F1 Racing Regulations

F1 is more about advertising than about pushing technology to the limit.It would be trivial for all tesms to build much faster F1 cars. Lots of technological innovations got banned because they made racing too dull or too fast. Examples are turbo engines with engines at are equal in size to non-turbo engines, the 'use a vacuum pump to suck the car to the ground in corners' trick, the 'electronic gear switching' trick, variable angle wings, and KERS (allowed, but drivers cannot use it as often

F1 cars are super heavily regulated.

Think about this scenario for a minute:You are top designer at an F1 team. You've got an idea that will (maybe) make the car go faster. Say it is a different profile rear wing. So you get the lads to build one up (you have your own carbon fibre maufacturing facility on site) and you mount it on the current car and then arrange for the team to rent (say) Brands Hatch for the day, run the new wing, compare sector times, get feedback from the driver, etc - something any technical person

That sounds not so different from building a race car irl. There's no point in a big engine if you have to brake so early that you get passed in the corners. Plus all that braking will cook the brakes. It's often letter to have a lower top speed and never have to slow down.

Formula 1 is a sport. The game is about building the most performant machine within the constraints of the rules. There is a ton of technology that is prohibited in F1 (traction control, automatic gear shifting, ABS, etc) that has been part of road cars for decades. Rule changes tend to relax the constraints from time to time for some specific reason: such as better safety, better spectacle, or cost reduction. KERS (with its driver-controlled boost button) was introduced in 2009 mostly as an att

I think that's a good thing honestly, instead of being only an arms race for the team that will make the most expensive car they have to be very clever in finding ways to shave a few milliseconds in each lap.I see that like code golf or the IOCCC, the constraints are what makes it interesting and challenging.In the case of F1 I think it's also about keeping the human factor, without regulations I'm sure by now we'd have fully automated cars that would react in a microse

To be fair, the speed of F1 cars is mostly limited by regulations that are meant to make the sport more competitive and entertaining. With fewer restrictions on engines and aerodynamics we could have had much faster cars within a year.But even setting safety issues aside, the insane aero wash would make it nearly impossible to follow another car, let alone overtake it, hence the restrictions and the big "rule resets" every few years that slow down the cars, compensating for all of t

Same car? Could improved aerodynamics play a part?

This is the right analogy. Its the same reason you don't always want a "faster" car in the america's cup or in f1. Boring racing. But the product is not "winning", its racing...the "racing and competition" are what sell tickets, attention, and bring in sponsorships. Technology-solutinos is only interesting insofar as it drives "good racing". This is why all kinds of "faster" technology is banned everywhere as "cheating".

making a car go fast on a straight bit of road is relatively cheap. making a car take a corner a couple tenths of a second faster is very expensive. and there's only so many corners in a lap. add up those tenths - that's your few seconds of difference!