“The sound is a disgrace,” Walker told the Independent. “When the car comes down the straight you can’t even hear it. Now you have got every promoter worried that it’s going to turn fans away. You will find promoters dropping out. They will go and get an IndyCar race or something like that to keep the fans. There will be a meeting of all of the promoters and you will find that an enormous voice will come out of that… to say ‘Bernie, enough is enough. This is not what we bought.'”
Walker is also convinced the threat of legal action is a legitimate one.
“We can’t just sit back and wait. There’s a strong wind blowing here. Legal action would not be very difficult. Bernie is clearly in breach of his contract because this is not what we bought. I didn’t buy a wimp. Originally, I bought a giant with noise. Bernie even suggested in a meeting a few years ago in Geneva the promoter would have the right to sue him.”
He is right.
These complaints about the lack of noise are a load of bull[…]. Spectators attended the F1 GPs wearing ear protection in past. Obviously, that was because the noise was unbearably loud. Why wearing noise mufflers makes it more fun?
I can’t understand how can the “real F1 fans” say that the pathetic, ear-splitting, high pitch “weeeeeee” of last year’s engines was better! They sounded like cheap no-name brand angle grinders before. You could not hear anything else, everything was drown by the bloody exhaust noise. I hated that sound.
Now you can hear the spectators cheering, the tyres protesting the abuse AND the engine sound. The new engines sound great. They rumble like serious machines and the sound of the turbo when changing down the gears is fantastic.
“When the car comes down the straight you can’t even hear it.” Most likely 95% of Walker’s hearing ability has been lost because he attended too many F1 GPs in past. That’s why he complains so aggressively.