Let’s talk about Formula One as a game. And no I’m not trying to get into the not-particularly-interesting
debate over what constitutes a game vs what constitutes a sport. I’m just going to run
with the broad generalisation that a sport is a game, just with more… sweating I guess.
I’m lumping sport in with games just to get my argument running. Games have rules,
players, setups and objectives and so do sports. The question I want to ask here is how do
you construct a game, sport, whatever to keep it fair, balanced and interesting both to
the players and the audiences? It’s harder than you think. That’s why
good board games, video games and sports often take a long time to conceive and construct
and not all of them are successful. You need to make it worth playing and worth watching.
The reason the rules of football insist on having 11 players on each side and not 11
players on one side and just two players on the other is to keep the game balanced. You
try and give everyone at least an even playing field to start with.
It’s not particularly interesting for anyone if one side is overly stacked against the
other, which is why - if you’ve ever played the Mario Party games - you’ll notice the
3 vs 1 mini games are often the ones that tend to be the poorest and least fun. It’s
an incredibly difficult and nuanced job to rebalance a game once you’ve weighted one
side. One criticism labelled at F1, in recent years
(and through several periods in its history, to be fair) is just how predictable it is.
And just how unfair it is. Mercedes are likely to win the title.
Ferrari or Mercedes are almost certain to win each race, with only Red Bull getting
that outside chance of sneaking a victory. I wrote the first draft of this script back
in early February and it’s April now and it’s still pretty true.
F1 as a sport often goes through these phases with one or two dominant teams scooping up
all the wins and most of the podiums, with the remaining teams - even the best of the
midfielders - sniffing around for scraps. And this leads to astonishing consequences:
despite F1 being the playground of the mega wealthy, the lower end of the field tend to
be at permanent risk of bankruptcy with the smaller teams regularly dropping out of F1
altogether when they can no longer scrape the pennies together to compete. These teams
will either vanish or be bought up by the next billionaire who wants to play.
It’s mindblowing that arguably the second most successful Formula 1 team, Williams,
seems to be balancing on a cliff edge right now.
Now, in theory, sport should be something of an even playing field with the over-riding
differentiator between winners and losers being talent.
In much simpler sports, like - say - running, the differentiator is overwhelmingly the talent
of one individual - the runner. You can include a little bit of the talent of their coach
or whatever, but when you watch a running race you tend to come away from it thinkinhg,
‘Yeah, the winner sure was the best at running today.’
In F1, it’s more complicated as many more people contribute to a racing driver’s success
on any given race day, but in theory that success should be a combination of the talents
of driving, engineering, management, strategy, etc, etc.
And is it? Well… sort of. And sort of not. Because it’s not a level playing field.
In 2018, Mercedes and Ferrari (and to some extent, Red Bull) started with a massive advantage
over everyone else. And you’re probably saying, yes Chain Bear.
We know. What’s your point? See - it’s something we’re used to. But
the key word here is “started”. They started with that advantage.
Let’s look at another scenario - let’s go back to board games.
Let’s say you and the family sit down and play Monopoly together every Christmas, cause
you’re all masochists or something. And every Christmas everyone knows Aunty Jenny
will always win because Aunty Jenny is both ruthless and absolutely incredible at Monopoly.
Her ability to weigh risks and her luck with the dice is second to none.
But everytime you set up a new game, everybody at least starts on GO with the same £1500
and zero properties, right? In F1, every time a new season starts it’s
like the winning players in Monopoly getting to keep most of the money and properties won
from the last game and taking them forward into the next.
And when you play like that, how on Earth can poor Alfa Romeo ever hope to dream of
victory when Mercedes already own all the dark blue properties?
And honestly, it’s something we’ve got very, very used to but really F1 should be
a place where Alfa Romeo or Sauber could win the championship. Maybe not straight away,
but does anything honestly think Alfa Romeo could put together a strategy for challenging
for the title over the next few years? So, people in the F1 community, let’s get
a little self critical. Let’s talk about Positive Feedback Loops
and how there are far too many in Formula One.
