[Mark Worthington]

Here's the brilliant idea I concocted a few months ago along the lines in which this discussion is progressing. Given the huge amount of money sponsors are throwing at race teams, particularly F1, I would like to see a team build a no-holds-barred car designed from a clean sheet of paper to achieve one goal: attain the lap record at a given track. This would likely require different cars for different tracks. No competitors running at the same time means the sponsor gets his name, and nobody else's, out in front of the public, and on the track record statistics. No restrictions on weight, horsepower, powertrain layout, active aerodynamics, tires, or anything. I think there'd be a lot of F1 technology without the open cockpit or open wheels. And while there might not be wheel-to-wheel competition (not that there's much of that in F1 today anyway) there would indeed be competition for track lap records, and the emphasis would be placed where it really belongs - among the designers and fabricators and amongst the really skinny drivers.