Re-fueling adds nothing to racing. I am fed up hearing drivers waiting until the stop to make a move. Ban pit stops other than for essential work and drivers are forced to take a place from another driver rather than sit and wait to find out who put 2 kg extra fuel in their tank. Do we really want grands prix decided on who guessed right on fuel load?

KERS is utterly stupid on so many levels that I can’t believe even Max thinks its a good idea. Of course the fact is that he doesn’t understand it and simply ripped off McLaren’s idea which he banned years ago. KERS in a racing situation where cars produce massive braking decelerations and have discs running at 800 – 1000C makes sense in terms of performance gain. It will make deadly dull racing though.

On a road car KERS maks no sense whatever. Maybe you could make a case on a hybrid but not on a petrol or diesel car it is ridiculous. KERS can only recover energy from braking but anyone who is remotely interested in the environment or simply in saving petrol knows that the best way to drive is to anticipate slowing down and simply let speed decay by getting off the throttle early and not braking hard. What eactly is KERS going to do on a motorway journey? It is going to result in more petrol being burned to haul it along at 70ish mph. Where is the sense in that?

Max made a statement earlier this week saying that in his mind it was inconceivable that in ten years time cars could be built that did not recover heat energy from the brakes. I don’t know about anyone eles but my car produces a lot more heat from its engine than its brakes and once it is up to temperature the heat output of the engine is pretty constant unlike brakes which can be cold for 30 minutes on he motorway and then produce a little heat and then go cold again. Surely it makes a lot more sense to recover the continual waste heat from the engine than the occasional heat from the brakes.

Think of everything that would be involved in a roadgoing KERS system. Imagine the amount of carbon dioxide produced developing it, mining raw materials, processing them and eventually producing and installing a fully functional KERS system. Now imagine how often and how hard you are going to have to use the brakes in any normal road car to save the amount of CO2 that was generated in putting it on your car in the first place. Not to mention the extra CO2 you are producing hauling the thing around with you.

KERS can give a performance gain on a track but there are far better and far more sensible alternatives on the road.

1.) Would banning refueling make the racing safer?
2.) Would banning refueling make the racing better?

Answer #1. Objectively, yes, banning refueling would make the racing safer, since you would be cutting out that risk of fire entirely. That said, how big is the risk? Other than 1 or 2 moments (like the Verstappen fire) there really haven’t been any major problems with fire.

I never understood why, when F1 brought back refueling, they used the pressurized fuel rigs that they still use. Watching North American racing, most series here that refuel use gravity-fed fueling systems. When fires happen, they are not catastrophic. I’ve never heard or read anything about why F1 doesn’t use a gravity-fed refueling system rather than a pressurized one – wouldn’t this eliminate some risk?

Answer #2. Having watched F1 when refueling was banned (from mid-80s to mid-90s) and now when it hasn’t been…I can’t say the racing is any better or worse simply because of refueling. Many GPs in the 80s turned into economy runs, since drivers would have to budget their fuel consumption since they couldn’t refuel. (The 1985 San Marino GP comes to mind.) I think allowing a limitless supply of fuel is a good thing, since the drivers can race as hard as they can (or their tires allow).

Banning refueling would be a good thing IF…teams were allowed to put as much fuel as they wanted in after final qualifying…final qualifying would then be purely about competing for the pole and going as fast as you can. And…if the tire manufacturers had to bring 3 or 4 different compounds – hard, medium, soft, supersoft – and then drivers and teams would have to strategize if they wanted to do a 3, 2, 1, or 0 stop race based on tire wear. No requirements about using certain compounds. That would make for more complicated strategy and good racing – and also bring driver skill into the equation more, too.

This race weekend did prove that refueling is safe. I mean despite all the flash fires nothing really happened, all the fires were put out, all drivers went on with their races. Only Bourdais had to come back for extra stop to get the fire extinguisher foam cleaned up from his visor …

That however does not changed anything on fact that FIA needs to get to the root of the problem and find out why the fires happened. TV commentators blamed heat, we had hot races before without the same consequences …

Schumacher had a small fire in Austria one year and still won the race.