F1 to use artificial crutch to fix what they made worse

Cars file into turn 1 at the start. Once they got sorted out and the first lap spins were out of the way, how you lined up at the end of lap 1 is where you finished. Luckily this race had a lot of attrition or the lap chart would look like the EKG of a dead man – all horizontal lines.

Yes, the cars are now faster, but as AR1.com predicted with the new F1 rules of wider tires and more downforce, passing on the track is now impossible. If you thought F1 was a parade before, you haven't seen anything yet.

When Lewis Hamilton was behind a much slower Max Verstappen after his first pit stop, his chief engineer, Pete Bonnington, came over the radio and said to Hamilton, "it's race-critical that we get past Verstappen now."

Irritated Hamilton shot back, "how do you expect me to do that, there's no way I can overtake this guy." That pretty much sums up the entire race.

Everyone got excited when Esteban Ocon got past Fernando Alonso late in the going. "Look at that a pass. I never saw one of them before," said one F1 journalist.

Turns out that Alonso had a broken suspension or there was no way Ocon was getting past him.

Race winner Sebastian Vettel did not pass Hamilton on the race track, he did it with pit stop strategy.

"I didn't want to push to close the gap [to Vettel] knowing that I could not overtake anyway," Said Hamilton. "And then find that I had run out of tires at the end and lose second place. So it was really once I came out behind the other car, behind Sebastian, it was really about damage limitation."

Tellingly, Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff would demonstrate the potential difficulties in getting close to the car in front by saying Vettel was clearly the stronger driver from the start, even though he was 1.7secs adrift at one stage due to the dirty air generated by running behind a slower Hamilton.

"You can see at the beginning we didn't have the pace of the car. That is why Lewis wasn't able to pull away from Sebastian and why Valtteri wasn't able to hold onto to the train in front of him."

Revised 2017 cars which have prioritized giving cars additional downforce, more durable tires for fewer pit-stops and faster cornering speed, Hamilton – who has long questioned the decision to adopt this policy – says this was always inevitable.

"It has been the fundamental way the cars have been since I have been in F1, but it is worse now than it has ever been. It definitely has not got any better. So it is going to be the same for the rest of the season for sure. We are going much faster through the corners.

"Last year we had to have a second advantage on the car in front, and it scatters from track to track. Sometimes it is a second and a half, sometimes it is two. The delta to be able to get past is bigger this year. If it was one second last year it is two seconds this year. This is going to continue all through the season."

So rumor has it that F1 will now increase the use of DRS (i.e. artificial passing) in the hopes of making up for the fact they made F1 a true follow-the-leader parade with their sheer stupidity. No-Doz anyone?