But before I get into what Positive Feedback loops actually are I want to take a very quick
break to thank Skillshare for sponsoring this video.
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Skillshare for the giving you some free access! Back to the video...
A positive feedback loop is a system where the outcome of an effect fuels the effect
itself, thereby causing the effect to escalate and escalate. It’s something that amplifies
itself. That’s a bit abstract, so here’s an example.
Let’s imagine a fire. Let’s say you drop a lit match in a barn full of hay.
Now the match is just a little fire, but fire needs oxygen, fuel and heat to grow. It’s
got fuel in the hay and heat from the match, so the nearby hay catches fire.
Not there’s even more heat, so it cause more fire. And now there’s even more heat
which causes more fire and so the growth of the fire accelerates until the whole barn
is burning down. The fire creates heat which creates fire which
creates heat, and on and on. This is a positive feedback loop. The output
of the fire - more heat - is driving the input (the fire itself) and causing the fire to
escalate. To grow and grow and grow. How does this work in F1 then?
In a way it comes down to the old ‘success breeds success’ mantra - a phrase many sports
people use proudly - but what are the mechanisms behind success breeding success?
Well, let’s pare F1 down to a more simple model:
To be a successful F1 team you need a few things driving that success.
Good drivers, of course. That helps, and is what we end up talking about the most.
You also need talented team members. That includes the people that design and build
the car, as well as those who manage the staff, make deals, and just get stuff done.
Money. You need a lot of money if you’re going to go big. Partly you need it to pay
the staff mentioned above, but also to buy the best equipment for your R&D, to build
plenty of parts on demand, and to make your team attractive in all sort of ways.
You also need good suppliers of things like engines, fuel, electronics, logistics, IT.
All that gubbins. And there’s many many other things but let’s
stick with these for now. How does this play out, then?
Well let’s look vaguely at Mercedes, but in our very stripped down, simplistic way.
Why were Mercedes so successful in 2018? Well, to start with they had one of - if not
the best - driver in Lewis Hamilton, leading the championship charge. Plus they had a solid,
unspectacular Bottas. They’ve got a team of great designers and
managers, and just a really slick organisation with the right people in the right placed.
It’s just been a well-oiled machine for the last 5 years, really. Mercedes was getting
things done, compared to - say - McLaren Racing, which was a bit of a mess as an organisation.
They’ve buckloads of money. Some from Merc HQ, some from the winning portion of the prize
money, some from their high profile sponsors - including that Oil Giant, Petronas.
And speaking of Petronas - it’s one of their many strong partnerships with supplies, which
I’ll come back to in just a moment. All of these things increase their chances
of success and ultimately a strong world championship win. All this success then means…
It’s easier for them to get the best drivers. Most drivers want to win, and almost everyone
on the grid would kill for a Mercedes driver. If a seat becomes vacant, Mercedes will have
basically the pick of the field, barring contracts. Similarly, designers, managers, engineers
and all the good staff are going to be more inclined to work somewhere like Mercedes than
a smaller team to get busy in a successful environment: for the chance to win, to learn,
to accelerate their growth and exposure. And, if that isn’t enticing enough, Mercedes
have enough cash to hook them in. Williams aren’t exactly going to win a bidding war
with mercedes over the next hotshop aerodynamicist. Speaking of money - this is a multi-faceted
thing. Obviously there’s the prize money, but again success brings people flocking.
Sponsors want to support winners. Mercedes have prime livery space for all and sundry
- and it’s worth a lot more too. This means Mercedes won’t have to fight too hard for
sponsors and they can charge premium rates too.
And remember those supplier partnerships I talked about. Well, when you’re a big successful
team you can convince suppliers to work with you rather than it being just about money
changing hands to pay for a service. You’ll work together on lubrication or whatever because
why wouldn’t Petronas want to say they’re the ones that made Merc’s engine the silkiest,
smoothest combustor on the grid? So, you see, success increases your talent
pool, you money, your technology, which in turn will increase your success and so the
system feeds itself making the successful even more so.
