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I'll be happy to prove you wrong, but I don't care.

That is me exactly. From 1997 till about 2013 ish I only missed watching live maybe 2 -3 races. I used to get up at 3am on a Monday morning to watch the fly away races...now I don't even bother. I would never have contemplated that happening. I used to down load every practice, qualy, race and post race on Racing Underground, now racingfor.me...curiously the only downloads I had last year were France FP1 and FP2????? What the fuck!! lol.

It just amazes me that F1 should be in a golden age, yet it is consistently the blandest and most boring stretch it has ever been since I started watching it. Save for the first half of 2012 it has just been absolute crap for the better part of a decade.

I share the general sentiment, but there are two factors I'm afraid we could be missing:

- It's normal to be much more fan of something in your teens than at an adult age. I wonder if current teen F1 fans (if there are any left...) don't have the same obsessive interest of watching everything, and we only have the impression we're less interested due to the normal process of growing older. I don't know any F1 fan teens though (or any teens for that matter because they're just whiny little brats that need to get off my lawn immediately)

- Nowadays if you miss a session or a race, you have easily accessible highlights and videos/news of it. It wasn't the case before, which explains why we (my father and I) used to literally plan our week-ends and days around F1 events not to miss anything. It's not that big of a deal now - you can literally go camping and you'd still be able to catch the results/stories, and Youtube highlights every evening on your phone. Or wake up/ come home whenever and just launch the replay function including if the race is still on.

I'm just trying to be objective here. I truly feel that even accounting for the factors above, F1 did become less attractive in general to its public regardless of age and availability.

I lost a lot of the hype with the slow turbo era. Didn't know the sound was THAT important to me. Then at least from 2017 the cars are great to look at, the aero war is awesome and there's more than one team fighting for race wins and to be the fastest car, and that was really great. Still, can't watch all races live and miss at least some GPs from the season.

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It really is amazing how much the little stuff like the sound adds up. We've lost the spectacle of the sound. Plus the racetracks are more boring looking thanks to all of the tarmac runoff and similar feeling track layouts and lack of trees around a lot of the circuits. They don't have grass or gravel on corner exits to punish mistakes and overdriving taking away some of the challenge and potential for race-changing mistakes. A lot of the random surprises are gone because reliability is so much better anymore. And the cars are faster than ever before, but they are nowhere near as spectacular to watch since they're absolutely glued to the racetrack and you don't see drivers sawing on the wheel with opposite lock and fighting for traction like you used to even a decade ago. DRS has helped improve the dirty air issue but it's also resulted in too many passes that are completed before the corner without any challenge or battling, which isn't interesting or exciting. Those are a LOT of little things that on their own may or may not be a huge deal, but combine them all together...

I was chatting to some younger F1 fans at my local climbing wall - probably between 16 - 20 years old. They didn't really have any issues with the sport apart from Mercedes dominating. They were quite keen on seeing a return of refuelling. They didn't seem very interested when I tried explaining how dull the refuelling era could be in the early 2000s, but I was forgetting that half of them probably weren't even born then, and some had never seen a race without DRS.
Most of them were into IndyCar as well, so that was encouraging.

At some point, Motorsport fans are going to have to make peace with the fact the entire sport is only going to get quieter

I do fear losing a lot of racetracks to real estate, and the ones that aren't built on top of directly will be shut down by nearby residents noise complaints.

However, if the sport suddenly became a lot quieter, those residents wouldn't have a leg to stand on with their complaints that their quiet sunday in their gardens was atrociously ruined by the hum of engine noise 5 miles away downwind...despite living next to an military airbase that's closer
(Nothing personal with that one.... )

It's the only way motorcycle speedway has survived, by mandating the bikes run with Silencers to significantly reduce their noise.

