(Motorsport-Total.com) – The entire fan community is discussing the new Formula 1 rules and, above all, whether the races will actually become more exciting in the future. The fact that overtaking maneuvers apparently won’t become easier is dampening expectations. But now former Formula 1 driver David Coulthard is joining the debate.
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Because in his view, numerous overtaking maneuvers are not necessarily required for a race to be exciting. “If you have the fastest car on the grid at the front, why should anyone overtake it? The whole principle of Formula 1 is: fast at the front, slow at the back,” says the Scotsman in the podcast Up To Speed.
“The race starts, but the slowest will never get to the front and win,” Coulthard emphasizes. “You just have to look at the history of the sport. Be the fastest. As a driver, I wanted to be on pole position, because especially in Monaco, 90 percent of the work was done if I led into the first corner.”
“In football, you don’t see 100 goals either”
“But I don’t understand that,” adds the former Red Bull driver. “If your team wins a football match 1:0, you leave the pitch and say: ‘That was a good game.’ You don’t see 100 goals or the points in basketball or something like that.”
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“So it’s not about how many things happen,” Coulthard emphasizes. Instead, it’s about individual highlights. “I remember how Mansell overtook Gerhard Berger on the outside in Mexico in 1988. That particularly stuck in my memory, although I probably got the year wrong, but it was an incredible overtaking maneuver.”
“Or I remember Senna’s qualifying lap in Monaco, which was a second faster than Alain Prost’s,” the former Formula 1 driver looks back, certain that overtaking maneuvers aren’t everything. “It’s about those unforgettable moments, not the sheer number. It’s like a social media feed.”
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