The sport was "oh so much better when"

Autoweek -People have a tendency to say “it’s not like it used to be,” but one cannot help but ask whether these people have selective memory.

They remember what they want to. In Formula 1 terms, there is a belief that there was once a golden age. But when was it?

The person best qualified to comment is probably the person who has been around longest. By the end of 2016, there will have been 972 Formula 1 races, and FIA deputy race director Herbie Blash will have attended around 750 of them. His adventure began in 1965, when he was a fresh-faced mechanic of 17.

“The teams were very small,” Blash says, “and the cars didn’t cost a lot. I do remember driving to Cosworth one day with two engines, thinking, ‘Wow, I could buy two houses with what is in the back of this van.’ The engines cost about £ 3,500 each ($4,275). If there were two of today’s engines in a van, you would be able to buy a pretty big mansion!

“I think the best time for me was in the late 1970s and early 1980s when the cars were so different,” he says. “The designers had freedom, and there were different engines. I remember one year, Brabham scored a 1-2 in Canada with a BMW engine in one car and a Ford engine in the other. That cannot happen today. We had some drivers who were really very special—obviously Ayrton Senna, but also characters like Nigel Mansell and James Hunt. We hardly ever see the current drivers. They hide in the motor homes.”

Ask Jackie Stewart the same question and he will say that racing in his day—the late ’60s and early ’70s—was “the bad old years, because of the safety thing, because of the fatalities.” Stewart led the campaign to make F1 safer.

“The accidents brought an element to F1 that has been very long-lasting,” Stewart says. “On the back of the tickets it says, ‘Motor racing is dangerous,’ and at that time something bad was happening almost every two weeks. In a sad way, that also stimulated the sport. Now the degree of safety and the lack of fatalities is probably the best example of risk management of any sport—any industry—in the world.”

Mercedes F1 team non-executive chairman Niki Lauda, a hero to many fans, is not interested in the past. “Who cares?” he says. “We live today, and we have kids who will live in the future. Only old wankers talk about the old days.

“From my point of view, F1 has never been producing races like it has this year,” he says. “I cannot remember any other seasons where we produced so many stories.”

It is a view shared by Martin Brundle, F1 racer of the ’80s and ’90s, who has been a TV commentator for the last 20 years.

“The mind conveniently forgets the bad aspects,” Brundle says. “I think the expression ‘rose-tinted glasses’ is accurate. A lot of people talk about the 1980s and 1990s when the cars were fierce and there were a lot of characters.”