tommykl wrote:Bleu wrote:We are now fourth season in the hybrid era. Still we see a lot of complaining about the car sounds. The current cars are very fast.
That led to my thinking:
When the change was done, there were a lot of other changes to the cars and therefore lap times were slower than in the last season of V8s.
From the first season of hybrids though, the straightline speeds have been faster. I feel that fact was much not highlighted in the change, making many people thinking that engines were the reason cars are slower.
That made the general reaction of the fans worse.
It's quite simple, really: people hate change. And many fans have grown up equating "Formula 1 = tinnitus-inducingly loud engines". Never mind the fact that many of the same fans point to the 1000bhp monstrosities of the mid-80s as examples of "real engines" without quite realising that they were also turbocharged engines with six cylinders or fewer.
Interestingly, I have now seen a few fans beginning to turn on the turbo engines of the 1980's and complain that they were not loud enough and lacked the high pitched wail of later engines.
I do agree that there is a sense of people resisting technological change over time. Perhaps it is just me, but in recent years it does feel as if a number of fans in the motorsport community have become, if anything, even more reactionary than in the past and increasingly turn to a romanticised fantasy of what F1 was like in the 1990's, demanding that the sport returns to an illusory version of the past that never existed, never can exist and never satisfy them.