Now, positive feedback loops can often work the other way too.
That is, a lack of success - or a heavy helping of failure, I guess - will cause good drivers
to move on, staff to leave, sponsors to look elsewhere, your income to drop, and make it
more difficult to do deals with suppliers. This, then, massively reduces your chance
of success, which results in poor performance which depletes the factors your need to win
and so you’re trapped in a cycle of poorer and poorer performance until the team ends
up folding due to lack of money and talent. We see this with F1 minnows all the time.
Caterham, HRT and Manor infamously never stood a chance, but many, many long-standing seemingly-stable
little teams have fallen out of the sport once things took a downturn.
These models - The spiralling success and plummeting failure are both positive feedback
loops as the effect continues to be amplified by feeding itself.
Success fuels success; failure fuels failure. Now, a negative feedback loop is where success
fuels failure and vice versa. Or rather the more successful you are, the less likely you
are to continue to be successful. This sounds intuitively wrong, doesn’t it?
Let’s look at that barn fire again. We agreed it was a positive feedback loop because the
very existence of fire was causing more fire to occur as fire needs heat to grow but also
provides more heat as it grows. But fire also needs fuel.
As the fire reaches the point where it’s literally all-consuming and set the whole
barn ablaze, it’s actually destroying the thing it needs to survive - the hay. More
fire eventually means less hay, so the growth of the fire means the reduction in fuel, which
ultimately means the demise of the fire, which eventually burns out.
This - this burning out phase of the fire - is a negative feedback loop. At this stage
more fire means less fuel means less fire. It was extinguished by its own success.
But negative feedback loops aren’t all a bad thing. In fact, I’m about to argue hard
for implementing them. Carefully. Some sports deliberately try and rebalance
out of control positive feedback loops by introducing some negative feedback loops into
the system. Here’s one example: success ballast.
Some motorsports implement a rule whereby the more successful teams get extra weight
added to their cars. There are many ways of doing this, but one
example might be that the top 8 drivers in one race will get extra ballast added to their
car for the next race - the winner getting the heaviest extra weight and the 8th placed
driver getting the smallest weight. More weight makes your car slower so it makes
it harder to win. So this is a system where being successful
reduces your chances of success next time out.
The idea here is that over time, the competition will balance itself out over several races
as the more successful cars will be just heavy enough to more evenly compete with the weaker
cars. In theory. Another example of a negative feedback loop
might be reverse grids. Say we just abolished qualifying completely
and just lined up the grid in reverse championship order or the reverse order of the previous
race. The more successful drivers and teams are
given the greatest disadvantage so again - being more successful reduces your chance of success
next time. These two examples are among the most obvious
I could think of and probably are not ones I’d implement or endorse, personally - though
reverse grids would potentially be very fun to watch.
I just use these examples as it’s very clear to see how success feeds into an impediment
for continued success. The good thing about negative feedback loops
is that they tend to ‘stabilise’. Whereas positive feedback loops cause out-of-control,
runaway outcomes - i.e. dominance leads to bigger dominance, etc, etc…
Negative feedback loops curtail any escalations. So runaway success is penalised, but runaway
disasters are helped back up so nothing can get too out of hand.
Fans and competitors would likely decry the particular example solutions I mentioned as
‘too artificial’ - and probably rightly so.
On this point of things being ‘too artificial’ though - let’s never forget that all of
F1 is extremely artificial. I don’t mean because it’s more about engineering and
motors than muscles and sweat - I mean the rules are all an artificial construct to create
a game. There’s layers and layers of artifice in creating F1 - and that’s not a bad thing.
That’s how you manage a complicated sport where the technological side makes the rules
and aims a bit more than “Throw this thing the furthest” or “get this ball in a hole”.
