BlindCaveSalamander wrote:Why are F1 fans never satisfied? The same reason Sonic fans are never satisified; the fanbase is so horrifically broken, no two fans can agree on what they actually want, if they even know what it is they want in the first place.
I'd say that there are definitely quite a few different factions that are complaining about the sport as it currently stands, and with fairly different reasons why. There are certainly quite a few who are complaining, overtly or covertly, because their favoured driver/team have fallen from grace under the current regulations, a number of whom might be casual fans who might have entered the sport after watching a particular driver or team do well.
Against that, there is a group that are effectively the polar opposite as they have watched the sport for much longer - typically since the 1980's, but sometimes older - who seek a return to what they perceive as the "golden era" of the sport as they perceived it in their youth. If you look at the nature of the sport of that time, there rarely were any more than a couple of teams in each season who were genuinely competitive at any one time (McLaren, Williams, sometimes Ferrari and Benetton in the early 1990's); there are no doubt quite a few people who believe that is therefore natural for the sport to be dominated by a small group of drivers and teams, and perceive the current openness as running counter to the normal state of affairs within the sport. There are probably quite a few fans who also came to the sport in the 1990's when refuelling was introduced, and came to associate the sport with the high speed "sprint race" format of that era (not to mention ever increasing lap speeds despite the efforts of the FIA to hold things in check).
Often associated with those would be those fans that are mainly interested in F1 from the technical perspective (I must admit to being partially in this group), where the racing itself is almost ancillary to the technological advances that they see or wish to see from the sport. Their rant against the current situation is not necessarily just about the chaotic nature of the sport as it stands, but the current situation serves as a platform for their wider tirades against the increasingly strict regulations that the FIA imposes, particularly where the changes are being made merely to limit the competitiveness of one or two teams (such as banning the off throttle exhaust blown diffusers), and the fact that they feel that the FIA should not be intervening to level out the field in that way.
As far as they are concerned, they feel that it should be the case that "to the victor goes the spoils", to the extent that some preferred seeing Vettel dominate in 2011 because they felt it rewarded the combination of team and driver that had found a way to out think and out drive their rivals. To them, the current tyres are an anathema because there is a certain amount of randomness that they believe diminishes the importance of the designers and drivers (Williams admitted that whilst they were thrilled to win in Barcelona, they were also confused as to whether the upgrades they'd brought to Barcelona really were working because the variation in the performance of the tyres was far greater than any quantifiable benefit in the performance of the new parts).
