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Comment by f055 | Hacker News Reader

You are spot-on! At the moment, F1 has little diversity and lots of restricting regulations. Formula-E is even worse, with everyone driving the same cars. NASCAR, or Indy, is not better either.

All the revolution and innovation is in WEC (World Endurance Championship), it's the one with the Le Mans round. This year, 4 strong competitors arrive in the top class and this is the series to watch http://www.carmagazine.co.uk/car-news/first-official-picture...

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Everyone is driving the same car only for the first season. Second season they are opening up the motor and inverter for improvement and modification. In the third it sounds like the battery will be opened up as well.

My guess is that they want to keep things as competitive as possible between the drivers. Slowly opening up the playing field for modifications will keep the races interesting but still foster innovation (at least for the first few years).

The main aim with the limited number of allowed modifications is to keep the cost of entry low, such that the brand new championship actually gets entrants. It's hard to justify a large budget for an unheard of championship.

I was really excited for FE, but at the moment is too like gokarts for me. But if your predictions come true, and they open up everything, I would really like FE to become as crazy as the innovative F1 years of 70s, 80s and early 90s - where just the speed and winning mattered, without the carbon and safety levels ruining the sport...

>too like gokarts for me. But even Formula 1 is essentially pimped-up shifter gokart.

Thanks to too restrictive regulations. I miss the times of four-front-wheelers, gas turbines and vacuum-undercarriage.

>At the moment, F1 has little diversity and lots of restricting regulations.

What would Formula 1 look like today with no restrictions beyond basic driver safety?

It would consist of just two or three remaining teams being able to raise the funds to compete...

Or in other words, it would no longer exists, because the public would lose interest in the lack of competition.

The funding cap currently in place makes sense, but the extremely restrictive construction rules don't. Some public, including me, lost interest anyway a few seasons ago. I would love to see F1 with say $50M max season budget and no rules :)

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