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It's a balance between man and machine, between tradition and progress. F1 racing cars would be faster if they replaced the driver with a computer. The fans wa

• bigiain 11y ago
  Interestingly though - those now-banned-in-F1 driver aids are all over showroom floors and making regular cars safer. (as are older technologies initially developed in top level racing - disk brakes, fuel injection, radial tires, etc...) Racing in all it's forms is nearly always conducted under some entirely arbitrary artificial constraints (even when the rules don't enforce it, money ends up taking the same place). Sometimes those constraints are "we'll sell more cars if they all look a little bit like Fords or Chevys", sometimes they're more like "we've got home-team advantage, so we'll make the rules say you've got to sail your America's Cup contender to Newport to compete, even if you come from Europe/New Zealand instead of Rhode Island...". Sometimes the constrains are "these new 4WD supercharged Group B Rally Cars are killing too many people, lets stop racing anything that fast thru the trees - lets race showroom floor shopping trolly hatchbacks instead..." Keep in mind that "Cycling with motors" isn't motorcycle racing either - in motorcycle racing there's engine capacity limits, number of cylinders, number of gear ratio limits, minimum weights, restrictions on brake materials, even things like limits on the number of motors used for a season and work allowed to be done on motors between races, and MotoGP are now "standardising" the engine management electronics/software as well... WorldSBK have homologation rules, where you need to sell a certain number of your racing motorcycle to the general public as road bikes to be allowed to race (modified) version in the race series. (I'm currently riding round a two stroke 125 Cagiva Mito that's a roadgoing version of the now banned/superseded 125GP bikes... These day's you've got no choice but to compete on a 250cc four stroke in that race series/class. In the past there were 8 cylinder bikes, and bikes with 16 speed gearboxes - all just history/legends now...) A lot of "the balance" seems to end up being about money - either to stop the guy with the deepest pockets from wining everything (who'd want to go sail boat racing against Larry Ellison without some rules about how much he can spend?), or to make sure the sponsors keep pouring money into "the sport" (how many F1 rules do you suppose there are relating to drivers meeting corporate and sponsor hospitality and media requirements, rather than technical regulations about what you're allowed to race on the track?)
• thaumasiotes 11y ago
  > Technology is an intrinsic part of the sport, but it is not allowed to play a dominant role. I can't make any sense of this. Any bicycle is 100% a product of technology. I can't think of anything that plays a more dominant role in bicycle racing than... bicycles.
  • techterrier 11y ago
    I fairly sure the cyclist has a fair amount to do with it. You can't just buy a £10k rig and win the Tour.
    • thaumasiotes 11y ago
      If we vary a bicycle race one way, by replacing the bicycles with walking sticks, which require no technology as long as you're willing to put in the time to find one rather than carving it; and vary it another way, by replacing the cyclists with monkeys -- which of those two resulting races (humans with walking sticks vs monkeys with bicycles dimensioned appropriately to the monkeys) is more similar to a "bicycle race"? You can have a bicycle race without cyclists; you can't have one without technology. Technology is playing a dominating role. I tend to suspect that jdietrich didn't mean to include things like metallurgy, rubber, and gears under the umbrella of "technology", but there is no actual line between the use of gears and the use of motors.
      • dalke 11y ago
        > there is no actual line between the use of gears and the use of motors. There's a very clear line in this case. Cycling is a human powered sport. Battery, gasoline, nuclear, and other power sources are not allowed. This is why mopeds are not allowed. Also prohibited is temporary power storage like a capacitor or spring, which might be used for regenerative braking. You can put all the motors you want on your bike (IMHO) so long as you don't energize them. Only a specific set of technology is allowed in a bike race. Under UCI rules, cyclist aren't allowed to use aeroshells, and recumbent bicycles are also prohibited, even though both are much more "similar" to a bicycle than your proposed monkey with a walking stick. The rules attempt to describe the ineffable concept of what it means to be a "bicycle race". They are meant to encapsulate a mass consensus based on tradition and expectations, including the idea of how to balance "human" and "technology". The rules must also face the challenge of changes in technology, and ever-present rules lawyering. The Lugano charter, mentioned earlier, tries to capture and influence that mass consensus. There are different interpretations of what a "bicycle race" means, which is why there are different rules organizations. If you want to run a race which allows a monkey with a walking stick to compete, feel free!
• erpellan 11y ago
  I'd love to see an autonomous F1 series!
  • jasonjei 11y ago
    That would actually be very interesting. Instead of drivers competing, it would be code competing.
    • ccozan 11y ago
      or, even better, AI competing.
      • strictnein 11y ago
        AI is code
        • thenewwazoo 11y ago
          And code is speech. Does that mean AI is speech? Man, that's a weird thought.
          • samstave 11y ago
            Are they considered legal persons then?
  • drewnoakes 11y ago
    There's an initiative to do just that. http://www.roborace.com http://www.roborace.com
• samstave 11y ago
  Great comment, thank you.
• jandrese 11y ago
  It wouldn't be the same Tour De France if they used mopeds.