Parc Ferme: Formula 1’s luggage Kart moment

For those who are not familiar with the segment, Austin (Mike Myers) is driving a luggage cart through a narrow tunnel when he suddenly finds his path blocked.

On realizing he’s gone “the wrong shagging way”, he then attempts to turn said cart around. Unfortunately for the hapless spy, the tunnel is too narrow (or the luggage cart too long). Despite this, he naively continues to try to execute the maneuver. The scene is sped up in the film, but no progress is made and he only makes the situation worse.

Now, substitute Myers with F1’s tripartite members and the tunnel with the current F1 PU regulations, and you have the perfect GIF for last Monday's F1 commission meeting.

It’s not uncommon for a committee, in order to get business done, to don its own straitjacket and lock itself in a cell.

F1 did this the moment it was persuaded that getting into bed with vehicle manufacturers was the way ahead.

Bernie Ecclestone warned the teams in the past about this Pandora's box. In his view, manufacturers are or were fair-weather friends - entities that would drop their F1 commitments when the going got financially tough. His words proved to be prophetic in 2008 during the economic downturn.

However, ignoring the voice of experience, together with Formula One Management's (FOM) acquiescence to these financial big guns, is why everyone has to meet up online and try to fix things. Much in the way of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic! 

The FIA is often characterized as the bad guy here, but Parc Ferme's view is that they have done their best, given the difficult situation.

FOM needed PUs to be what the manufacturers wanted, not what the sport demanded. The latest set of regulations was pushed through with the introduction of the ADUO (Additional Development & Upgrade Opportunities); a mechanism designed to ensure no one stole a march in the development stakes – like Mercedes has.

However, its application is arguably somewhat vague in the scheme of things, with as many interpretations as there are PU manufacturers. Luckily, there’s no committee involved with this decision. It's the FIA who decides who does and doesn’t get it.

A good measure of a fair decision would be if no one was happy with it…

The output of the April 20th meeting was unsurprisingly… meh. Toto Wolff was at pains to suggest they would take a scalpel, not a baseball bat, when making changes. What he forgot to mention was that the scalpel in question was blunt. 

Maybe it’s time that F1 returned to its sporting roots and let the FIA formulate the regulations. Consult with FOM and the Teams, of course, but ultimately remain unencumbered by the agendas of others.

The President of the FIA was quite public about F1 needing to be normally aspirated. An idea that core F1 fans wholeheartedly support. This little spark of reason was quickly hosed down by FOM’s PR hit man Stefano Domenicali at the time.

However, with the PU season of discontent showing no signs of abating, it seems that in 2030 we may still see the President’s suggestion come to fruition, that is, if F1 remains the premier race series it is now…