F1 2016 – Ten simple wishes for a world championship to remember…

On the eve of a world championship that we hope will be fun, lively, exciting, hard-fought, passionate, epic and crazy at the right point, we list ten banal wishes that we would like Formula 1 to fulfill in order to be appreciated, chasing away the many controversies and discontents that have long been they accompany her.

1) Krauts, come back to Earth! Okay you are very strong, beautifully silvered, rich, beautiful and famous. Above all, fast. And yet here there is a desire for healthy competition, to see a title that is sincerely contested between two or perhaps more teams, a need for a challenge that can be experienced and told. Avoiding boredom which is the worst evil for a sport, even if in the end the one who worked best wins and Mercedes deserves it, there is no doubt about it.

2) Go Nico, it's time to overcome the Oedipus complex and ideally beat dad Keke, who found himself a world champion despite having won many fewer races than you. It should be explained to others how hard life is daddy's boy, when you have everything against you and your first opponent, teammate, in addition to being a champion is also a (fake?) rebel, who also uses class conflict and different origins to hurt you. Oh no, seconds out Nico, let us have some fun.

3) Let's hope Hamilton gets back to normal. It's okay for him to be shady, multifaceted, even a little rapper if that's his natural style. Long live the free manifestation of personality. Sacrosanct human rights. But whether that personality is one and only someone or something, even just the passion for motoring and F1, stops this escalation of almost surreal extravagance, such as the mania for selfies (even on motorbikes!) or unwatchable red coats. Come on Lewis, let's recover a minimum of presentability. Do it for Formula 1. The jet-set can wait, extraordinary driver talent deserves to still be cultivated and indulged.

4) It would be funny if between one proclamation of victory and another for Ferrari, the CEO of FCA also managed to get the Alfa Romeo Giulia out in dealerships...

5) All in all it would be nice if the Ferrari Arrivabene and ends better. Vettel is a guarantee, he just needs to continue the level of driving he showed last year. Raikkonen no longer has anything to lose, but a lot to gain, especially with the push-rod scheme at the front. He expects a lot from the two and even more from a single-seater, the SF16-H, which deserves the best results for the courageous concept that he is expressing.

6) We must hope that McLaren becomes competitive again as soon as possible, because it is a historic and renowned team that deserves to be in front of many complaining upstarts. Above all for the good of two champions like Fernando Alonso and Jenson Button, who due to their skill and career deserve far different positions on the starting grid compared to the unfortunate ones of 2015. From Honda we ask for more fire and less...smoke!

7) A fair internal fight between two talents like Verstappen and Sainz; both have the foot and the head to exalt Toro Rosso and retrace the results glimpsed with Vettel in 2008... perhaps managing to finish ahead of the parent company Red Bull.

8) Red Bull precisely; nothing personal, but a team that has won World Cups in succession must also be able to accept defeats, without standing there making threats or complaining. Head down and recover, the true nobility of soul, of spirit, can be glimpsed also and above all in defeat.

9) It would be nice to see a generally high level of competition, without “moving chicanes” running up to four seconds behind the leaders. Everyone closer, everything more fun.

10) The last hope, the most important, is to see a category that knows how to react to criticism, knows how to make itself loved by the public, and returns to enthuse a loving and hungry audience. The technicalities are understandable, the lot of technology (hybrid, electric and so on) that will be useful for series production, but the dream is to also see a challenge between men, with simple, intuitive, fair rules. All this is currently a half-utopia, but dreaming costs nothing, right?

Antonino Rendina 

Follow @antorendina