Before we look at the individual rules it may be worth to take some time out to see what can be gained from these rules. The FIA seems to have a few benefits in mind, some which they are happy to share with us and others that they may feel is too controversial.

For several years now the FIA have claimed that they are trying to lower the cost of the sport. This is probably in response to appeals over the years from teams like Prost, Minardi, Arrows, Jaguar and Jordan.
So far I have not been able to see any evidence that the FIA's efforts have resulted in any cost reduction. They were probably effective in reducing cost in the restricted areas that they changed the rules in but the unavoidable truth is that the absolute total of funds sponsors put into the sport is available to the teams and if the FIA makes one area cheaper the funds are merely diverted to other areas of research and development that, until that time, could not be afforded. The only way to reduce the cost, in my opinion, is to restrict funding at the source, i.e. limiting the total amount that each team gets. I suspect that this will be very hard to police even if they could get the teams to agree.

Periodically it is necessary for the FIA to slow the sport down. If cars are allowed to go faster unrestricted the risk to drivers, crew, officials and spectators go up exponentially and there really are only two practical options: Change racing circuits to cater for the higher risk, which will involve extensive changes to tracks and grounds to put grandstands even further away from the circuit and extending "slow down" or run off areas. Apart from huge costs for venue organisers it will also result in many of the current circuits being abandoned as, for example, Monaco cannot be altered significantly before the city will change forever.
The other alternative is to rein speeds back in and at the end of the day this is the only reasonable option. It is how this is done that is the problem.

The Concorde Agreement that we have heard so much about in the past year has, as one of its primary purposes, given the FIA the right to make rule changes for the sole purpose of slowing the sport down.
With 20/20 hindsight this is flawed as the intention was to give the FIA the power to control the safety of the sport. There are, however, many other factors that contribute to the danger of the sport. For example when minimum weight of cars were introduced it may have been the intention to make the cars safer (by controlling power to weight ratio, which after all is one of the basic measures of acceleration and top speed) but as new, lighter, materials were developed cars were being brought up to the minimum weight by adding ballast. Today the ballast forms a substantial part of the overall mass of a formula one car.
The old adage that speed kills is not totally true. It is actually the rate of deceleration that is the killer (it takes as much energy to slow something as it took to accelerate it). Drive into a brick wall at high speed and it is the sudden stop that kills.
The ballast in the car is by definition dense and stores up a lot of energy at full speed, adding considerably to the danger once the car is out of control.
The way the Concorde agreement is worded, the FIA are powerless to reduce this risk as a rule to reduce the ballast and therefore the overall weight of the car cannot be construed as slowing the car.

So we may often wonder why changes to the rules by the FIA seem ineffective and sometimes even stupid but they are severely restricted by the Concorde Agreement and therefore cannot always address the obvious.

Last year we saw formula one cars reach 350 km/h on some of the circuits. This is starting to get way too fast for reasonable safety on virtually all of the circuits, so there is no denying that the FIA is justified in slowing the cars. It is only the way in which they are going about it that concerns me, but more on that later.
Over the last decade we have seen formula one races become more and more processional. Overtaking became difficult, if not impossible, and pit stop strategy became a very important tool to manipulate the order of the race.
As exciting as pit stops were they did not compensate spectators for the loss of seeing an overtaking duel on the track itself. I am sure that the FIA are very aware of this disillusionment and very motivated to fix the problem. Again, I believe that some of the changes that they made will help, but some of the others will have little or no effect on overtaking.

For 2005 races the rule changes are in three basic areas: Engines (with some follow through rules on spare cars), Tyres and Aerodynamics. There are also qualifying system changes, which I will cover too.

Engines (and changes to spare car rules):

Each engine must last for two complete events.
But not really. If an engine breaks down and needs to be replaced, say after or during practice on the first of the two races the driver may start with another engine but loses 10 places on the starting grid. If he did not get to qualify because the engine failed he starts from the back of the starting grid or if the engine failed after qualifying it is the back of the grid too.
If the engine fails during a race there is no penalty regardless of whether this happened in the first or the second of the two races that it was supposed to last for.
Confusing? Yes.

I can understand that any driver that starts with an engine different from the one he qualified in should be penalised to avoid teams building special qualifying engines and then orchestrating a well timed engine failure to move the driver into the spare car that just happens to have an engine designed for full race distance.
Where I do get confused is that it is OK for an engine to blow during a race but not if it is in practice. Again I can understand why - the FIA will be severely criticised if spectators attending a race find out that their favourite drivers are not even going to start, but I do feel that the rules are unnecessarily clumsy and patently compromised. It is almost as if they decided that it is important that engines should last for two events and made that decision before considering how it will work. Questions like: "What if a top driver does not start a race?" Even worse: "What if many of the favourite drivers have to sit out a race?" "What if the teams use this to somehow introduce qualifying engines again?" " Where are the loopholes?", were catered for as an afterthought. That is when a simple straightforward intention turned into obscure, and in my opinion, ineffective rules. They will not change anything significantly but could make some races chaotic and confusing. This certainly will not add more safety. In fact, the enforcement of these rules will increase risk of accidents, as a fast car starting ten places down or at the back of the field will be barging through the ranks to recover lost ground.

