The thrust of the FIA's campaign to make Formula One racing safer has been to slow the cars down. Even before the spate of terrible accidents last year, the FIA was working to slow the cars down by various rules changes. In reality, the FIA was once again asserting their power like a weak monarch seeking to validate his existence.

The most obvious rule change a couple years ago was the narrowing of tires. One would expect that as the governing body of high-tech racing the FIA knows that everything a car does is done via tires. That is, the contact between a car and the surface it is on relies on the surface area of the tires. To reduce this area means to reduce the amount of control a car has, be it braking, accelerating, or cornering. It seems to me that to reduce tire size is making racing a bit more challenging and less safe. Drivers will always try to push a car, even if they know they have a smaller contact surface.

Then there were the accidents last year.

The FIA immediately sought to cover themselves and ordered many changes to slow the cars down in the name of safety. Included in the new rules was a reduction in wings. Again, one would expect that the FIA would know that open-wheel racing cars rely on external wings for much of their downforce, especially since they run flat-bottom cars in F1. A car with less wing is a car with less control and therefor a more dangerous car.

Other rule changes seek to reduce horsepower by reducing the amount of air to the engine and making the engine displacement smaller. That's all well land good, but for a tenth the cost of the combined monies spent by engine manufacturers to comply with the new rules, every F1 track in the world could now be outfitted with technology that would make F1 racing truly safer: water and tire barriers.

The fact is, if an F1 car (any car) hits an unyielding concrete wall at over 120kph, serious injury or death will likely occur. F1 would have to slow down to US freeway speeds before things became appreciably safer...

Bottom line: don't slow the cars down--make the race courses safer and ban ridiculous street course races if there isn't sufficient room for safety (i.e. tire) barriers.