New teams

One of the questions you can ask about F1 this season is, “Has it been diluted due to the addition of new teams?” I know it’s loutish to be asking this question when someone is putting in colossal efforts to make it to the top echelon. But when one of them, USF1, isn’t going to make it to the grid, and the other, Campos, had to go through so many difficult changes, you can’t help yourself. Isn’t F1 supposed to be a brilliantly orchestrated world where things fall into place, in the eyes of the public, smoothly?

A hasty addition to expand the grid is what it looks like from the outside. The new teams will have had nowhere near the input that the old teams have into their cars. Don’t get me wrong, I have huge respects for the folks at Lotus and Virgin Racing for having an F1 car ready for testing in a such a compressed timeline but all of them should have gone racing for the next season. They will have had much more preparation by then, would not have been 5 seconds behind the other teams and would have made racing more exciting for us fans by mixing it with the lower midfield, which I doubt they will do this year.