Be that as it may, let's look at how effective this is going to be:

It may be a little cheaper for teams as, theoretically they will need less than half as many engines per season as before. However, by far the lion's share of the cost of the engines is the development cost. Developing longer lasting engines may even increase these costs in 2005 and, as engines are going to be smaller in 2006, most of these costs will apply to only 2005.
I will be amazed if these new, longer lasting, versions of the same engines we saw on the circuit last year will be perceivably slower.
We already know, by simple power to weight calculation, that last year's formula one car was using most of it's power to obtain the downforce needed to achieve the huge adhesion of these cars through corners. Seeing that this is already being reduced (I'll cover that later) I will be amazed if the cars are slower in 2005 simply because their engines are expected to go further.
Engine wear is about extremes in formula one. Rev limits are set just below where these engines will destroy themselves and it is at this very high level of stress that most of the wear, or damage, is likely. It takes a very small reduction in revolutions, with an equally small reduction in power, to substantially increase the potential life of an engine.
By that I mean that the teams have already developed the skills to build a motor that has a high probability to finish a single race (not all of them got there; McLaren jumps to mind). If power is reduced by something like two or three percent those engines should be able to make another race. With less drag cars producing 3% less power may even be faster in a straight line.

The rules around the use of the spare car are equally as confusing, for the same reasons. The FIA have to make rules to ensure that the number one driver of each team does not get there with two cars: one for qualifying and another for racing but again I feel that the rules are unnecessarily clumsy.
My conclusion? I do not believe that this, almost interim rule for 2005 only, will make much difference.

Tyres:

Only one set of tyres are allowed for qualifying and the race.

Out of all of the rule changes I feel that this has the best chance to achieve some of the desired results.
By far the most significant aspect for spectators is that this rule change may bring back overtaking to the sport again.
In the last several seasons we have seen that although it may be easy to catch a car it is very hard to overtake. This is because, even if the overtaking car is substantially faster than the leading car, once it has caught up it is in the turbulence of the leading car which affects the following cars ability to get through corners fast or accelerate out of corners as the grip of its tyres are dependent on the downforce it gets from its wings (front and back) and these do not work effectively in the turbulence of another car.
The only alternative is to go off the racing line - to get free of the turbulence of the leading car where wings and other aerodynamic devices will work effectively - but because of the softer compound tyres that were used in the past these areas were covered in tyre debris (which, on soft compound tyres come off as little rolled up bits - a bit like the little wormy things that you get on your page if you use an eraser). These are aptly called marbles and they are as slippery as marbles. Going off the racing line was not an option.
Harder compound tyres leave a lot less marbles, and tyres that can last for the entire race and qualifying session will have to be substantially harder than even the hardest tyres we saw last year. They may still leave marbles but I suspect that they will be more like high performance road cars that really only leave rubber dust which should be much better.
If overtaking off the racing line is possible (and I hope it will be) then cars with a speed advantage will suddenly have many more overtaking opportunities and we may have racing on the circuit and not only in the pits come back to the sport.

We can but hope.

Even taking into account the additional research that will be needed the savings should be very substantial. We used to see teams use up all their allocated tyres per weekend (forty dry-weather tyres). The new rules have the potential of reducing this to two, or at most three sets. [Four sets of dry-weather tyres is the maximum allowed per event or weekend and that includes all the different compounds so practically speaking there may only be one or two suitable sets of tyres.]
Add to this the cost of transporting and storing these tyres and it has to be a lot cheaper.

How much the saving in tyres will impact the overall cost is hard to say and even if the savings are big there is still no reason why this saving in cost will not just be absorbed in another area of development, as I mentioned before.
I do not know if one set of tyres will slow the pace down. It may lower cornering speeds but there is no reason to assume that straight line speeds will lower substantially.
The probable net effect will be no reduction is straight-line speed but slower corners. Longer braking distances (because of lower grip), slower through the turn itself (lower grip again) and slower acceleration for the same reason, may bring lap times down but not top speed. We will just have to see if this will make it safer or not.

Aerodynamics:

There are many changes made to these rules but at the end of the day the basics of the rules and their effect can be summarised as follows;

Minimum ride height has been increased.
Maximum height of aerodynamic devices is limited.
Rear aerodynamic devices are moved forward.

Bodywork changes regulated will constrain downforce without reducing drag (I am not sure that this will survive).
The way the FIA explained this is that the net effect of these rule changes would be to reduce downforce by as much as 30% without a reduction in drag.
These changes were put in place towards the end of October of last year and were in discussion for quite some time before that. The teams have had a lot of notice and all of them would have been working on it from at least the start of November.