And as someone who works in both motorsport and audio production, I'm damn protective of my hearing as its my living, so I'll turn up to a racetrack with earplugs or headphones in with no shame and wince at anything louder than a kart on track
(I do think I have over-sensitive ears tbh, when you guys are falling over yourselves at a v8 or v12 sound, I've always just winced and tolerated it, it's not why I've been attracted to this sport tbh)

Now that I'm working at a few oval racetracks around the UK, it's not really surprising how many people are half-deaf and getting deafer and don't even realise it.
They shout at the top of their voices even when the engines are off, they ask you to repeat things 2 or 3 times and they always blame the radios for not being clear, even when the messages are coming through fine

So yeah, if this sport is to survive, it'll have to adapt, get quieter (though I imagine sheer physics will prevent it from ever being completely silent), and, oh yeah, greener while we're at it too

Personally, as long as there's 2 vehicles being raced hard, overtaking each other, passing and repassing, I couldn't care less how much noise they're making or how much they're polluting our atmosphere. YMMV

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There's a difference in the loudness of the engines versus the tone of them. The old CART era 2.65l turbo V8s are the best sounding engines ever to me, and they actually not very loud.

I have mixed feelings about the sound. It probably depends on whether you're at the track or watching on TV. I didn't really care when the engines became quieter, because good racing is more important than the sound.

But I do remember going to races in the 2000s. Walking to the circuit on a Friday morning and hearing the cars from a mile away. It really added to the excitement, although once you were at the track, it was almost too loud and high pitched! I also went to see top fuel dragsters a few weeks ago, and the sound was incredible. But I also have sensitive ears, so I wouldn't want to be exposed to it all the time. As Dan says, the tone can be just as important. I prefer the sound of the turbo engines of the 1980s, but it's possible they were quieter than the 90s and 2000s engines?

The problem is that F1 has a lot of issues at the moment. If the racing and competition was exciting, people would be distracted and maybe forget about the sound.

I said it before and I'll say it again. If the racing is ace, no-one gives a flying fuck about the sounds.

no-one in their right mind would complain after a full race on the tip of their seat.
At the same time, no-one will rate another boring parade a 10 just because the sound is awesome.

Focusing on making the car sound better is time wasted. Make the racing great again.

I disagree Micha. I really love the racing we have right now in IndyCar, but I definitely would enjoy watching it even more if we had the old turbo V8 sound again. Racing is about the sum of all the parts to me, it's an experience.

Great sound is a bonus but great sound alone doesnt make the racing great.

Its not something they should be focusing on right now. You will not fill the seats with great sounds, you only make the numbers go down a bit slower.

Fix the racing first, then the sound. Not the other way around.

I'm up for more noise if that nulls the commentators

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Motorsports trend for 2024: everything is a bad taste joke now

I'm 29 right now, I watch F1 since I was 6 and I have been on motorsport forums since I was 15. I must admit sometimes I think 'Hell! Right now I am the same guy who says 'IN TEH PAST F1 WAS BETTER!!!' like the ones I used to make fun a decade ago.

But your point made me reflect. We change a lot as we grow older, indeed, but I have other sports leagues that I follow with huge interest. That's me with NFL, for example, and that might be the case for everyone who follows MotoGP and regards it as a benchmark for F1.

We might be getting old, but we are witnessing unprecedented domination in the sport too.

As per the sound, I remember the times we had Speed Channel here in Brazil. Even though I love motorsport, I simply couldn't watch a race on that channel. I took some time to find out why, and it turns out most of the races they used to show, came with commentary in English. So, they simply put the sound of the video very low so that we could hear the commentary in Portuguese. Every time they showed a live race without that bullshit, it was fun to watch. Sadly, it didn't happen very often.

I think a good race isn't ruined by poor sound, but great sound can lift a bad race.

I must say the sound of a V10 taking all my house on Sunday morning is one of the fondest memories of my childhood.

and that because they reduced the track volume so the broadcasters could talk

today they can raise the volume but instead put the audio delayed on onboard shots, you see the brake indication but the engine still revving, it's damn annoying

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Motorsports trend for 2024: everything is a bad taste joke now

Glad you've finally seen the light matey.

I love V12s but to me V10s are the quintessential F1 engine sound.

But with better sounding engines, this season still would be absolute poop. So its a waste of time to get the sound better if in the end the racing is still shit. Spent that time on fixing the real problems.

Last weekend was the first race since 1986 I didn't watch live while being to do so. I prefered to be in our garden, doing some gardening and reading a few comics.

I followed it a bit on the blog on motorsport.com. I think I checked it 4 or 5 times.