I suppose all the nostalgia merchants long for the days of the 90s with all the electronic driver aids and the cars basically driving themselves...

We see the same discourse every single reg change yet all these people claiming they'll stop watching (like 90% of those comments) will still be saying the same thing in 10 years time.

1992 and 1993 are the only two years from the '90s with any kind serious electronic driver aids employed, with traction control and active suspension being the most dominant features. I don't think I know anybody who looks back on that era as among the best for racing and that's despite Mansell winning his title and Senna and Prost still racing. 1992 is often cited as one of the least interesting years ever. There was a reason it was banned until the 2000s and then banned again.

I'm sure you're right about a percentage of people who will moan about anything but this time there may well be good reason to moan. Hopefully the development race will quickly render the excessive management on these engines obsolete real soon and we won't have to worry about seeing drivers operating well within their , and their car's limits anymore.

Bahrain and Saudi races CANCELLED.

what is even this gp???? four cars dns??? we are in hell

Tbh it's so satisfying to see both McLaren and Red Bull get an almighty humbling this season.

Kimi is THAT guy. First win for an Italian for over 20 years!

And Lewis FINALLY bet he wishes he could do every race at Shanghai.

Antonelli winning was the best of all likely results. Anything is preferable to a Russell walkover this year. He's insufferable enough already.

At least we were a bit closer to proper racing this time too.

If the Ferrari's had held station when Russell was behind a 2-3 was on the cards too

and since no one is talking about it let’s talk about how Red Bull gave up on Liam Lawson this time last year and now not only did he score points but he’s TIED WITH MAX in the championship.

Nothing tastes better than revenge

Conversely, I find it a great shame that one of the all time great drivers is forced to bumble about in a mid tier car that has no significant way to allow him demonstrate his skills. The new regs really do neuter the drivers ability to make the difference. Wouldn't be at all surprised to see Verstappen and Alonso quit the sport this year.

Max is experiencing what ~90% of former champions did at some point after their heyday. Now will he rise to the challenge or sulk about it and walk away with a whimper.

Never before have the regulations so completely neutralised the driver talent factor. Teams have certainly given former champions duff cars (Hamilton, Alonso, Vettel, Villeneuve, Senna, Piquet etc) but the driver always had the ability to make a real difference. That's no longer much of a factor. Today was better than last week for sure but 90% of 'overtakes' today could be seen coming a mile of and were about deploying battery coming out of a corner rather than bravery under braking and driver skill. Cornering is way too slow with super clipping and when the computer's algorhythm is deploying your power for you we have gone too far. Hell, the software put Piastri in the wall last week because it read the situation wrong! And it undid all of Alonso's good work today. 11th to last in one lap because of the battery.

There are good things in the new regs - smaller cars, tyres, the aero - but the engine rules are fundamentally flawed and were designed purely for commercial reasons, not sporting ones, just to get Audi onboard. Not sure it's a price worth paying. They should have taken their kead on this from Indycars PtP system which works really well.

If the teams can out develop these rules fast we might find it works out in the end. I'm not convinced but then the newer generation of fans just seem to want to see cars passing each other with a button press. It's just doesn't fit the prestige and levrl of driving excellence that should be F1.

FIA director Nikolas Tombazis has confirmed that no changes to the regulations will be considered until Miami, which suggests that several of the options are still on the table. How any changes might be received by Audi, Ford and Honda remain speculation for now.

Additionally, the team principles' post Shanghai meeting to discuss these regulations was postponed until after the Japanese GP. However, following continued concerns, the drivers are said to have brought forward their next planned 'secret' meeting to before the next race. Following the leaked details from the previous one, according to Alex Albon, there is a broad consensus among the drivers.

I've seen plenty of suggestions online that some drivers, particularly Max, are only complaining because they're not winning but here he is in 2023 saying exactly the same thing he is now.

Audi team principal Johnathan Wheatley has left the team with immediate effect. Mattia Binnotto will assume his role. Wheatley is expected to be announced as taking over at Aston Martin, therefore relieving Adrian Newey of his role there. Newey's role as team principal was always intended to be temporary whilst Andy Cowell was seconded at Honda. However, the situation regarding the Honda engine has necessitated a longer term switch..

The start of this season is very reminiscent of last season where the experienced guy in the fastest car wins the opening round but then his younger, less experienced teammate goes on a run of wins to make things rather interesting! The big challenge for Kimi will be when the European season starts where he performed very poorly last season but so far it's very impressive that's he already at George's pace in both quali and the race.

And yes the safety car timed well for him but this is part of F1 and has been for yonks.

F1 got very lucky yesterday as the new rules threw up almost exactly the kind of problem that the drivers have been warning about. Had Bearman and Colapinto had that same incident at Jeddah (for example) things could have been much, much worse. We can now no longer ignore the inherent added danger that the new rules add to races.

