Formula 1 Managing Director Ross Brawn has outlined his vision for the future of the sport, with an end to grid penalties and an alternative to DRS top of the list.
Under the current rules, drivers who exceed their allocation of power unit elements or gearboxes are hit with demotions.
Those who take a number of new components can face farcical penalties in excess of 50 places.
Brawn insists such issues should not affect the racing and is determined to find a compromise.
“I hate the fact that we’re having to affect the racing because of the technical issues,” the F1 veteran told Autosport.
“I know you can say if a car breaks down in a race that’s a technical issue and you’ve affected the race, but I think the fans understand that.
“For a fan to stomach that his hero is on the back of the grid because he had to change the engine, that’s not great sport.
“We’ve got to find a solution to that, either through a different form of penalty or to remove the penalty altogether and just live with the problem that it was trying to fix.”
The 62-year-old is hopeful more “discrete” penalties can be introduced before the engine regulations are overhauled in 2021.
“Maybe we’ll be able to implement a better solution before then, because it’s a massively unpopular aspect of Formula 1 at the moment,” he said.
“One of the things that has been suggested is loss of constructors’ points. There could be other more discrete penalties.
“We used to have the token system for the engine, and that wasn’t bad actually. It got a little bit complicated, but you could remove the tokens for a while.
“It needs a lateral think. The grid penalties are very unpopular, and we should be finding a better solution.”
The so-called ‘purists’ have also been critical of DRS, an artificial overtaking aid.
Brawn shares their reservations but admits the design of the cars would need to be changed to ensure close racing.
“It’s a compromise,” he explained. “What we should do is find a better solution.
“What we really want is the cars to be able to slipstream one another properly and overtake.
“So for me, the solution, which we’ve now started a programme on, is to design the cars, so that they can race each other in close proximity.
“A current Formula 1 car is totally optimised around running by itself.
“The teams, when they go in the windtunnel and create their CFD programmes to develop the car, it’s all done in isolation. So when you put another car around it, the car doesn’t work as well.
“What we are working on is generating the capacity to look at cars that are racing each other in close proximity, and what sort of designs we need to enable that to happen.
“When we do that, which is our ambition for 2021, then we will have cars that don’t need DRS.”
