously? 

Blaming Honda is a coward’s escape. Was due diligence done? Did Newey and AMR engineers camp at the engine factory? Did they not communicate daily or weekly? Did they not realise this long ago? Why now come up with this BS excuse?

For me, Formula 1 is Mercedes getting their act together and putting George Russell in line to become world champion this year, with no race run yet. From what we saw, he has half a second in his pocket. Guaranteed they will wipe the floor with the field unless McLaren, Williams and Alpine wake up. They all have Mercedes power. What is their excuse? The world champions, especially.

Kimi Antonelli was another highlight. What a gem of a driver he is turning out to be. The kid was absolutely awesome, and the character he showed belies his youth. Binning it in FP3 raised eyebrows, but when it mattered, again, he came back and delivered the laps when he needed to, putting the car on the front row next to Russell.

Let me let you in on a little secret that only our Editor Jad Mallak knows. One day, out of the blue, working on something totally unrelated to F1, I suddenly had a spontaneous vision. Completely random. I saw an image of Kimi standing on a podium with champagne being poured over his head.

It was just a random thought. But I will put it out there anyway. Antonelli wins the Australian Grand Prix on Sunday. You will see him on the podium many times in the future. Lots of champagne. That is my crystal ball moment.

Another thing I loved today was the inter-team battles. Once again, my theory that Nico Hulkenberg is long past his sell-by date in Formula 1 was reinforced when Gabriel Bortoleto outqualified him. I love that.

A kid with one year of experience tackles a new car and new regulations and beats a guy with a hundred races on his CV. When are these journeymen going to be given the boot? Formula 1 should have the twenty-two best drivers in the world. Nico ain't been one for years.

Dito Esteban Ocon whose long overdue expiry date in Formula 1 was been exposed by young Ollie Bearman at Haas.

Which brings me to Arvid Lindblad. Outstanding. He arrived on the scene like he belonged there all along, like he had been in Formula 1 for years. The kid took to Formula 1 like a duck to water. A wake up call for Liam Lawson in the other Racing Bull.

There is a pipeline full of kids like this year's only rookie who deserve a chance but cannot get in because journeymen, like our man Nico, hog those seats.

So I made my prediction for Sunday. Antonelli wins. I will throw into the equation that an angry Max Verstappen is a dangerous Max, so put him on the podium.

Another reason why I love Formula 1. Isack Hadjar. A year ago, his debut ended in the Albert Park wall on the way to the grid. Today, in his first race as a Red Bull driver, he put it P3. While Max binned it. When last did that happen at Red Bull?

And Oscar Piastri beating Lando Norris means Papaya Rules, and we know what that means. I predict Piastri owns Norris this season. Delightful. Three new kids on the block, topped by George Russell on the first two rows of the grid.

All I can say - after pondering a possible defection - is that I love Formula 1 too much. No matter what they do to it, I will follow it. But I reserve the right to question, blame and moan when they take it in the wrong direction.

Many people are telling me in the comments and messages that they are ready to turn their attentions to other racing series, as F1 turns into the disaster everyone predicts. I understand that. But I cannot do that, because for me, Formula 1 is the end-all and be-all of motorsport. It's my religion.

People ask what motivated me to go into Formula 1 as a photographer in my early twenties. The answer is simple. I love motorsport. I followed racing all my life, from motorcycles to GT racing to single seaters and finally Formula 1. And I said to myself, if I am good enough, I want to go to the pinnacle of the sport.

Once you have worked at that level, it becomes very difficult to get excited about anything else. So instead of turning my back on Formula 1 - although I am not wealthy and I do not have influence - I do have a platform. GRANDPRIX247. And we will use it to share my concerns about the sport I love.

It is also worth noting, for the record, that those who know me know I am a keen sim racer. I have been involved in it since the mid 1990s, back when only real nerds did this kind of thing. Today it has become far more mainstream, and some of the world’s best drivers openly use simulators. Aka Max Verstappen, top of that pyramid too.

Because of that, sim racing has gained a certain credibility that it did not have in the early days.

As a result, I have just about every major sim title available, and I am happy to say that I run Assetto Corsa, which remains the go to home simulator for replicating historic cars. Thanks to a thriving modding community, the game stays relevant and is arguably more popular than any other serious racing simulator on Steam.

Of course it is not iRacing. That is a very different product. But what Assetto Corsa allows you to do is remarkable. For example, I can virtually drive a 1973 Lotus JPS, the kind of car I watched racing at Kyalami decades ago. As a petrol head and a racing fan, that is one of the coolest hobbies imaginable.

So my simulator rig is always there.

Although these days I sim far less than I would like to because of work commitments, buy every now and then I fire up the rig and go for a drive.

Last month I purchased the new RSS Formula mod. It is a premium mod, costs about ten dollars, and it is extremely well built. However, I do have my doubts that it accurately replicates the current Formula 1 cars, because frankly, nobody outside the teams really knows how these cars behave.

Nevertheless, it is still a fascinating exercise. 

The interesting thing is that the mod offers two versions of the same car. One version runs the modern hybrid power system with all the energy recovery systems and deployment tricks. The other version uses the same chassis but replaces the hybrid unit with a naturally aspirated V10 engine.

So I started with the hybrid version.

And I must be honest, ever since the hybrid era began I have tried various simulator mods replicating these cars, and I simply hate driving them. I do not enjoy them. I do not understand the harvesting, the deployment, the complex energy management. Ditto the virtual WEC cars, which I also love but sadly cannot drive the Hypercars of today. 

Everything feels like a complicated technical puzzle rather than driving.

So when I drive Formula 1 cars in the simulator, I usually prefer the normally aspirated era or the first F1 turbo era. Still, for the sake of curiosity, I did about twenty laps at Barcelona with the RSS hybrid version.

And just as expected, I could not really drive it properly. One moment the car is doing 340 km/h, the next moment it drops to 290 the next lap. It feels strange and disconnected.

Then I switched to the exact same 2026 chassis but powered by the V10. Oh my God. The difference is like night and day. It is absolutely insane. A bulletproof engine, relentless power, nothing cutting in or out. They just drive, and the fastest piece of kit wins.

There is no sudden drop in performance, lifting and coasting and all that bull. It is simply raw V10 power, flat out, all the time. And it is glorious. After experiencing that, albeit virtually, all I could think was this: how on earth did anyone decide that the complicated hybrid contraption we have today was the direction Formula 1 should go?

Because after feeling the difference even in a simulator, one thing becomes clear. V10 is Formula 1, or at least far more so than this hybrid cr@p they are force-feeding us will ever be.

The dubious leadership of Formula 1 has delivered a highly unpopular, incredibly expensive, radically complex and irrelevant formula for a world that does not exist, as our man Jad so aptly puts.

How long will fans live with it? What about Max Verstappen?