The Athletic

You're listening to The Undercut, with Damon Hill and Mark Hughes.

Well, Damon, as we're coming up to the Canadian Grand Prix,

and that gap between Miami and Canada, we've heard a few interesting comments from the government body, the FIA. Senior people, one, the president saying, yeah, we're going to go back to V8 by 2030 or 31,

but senior technical people saying, yeah, we probably listen too much to the automotive requests.

And that's what's led us to have this trying to get to this 50-50 split, which has caused

us some problems and we really need to

change that split a bit more in favour of the internal combustion engine, particularly from

27 on.

And it's an interesting point because certainly some of us have been saying for quite a long

time, Formula One is so successful in its own right commercially, why is it giving itself such difficulties just to accommodate the wishes of an outside entity, such an automotive, and can't it exist on its own terms without compromising, in this case, the racing, just to accommodate those wishes. Where do you stand on that?

The whole subject is complicated and fascinating, and I think we're going to try and unravel

some of the components of that so that we can talk, we can help people engage with this debate

because it's very easy to sit here and say, oh, they're racing cars, we just want loud engines. And there are, those have

argued that that is, that's all F1 needs is fast cars with loud engines. And it wasn't, when I was

growing up, it was always talked about, if you haven't seen the start of an F1 race, then you haven't lived.

This was the big attraction, was the noise of the cars on the grid and the revving and all that

excitement and the sounds of them whizzing past.

But those were in the days before people started to think about the planet and the consequences

of just puking out poisonous fumes

with carbon dioxide in them.

It is a long story.

...