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I don’t remember many races in the 90’s and 00’s being won by being the slowest car on track, simple solution, stop the teams being able to control fuel flow through the ECU, you know, how it was in the good old days when you controlled it with your right foot.

Yeah yeah I’ve heard it all before, shut up you out of touch gammon, but face it, it’s on life support, when people like me who have been life long motorsport fans don’t even bother to tune in anymore, your product is broken, and I had motorsport flowing through my veins from the day I was born, my first visit to a track was when I was three days old and I spent the next 35 years at tracks every weekend either spectating, working or driving. The more technology has advanced, the worse the product has become to the point that I’d rather watch a historic club event at Donington on YouTube than I would a Grand Prix or Indycar race the racing is so much better the simpler the cars are. I know I’m not the only one who thinks this too, many of the people I worked or became friend with during the 80’s, 90’s and. 00’s are either not involved or not interested in the sport anymore.

I only watched this race because I had nothing else to do but if someone had suggested an alternative, I’d have turned it off in an instant. Maybe the TV coverage has a lot to do with it too, Indycar isn’t bad, but those yap yap screaming commentating on the NASCAR put me right off and I’m not paying £42 a month to watch F1 on Sky.

I mean that isn't going away regardless what you do

even in races without refueling (F1, Sprint Cars / Midgets / Silver Crown / dirt late models / some modified races), teams will always play in the gray area to have the least amount of fuel in the car as possible to save weight

I do wish they had less options of engine maps though, make it more based on driver skill than what the ECU is programmed to do

I think the move to spec cars and engines in more and more series has had the reverse effect. Sure, "evenly" matched cars should have close racing and should put the deciding factor in the skill of the driver, but instead it is the engineer who wins or loses the race these days. Moreso than ever before.

It's just the "way it is". Most of the top-line series these days have all kind of sensors and data collection that feeds real time information to both the teams and the drivers, and I think that explains some of the differences between now vs., say, 1985 when real-time telemetry didn't even exist. As long as this data exists (and for safety reasons I doubt a lot of it will go away), you're going to have someone trying to crunch the numbers and eek out various fuel / refueling strategies for what they think is maximum advantage. Removing the custom maps would make fuel management more "driver skill", but "data engineers" (which also didn't exist on racing teams in 1985) are still going to be from time to time tell drivers to drive to a fuel number.

The saving grace of this is I can remember more than one race in Indycar where the team(s) that took on fresh tires and were able to run full rich made mincemeat of those in fuel save mode. Fuel save strategies don't always work.