Everything bad about these rules was on show this weekend - High speed challenging corners that are now taken at far less than top speed, drivers deliberately keeping it 'slower to go faster' during qualifying, the meaningless passes (Verstappen's wave to Gasly was funny and depressing at the same time) that look exciting to the untrained eye and the super-clipping throwing in an unnecessary risk of a serious incident, all just for the show. Qualifying at Suzuka is normally brilliant but it's no longer exciting to watch the cars flat out through the Degners or 130R because they're entering the corners so slowly. Qualifying is no longer worth the time to watch. The driver skill, the total commitment making a difference has largely been lost, except perhaps at the starts. Monza is going to be awful but perhaps Monaco might work better for racing.

Horner, Verstappen and others warned about this 3 years ago and Liberty preferred to court Audi and Porsche (who pulled out anyway) for marketing reasons but this is making the sport look like a pantomime circus. Fortunately driver discontent is getting more attention with the majority voicing their disapproval.

On the plus side it was great to Antonelli win, even if he was very lucky and I enjoyed watching Leclerc put Hamilton back in his box this time. Without Kimi and the Ferraris the season would be even worse.

It seems that reports say the FIA are acknowledging the problem and listening now to the drivers.

Some of the driver's comments this season -

Carlos Sainz

“We, as GPDA, have warned the FIA that these accidents are going to happen a lot with this set of regulations, and we need to change something soon, if we don’t want them to happen.

“It was 50G, I heard, just imagine what kind of crash you could have in Vegas, Baku, etc.

“I hope it serves as an example, and the teams listen to the drivers, and not so much to the teams and some people who said the racing was okay, because the racing is not okay.”

Lando Norris

“Honestly some of the racing, I didn’t even want to overtake Lewis. It’s just that my battery deploys, I don’t want it to deploy, but I can’t control it,” Norris said when asked by Autosport.

“So, I overtake him, and then I have no battery left, so he just flies past. This is not racing, this is yo-yoing. Even though he [Hamilton] says it’s not, it is yo-yoing.”

“When you’re just at the mercy of whatever the power unit delivers, the driver should be in control of it at least, and we’re not.”

“Well, the problem is, it deploys into 130R. I have to lift, otherwise I’ll drive into him, and then I’m not allowed to go back on throttle. If I go on throttle, my battery deploys, and I don’t want it to deploy because it should have cut. But because you lift and you have to go back on [throttle], it redeploys.”

“There’s nothing I can do about it. There’s just not enough control for a driver, and that’s why you’re just too much at the mercy of what’s behind you. That’s just not how it should be.”

Max Verstappen

"It's still terrible. I don't know, if someone likes this, then you really don't know what racing is about. It's not fun at all. It's playing Mario Kart. This is not racing. Look at the racing. You are boosting past, then you run out of battery the next straight. They boost past you again. For me, it's just a joke."

Lewis Hamilton

"It's the best form of racing, and Formula 1 has not been the best form of racing in a long, long time. You just couldn't follow. You finally have a car, out of all the cars that I've driven in 20 years, this is the only car that you can actually follow through high speed and not completely lose everything that you have, and you can stay behind."

Fernando Alonso

"No fun in the race, what fun is there in overtaking by accident? The overtakes we have now are unintentional.

"It's no longer about doing anything different."

Charles Leclerc

“I honestly cannot stand these new rules for qualifying… it’s a f**king joke!”

“It’s very frustrating because, coming into Q3… at least myself and how I approach qualifying since forever, you go into that last lap and you try things that are a little bit of whatever you’ve tried before,” he said.

“When you do that, the system needs to re-optimise everything while you are driving, basically. For some reason, whenever I get to Q3, I start losing time in the straights.

“So I make time in the corners, I lose time in the straight. This is very frustrating, because you never really put a lap together, because you’re always compromising one thing for another, and that’s a little bit frustrating, but it’s the way it is for everybody."

Oscar Piastri

"At a circuit like Shanghai, it is very harvest-rich, so you don't have a problem with super clipping or needing to lift and coast, but you've got other problems because you can't harvest as much as you want everywhere.

"There is nothing you can do about that as a driver, so we're kind of learning, and the difficult part is, even sometimes, if we know there's something that we want to do differently, we can't do anything because it has to be programmed in or there has to be a code change, so it is complex."

George Russell

"The 9MJ to 8MJ of energy was 100% the right decision. Arguably, we could have gone even further. 

"It would have increased lap times a little bit, maybe in the order of one second a lap, but having this really high peak top speed and then de-rating and super-clipping down to quite a slow speed into the first corner, as an example, would have been less extreme. 

So, I think we can afford to drop it, but generally, it was the right decision to change."

Kimi Antonelli

“On tracks like Monza the risk of running out of the battery already on the main straight is concrete. It will also be necessary to change the way of driving in curves, perhaps in some cases by dosing the accelerator more to be able to better manage the battery and save it. It could be possible to bring small ‘simulators’ to the track… to facilitate the training of the drivers and the habit of driving the car in a very different way. This is not the best of regulations.”

What’s interesting about this is that some of the drivers listed were willing to give it a chance during pre-season testing (Lando for example seemed more willing to give it a chance in Bahrain), but now that three races have gone by, they’re seeing that it’s not working in practice and everyone is complaining now. It’s even worse given it took Ollie getting injured for the higher ups to really take notice.

I could have gone on posting comments but i stuck to the bigger names and made sure to include the one driver who still has positive things to say. The rest were more of the same