Sebastian Vettel has branded F1's latest radio restrictions "complete bulls---" after the FIA tightened the rules ahead of this weekend's Hungarian Grand Prix.
F1's radio rules state the driver must drive his car "alone and unaided" but came after scrutiny after the British Grand Prix, when Nico Rosberg was demoted from second to third for a breach. That penalty came after Mercedes had informed him of how to fix a faulty gearbox towards the end of the race, avoiding a retirement in the process.
The new rules now state a team must call a driver in to the pits if he suffers a similar issue, where it will then be able to talk to the pilot, meaning the new penalty is effectively a drive-through penalty.
Asked about what he thought about the new rules, Vettel told the press: "Complete bulls---. I think all the radio issues we had, I think it's a joke. I looked at the race after and I found as a spectator it was quite entertaining to hear a driver a little bit panicking on the radio and the team panicking at the same time.
"I think it puts the element of human being in our sport that arguably is very complicated and technical, so I think that's the wrong way. There's a lot of boring stuff on the radio that got banned, I don't see the point, I think if you want to change it you should change the cars. I have no problem, let's go back to V12s, manual gearbox, two buttons, one for pit speed limiter and one for radio just to confirm when we are coming in and other than that, not much electronics to look after, which there's no point then to memorise a lot of things."
Vettel does not think drivers should be punished for how technical other people have made modern Formula One cars, pointing at how steering wheels have changed since the 1990s to highlight his point.
"I think all of the buttons that we have on the steering wheel today are there for a reason. It's not like 'ah yeah, we can build buttons, let's put them on the steering wheel', so I think if you just look at a 1995 steering wheel for example, or speak to a lot of experts that are still around in the paddock, what they raced with, it was a simpler just because the cars technology was a lot simpler. It's not our mistake, as in the drivers, that the cars are so complicated these days that they need a manual this big and a steering wheel full of buttons to operate it. I think we're going a little bit in the wrong way so that's why I think it's bad and we should just go back to being able to say what we want."