And without the level playing field of - say - athletics or the purity of spec car racing
you do need to rebalance these positive feedbacks loops that come out of letting teams design
and build their own cars. You can introduce negative feedback loops
a little more subtly than throwing more weight at the winners or forcing them to start from
the back of the grid though. There are ways of giving a little something
extra to the smaller, less competitive teams without completely upsetting the balance of
competition. I’m not an expert on this but a few ideas
have come to mind as starter examples. These aren’t necessarily things I’d specifically
advocating for - more examples of bringing in systems to rebalance things and give smaller
teams a chance to work from their already disadvantaged position.
From 2004 to 2006, teams who had finished outside of the top four in the constructors
championship the previous year were allowed to run a third car in Friday practice. This
car had to be piloted by a young driver, which was also great for giving junior drivers F1
experience without having to yank your actual race driver out of their seat.
There’s an added expense to this but think of the free testing mileage smaller teams
could get from this 3rd car if you gave it its own power unit separate from the extreme
engine usage limits of the race cars. The smaller teams have the slight advantage
of being able to learn more about their cars, new parts they want to try and about the circuit
itself before the race. It won’t give their cars a massive performance boost but it gives
them more of a chance to improve relative to the giants at the front.
Their previous lack of success feeds a system that gives them a better chance of success
going forward. A negative feedback loop. On a similar note, you could restrict or expand
testing opportunities for the top or bottom teams respectively. So, at a four day winter
test, perhaps the top three teams would only be allowed to run for three of those days.
Little bonuses like this for the smaller teams could aid their path to success or even their
survival. Here’s another one. At the moment, all teams
are restricted in how they can run their wind tunnels and CFD machine - computer simulations
that allow them to virtually test aero parts. A simple tweak to this would be to give more
flexibility in how less successful teams are allowed to operate their wind tunnel and CFD
simulations. This would increase the smaller teams’ chances of catching up and reduce
the bigger teams’ ability to accelerate their design advantage.
You could even do something as simple as removing some of the existing positive feedback loops
like making prize money equal across the board. Winning the championship already brings so
much positivity, as we have shown. Why get extra money on top of that, further increasing
the gap between you the winner and those, the losers?
Anyway, this video isn’t about my specific ideas for fixing F1. It’s about demonstrating
how positive feedback loops can spiral out of control and if we introduce some negative
feedback loops into the game we can at least temper some of this runaway madness that only
makes the big, competitive, rich teams even more rich, powerful and competitive and instead
redistributes the power back to the smaller teams.
Because this a sport. A game. It’s meant to be fun and competitive across the board
and not dominated by a couple of all-powerful teams. That’s not as thrilling as you’d
really want F1 to be. At some point F1 needs to acknowledge it has
a problem that needs fixing. As it’s not a spec series it needs to introduce
systems that reduce the horrific positive feedback loops that harm competition, drive
away audiences, reduce viable avenues to success for smaller teams and end up making everything…
predictable. Yes, the best team should win and I’m not
trying to force Mercedes to compete blindfolded with one hand behind its back. I’m saying
that just because Merc won last year it shouldn’t carry all of its huge advantage through to
this year. And next year. And the year after that. They shouldn’t keep holding all the
cards, every game. A new season should, in theory, be a new season.
And while F1 will never be like Monopoly, where everyone starts from the exact same
point every season there should be far more opportunity for every team to turn up at the
start of the year with a potentially winning car, right?
Williams may have mucked up 2018 something rotten but imagine being able to think ‘Ah,
they’ll go back to the drawing board and come back strong in 2019 and really take it
Mercedes and Ferrari’ instead of thinking, ‘Well I can’t see any way for Williams
to come back from this. They’ve got no money, lost their major sponsor, seem to be spiralling
further into disaster. I really can’t see them hanging around F1 for long.’
We need potential new teams, be they manufacturers or privateers, to look at F1 and think “Yes!
Joining this sport won’t be a massive waste of our time!”
And I think that’s entirely possible, but there needs to be a proactive push and considered
implementation of systems the start to unpick the runaway feedback loops built into the
sport.