Mercedes had dominated for the second straight season, but this time Rosberg presented little challenge to the rampant Hamilton until late in the year, when it was too late to mount a credible threat.
Ferrari’s increasing competitiveness gave many cause for optimism, as did Williams’ persistence to win third in the constructors championship despite competing with a fraction of the budget burnt by its car manufacturer rivals.
The sport is no stranger to one team nailing a car design to the point it races in a league of its own – the early 2000s passed in a haze of a Ferrari-overalled Michael Schumacher to minimal detriment – but its inability to regulate competitive equality has become increasingly problematic and left the paddock pessimistic for the future.
Mercedes got the ball rolling by lodging an official request for clarification of the FIA regarding the sport’s intellectual property rules, querying Ferrari’s increasingly intertwined relationship with Haas F1, which will enter the championship pin 2016 with a car comprising a significant number of Ferrari parts.
While Mercedes emphasised that it did not do so to catch out either team breaking the rules, it was concerned that allowing the relationship to grow in a space of significant regulatory ambiguity could lead to new avenues for excessive spending.
The Abu Dhabi stewards agreed that the rules allowed for too much interpretation, and its most significant clarification was to force teams approved but not yet entered into the championship to abide by wind tunnel restrictions, a loophole exploited by Haas up to this point. The FIA ruled that the clarification would not be applied retrospectively, however.
The sport’s more rational pundits were further incensed by confirmation from Williams technical chief Pat Symonds that the sport’s numerous and disparate rule-making bodies had agreed to speed up cars by five second per lap principally using aerodynamics, identified just two weeks earlier by both Lewis Hamilton and Sebastian Vettel as the root of the current crop of car’s problem with overtaking.
As outlined by this column after the Brazilian Grand Prix, the intricacies of the modern Formula One car’s front and rear wings enables them to produce impressive amounts of downforce when racing in clear air. Put one car behind another, however, and the wake produced by the first car undermines the aerodynamics of the second, making it difficult for two cars to race at close quarters.
Even Fernando Alonso, for the most part stoic in the face of an extremely challenging year for McLaren-Honda, was moved to express his frustrations, triggered by what he felt was a harshly meted penalty against him for a first-laps crash.
“We see the grandstands half empty on this circuit and half empty on most circuits,” he vented.
“There are championships which are overtaking us on the right, like WEC or MotoGP, and we are trying to make the cars louder. I think we need a bit of common sense.”
In a single sentence the two-time world champion skewered Formula One’s knee-jerk reaction to the state of its affairs – fiddling while Rome burns, to quote a phrase.
With the European winter looming large, the sport’s brains trust must consider the sport’s long-term future before laying the 2017 rules in stone.
Only time will tell if Formula One is capable of applying common sense to its curable problems after such a fractious 2015 season – around three months, in fact, when the sport reconvenes for the 2016 season in Melbourne, Australia.
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