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Hi, I just found this forum. Great place. Hope you can tolerate input from a technically oriented layman.
I offer the following comments:
1. Every rule change has unintended as well as intended consequences: all correllaries to Murphy's law are in force.
2. Changing the allowed allocation of tire widths and treads as the FIA has done will result in exactly the problem Dino originally pointed to: the tendency to oversteer will increase. Is anybody actually disagreeing with that?
3. Before ballast can be "moved" to the front, you must have ballast available to move. That has to come from somewhere, and the logical place to get it is from the areas that one is trying to offset with the ballast, by removing weight from those areas. Therefore, Dino is correct when he observes that the designer's response to the tire regs will be to lighten the rear, in areas that they might have ignored before: moving weight around is much preferable to altering suspension or aerodynamic parameters, as those components have other duties to perform.
4. However, it is a HUGE leap to blame those responses on more crashes or less reliability. I suggest that the designers have succeeded in making F1 cars balanced, safe, and reliable (for race cars, anyway). The increases in speeds despite the reg changes prove that, as do the ability of current cars to meet new impact regs. The cost of the new regs isn't in balance, reliability or safety; the cost is in research and development dollars that almost make me faint.
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