>Engines and regs
The basis for all of that is basically a balancing act between innovation/different parts and cost for teams/manufactures. Keeping everything within similar designs helps save costs. Partially because your R&D isn't as radical, but mostly because if someone else has a much better solution that they spent money on, it takes less R&D to implement a copy.
>>4404
>F1 vs Touring Cars
I think a lot of the appeal of F1 is the technical crap and politics that goes on as well as the racing. If you don't enjoy that then you'll never really like F1.
And the racing is very spotty. Even in the better years you'll have an absolute dud race every now and then, and sometimes you get entire years of duds. If you just want to watch good racan', then touring cars are a better bet. BTCC, V8S, and to a lesser extent WTCC are all great options for such. WTCC is turning into mini formula 1 with Citoren ruining everything, but V8S and BTCC still offer up good racing. Older BTCC is absolutely amazing, particularly races from the supertouring era.
There's also passing on track and passing in the pits. I personally enjoy the refueling era strategy racing that happened in F1 around the 2000s, but based on the recent 'lets bring back refueling guys!' push I guess most people didn't like it.
>Car design and racan'
Generally, downforce makes for less side by side racing, because the first car through the air fucks up the air flow and since the cars rely on downforce to go fast, any cars in the 'dirty air' so to speak get their downforce ruined and suddenly become slow pumpkins again. Heavy aero reliance also requires the cars to have less yaw (See: less sliding) and pitch (See: less jumping over curbs) in order to be more effective, which basically just makes them less exciting to watch. Of course, downforce is also the single biggest thing that helps improve lap time along with more mechanical grip from the tires. Of course, there are exceptions to this. Ground effects are, to my knowledge, less selectable to yaw (but very susceptible to pitch), and active aero like fan cars remove the issue of dirty air almost entirely, in theory. Naturally that all got banned years ago. Champcar ran ground effect heavy cars with 900-1000hp turbos up until their demise, I need to actually watch some to see if it was any good.
So TL;DR you can have slow cars that slide, hop, and run side by side all day, or really fast cars that look like they are on rails.
Sports cars are a good watch though, lemans is only a week and a bit away!