Turkish F1 GP: KERS and DRS Fail Their Latest Test as Vettel's Season Marches On

William Shakespeare, through his character Macbeth, said of life that “It is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

While Macbeth was speaking in reference to the death of his wife, the quote could equally be applied to Formula 1 racing at the moment.

Or so we thought.

After a stunning Chinese Grand Prix, that had F1 fans believing that the sport had turned the corner from engrossing to exciting, expectations were high that the fun would continue in Turkey.

And, guess what? It did!

We were treated to a race with 82 pit stops and innumerable overtaking manoeuvres. Fans were left breathless and it seemed that the combination of KERS, DRS and self-destructing Pirelli tyres had actually combined to achieve something great.

It’s an unprecedented outcome for the FIA. Tinkering with rules is what they’re best at, a small change here, a tweak there, all adding up to make no difference whatsoever.

Whenever they have taken a really bold step, such as the wholesale changes at the beginning of 2009, their efforts have led to nothing or made matters even worse than they already were.

In 2011, however, they were on a winner. For years fans have been clamouring for more racing, for more overtaking. In short, the fans wanted excitement and it looked like the FIA had finally delivered.

And then we went to Barcelona.

It was the return to a circa 2010 procession. KERS and DRS were ineffective and the teams had figured out how to minimize the impact of the pit stops by mimicking each other’s strategies and covering pit stops.

We saw how thin the veneer of change really was.

More than that, we saw that the changes, while making life more exciting, actually made no difference to how the races pan out. The race results are largely unchanged across both the exciting and the uneventful races this season.

Going back further, there isn’t that much of a change from last year’s results really. Some minor shuffling down the order and Ferrari has slipped a little, but otherwise nothing has changed.

Perhaps that’s as it should be, and the FIA have done an even better job than we even suspected. They have added a whole lot of different variables that have changed the nature of F1 racing, but they have done it without affecting the result.

That’s a pretty impressive effort.

Purists may argue that it’s artificial, but what about F1 is natural?

Okay, the Spanish Grand Prix didn’t give us the excitement that we saw in the previous two, but it will take a year or so to fine-tune the DRS distances. Similarly, overtaking was a little too easy in Turkey and that, too, will need to be fine-tuned.

Then we have Monaco. Can the FIA invent a teleporter to make overtaking possible at that track? Probably not, but maybe having one traditional race in a season isn’t a bad thing.