I may not know as much about aerodynamics as the people at the FIA but there are two aspects of this that I do not accept:

I would have thought that aerodynamic devices, like wings and barge boards, accounted for a huge portion of drag and find it hard to accept that the effect of the bodywork behind the car could have that much influence.

Wind tunnels and aerodynamic development using these bigger and better wind tunnels is still very new so I do not share the FIA's confidence that these rules will work. I am sure that, as I am writing this, there are many, highly qualified people, working round the clock to either eliminate some of the drag or to convert the drag back to downforce, or both.

Already there are many rules on the shape and dimensions of the suspension struts to limit the teams using these as aerodynamic devices. My understanding is that the distance that the body panels may extend behind the rear wheels has been restricted so that this area can no longer be shaped to eliminate drag or create downforce. Depending on how teams can cope with this rule change it may expose parts of the gearbox and engine. I had a look at the rules and I do not see any that address the shape of the engine or gearbox. What stops the teams from shaping some of the drag causing engine parts to either reduce drag or increase downforce? Are we going to see wing shaped fuel lines? Sure, that may be an absurd suggestion but I will bet that if bulky items like cylinder head covers cause drag they will be changed very quickly.

I will not be surprised to find that Ferrari eliminated 50% of the loss in downforce before the end of last season already and Minardi will get there after the 2005 season because they just do not have the money to change that much so soon. Williams on past performance will come up with another radical change that does not work and McLaren will get it right but take most of the season to make it work. Apart from anything else this does not level the playing field - in fact, it is likely to widen the gap between the rich and poor teams.

If we combine some of the effects of all the rule changes it does get a lot more interesting. Remember when McLaren were blowing rear tyres quite regularly? We all suspected that the tyres could not handle the pressure that the back wing applied to them.

What if the new tyres can't handle all that downforce for that long? Then it becomes a moot point to care about how much the rules allow in downforce, as it then becomes a factor of what the tyres can take. That would slow the cars down.

What if the tyres have to be inflated more to do the distance? The flex of the sidewalls of any tyre is responsible for heat build up (which in the past we have seen is desirable to some extent) but the flex of the sidewall also causes fatigue. If this fatigue becomes a factor it is simply fixed by inflating them more.

Tyres that deliver the same grip when harder should not be that much of a problem but it may create a much bigger problem because last year's F1 car was relying on the cushion effect of the tyres to absorb a lot of the shocks that their suspension was not designed to handle. Take this away and suspension changes are inevitable.

It will be an interesting season and it may take some time before a pattern emerges but I am pretty sure that the cars will not be slower in a straight line (in fact they could even be faster). I hope that I am wrong because we do not want a sport that is that dangerous.

Lap times will be down because cornering speeds will be down and braking distances will increase but I do not see anything in the rule changes that will slow the sport down for the whole season.

For the FIA it will be back to the drawing board before half of the season has gone.

Qualifying:

We have seen qualifying go from an hour-long event that happened on the Saturday before the race to the really challenging procession of two sessions where every driver gets only one lap.

Both had their problems.

The old one-hour session had no cars on the circuit for at least the first half. All the drivers were sitting in the pits waiting for someone else to go out and clean the track for them and when they finally came out it was a shambles of aborted runs because it became too crowded.

Last year the format was slightly better because only one car was on a qualifying run at a time but because it was only one lap if anything went wrong it was over. The potential for disaster on the second round (the qualifying that counted) was just as large and if the weather changed halfway through the session outcomes became totally unpredictable so starting grids were often very strange.

This year we will still see two sessions but results will be aggregated for grid positions.

From a purist point of view I think it will be better as the new qualifying system is more likely to put the fastest cars on the front of the starting grid (I do not like races that have slow cars in the front of the starting grid as it increases the danger and often holds up the top cars).

There are however a few wild cards caused by the tyre rules.

Some teams may, as they did last year, qualify on a low fuel load to get to the front of the grid and therefore in a commanding position at the start of the race. Others may try to qualify as well as they can on a full fuel load hoping to capitalise on not having to pit when the others do.

I do not know how it will work this year. The tyres may not wear well if the race is started on a heavy fuel load. This may apply to either Bridgestone or Michelin or both.

If fuel load does not significantly affect tyre wear there seems to be little point in stopping more than once to refuel. That may be in the middle of the race or it may be better to start the race on a slightly lighter fuel load to get a better qualifying position, which means an earlier pit stop. It may even make sense to have the lighter fuel load at the tail end of the race because of tyre wear.

It is unlikely that Michelin and Bridgestone will perform the same. It is unlikely that they will have similar performance when new and just as unlikely that they will have matching performance when worn. It is going to be very interesting and the tyre war may take some time to settle down.

I have decided to call 2005 "The Year of the Rubber", and I did not miss the obvious connotation. Unless both tyre manufacturers get it right, someone is going to be screwed.

Agree or disagree ?

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