Not to side track this thread, but all current professional racing series are about making money for the manufacturers or sponsors. What wins on Sunday sells on Monday.
Strategy is essential to racing as are the drivers. Pit stops matter, tires matter, car setup matters, and setting up the driver in front of you to pass him at the right spot, matters. That is all strategy. If there was no strategy in racing it would be a demo-derby at 200mph. The drivers living at the end of the race are the winners? Be realistic.
The Tyrell P34 was a cool car, and it kind of worked, but it was an overly complicated nightmare, and the front end required double the parts for everything. In the two years of the cars history it only won one race, and had DNF's over half the races it was in. Innovation and design isn't always the fastest, or the most appealing.
I love vintage F1, as well as other vintage racing cars, but I highly doubt that F1 would survive as a multi-billion dollar industry if they went back to ass-backwards v12 engines, four speed gear boxes, and a death-trap of a cockpit.
We have the cars now because that's where the technology and times have taken us. Take for instance NASCAR. They have been losing fans for a few years now. They have also been under fire by the media, the fans, and the auto industry for not modernizing the CoT more than it could have been. Finally, after almost sixty years since the first automotive electronic fuel injection was produced, we now have it in NASCAR. Some don't like it, some do, but that's where the industry is going, and NASCAR is a for-profit industry, and like others, they are going to do what they need to do in order to make money.