> Turbochargers have come and gone and there hasn't been a switch to two-stroke or rotary, scotch yoke engines
This is tangential to the article but these things are not in F1 because they are bad but because several of the configurations are too good. Most of the above are banned. Today only 4-Stroke engines with reciprocating pistons are permitted in F1. See page 12:
The FIA also banned Rotary engines in Le Mans after the 787B won, enforcing all participants afterwards to use 3.5L F1 engines (correct me if I'm wrong there, might have changed since 1991?)
It kind of saddens me because racing platforms (esp. Rally) are big drivers of car innovation (suspension, safety, power). Arbitrarily banning things like rotary engines has - in a way - killed an immeasurable amount of research money that might have gone towards the topic.
We've lost a lot, both in terms of the pure entertainment of seeing the new ideas, and in terms of lost opportunities for improving our everyday transportation through innovation.
BTW, I'm planning on giving a Toastmasters speech in 2 weeks on F1. Maybe I'll mention this.
From a pure engineering perspective I absolutely agree. I'm too young to remember the P34 or BT46 in person but the shock of seeing different approaches is definitely sadly missed.
In sporting terms though, I (sadly) think they've gone down the right general path. Partly for containing safety as there's no denying that some of the developments have been less than ideally safe to put it delicately - the idea of the combined evolution of an MP4 ground-effect car with the 1500BHP Honda V6 turbo, but with another 25 years of development, just wouldn't be manageable or safely driveable with the lateral G it could generate. Also though, for cost containment - F1 had spent too long going up expensive blind alleys that served no competition benefit.
This is a benefit of LMP racing though for me, which I love to watch. The diesel cars may sound a bit odd but the sight of a Peugeot 908, Audi R10 and Lola Aston LMP1 thundering through the Becketts-Maggots complex while picking their way through the GTs is just awesomely impressive, and you can continue to see genuine differentiation and innovation in the chassis.
Agreed. While I feel curious about what sort of spectacle we'd be seeing if they were still allowed to run 1.5l turbo motors with active suspension and ground effects all at the same time, I understand the need to both keep costs within reasonable bounds, and to keep drivers alive...
Here's something I don't understand: Why do they ban technologies on cost grounds? Why not just force the teams to sell one of their cars (chosen by random) in an auction at some minimum price at the end of the season? Banning technologies to control costs just results in more money being poured in to old technologies, when it should be poured into new technologies that could finally set us free from the tyranny of traditional IC engines.
Well, at present the cars are pretty much written off at the end of the year as total losses anyway - you might see a few cropping up for sale, but for well below the manufacturing costs in my experience. So forcing a sale wouldn't really change the economics of the situation in the way you're thinking.
Who would buy though? The cars gain new parts on a race-by-race basis - they're never line production vehicles so there'd never be a stock of parts available to support them. The support infrastructure to run them is horrendously intricate, components are designed to be inspected every few hundred miles.... I can't see how it'd be viable - the current market that buys the few cars that crop up is hardly enormous.
Recent winners of Le Mans have been powered by diesel engines.
I went 3 years ago and it was very strange - the diesel power LMP1 cars were almost inaudibly quiet compared to the petrol powered cars. Almost like they were floating round the track - most surreal.
Diesel engines have advanced incredibly in the last 15 years.
And they were trying everything to cut the balls of them, weren't they?
The Diesels aren't banned but they restricted their fuel-tank size. They also have to refuel slower than non-diesels (not by design but by regulation) and they have a new +30kg weight increase restriction just for diesels.
There might be more. I suppose its not a bad thing to try to equalize the cars for racing by putting handicaps (and thus leaving it up to the drivers skill) but I dislike the outright banning of certain technologies.[1]
Yeah, but FIA also has a mandate to keep the race safe. So it tries to restrict maximum speed and power, without killing the sport. For example, air inlets have a maximum area limit. This clearly restricts air intake.
F1 is not the only sport with such restriction. The Tour de France has imposed minimum bike weights and the actual 2 wheel upright bike configuration, which is far from optimal. All other cycling competitions have followed. Recumbent bikes allow the racer to better use his legs and are more aerodynamic, thus faster. You can also buy bikes that are lighter than Tour de France bikes. It's just that they're really expensive, of course.
If the need is to limit power, then why not directly limit power: make a rule stating "no more than 600bhp" or something like that?
Improved technologies could still flourish. If a new approach could deliver more than the power limit, it might instead be re-tuned to provide better durability or better fuel efficiency or lighter weight.
But the FIA has interfered with any of these possible paths of innovation, because it's thinking more like a government and less like a group whose very purpose is to compete.
More expensive? hardly, you can put a bike lighter than tour de france spec for less than two grand. Mind, for all but the most dedicated amateurs that level of equipment won't make a difference.
Personally, I'd like to see a new road class in le mans, perhaps < 700kg and 2L naturally aspirated, IE: Road cars. (Stuff that we could actually buy)
>It kind of saddens me because racing platforms (esp. Rally) are big drivers of car innovation (suspension, safety, power). Arbitrarily banning things like rotary engines has - in a way - killed an immeasurable amount of research money that might have gone towards the topic.
While I do agree with that sentiment, FIA is the difficult postion of balancing innovation with fairness. They tend to use bans to keep the playing field somewhat level. Also, in the past few years fuel efficiency is playing a bigger role with KERS and the switch to 1.6l I4 coming 2013. Those restrictions should lead to some interesting consumer level technologies.
An idea I heard floated, but never got as much consideration as I would have liked: Teams get a fixed amount of fuel for the race, how they go about converting that into energy is entirely up to them.
F1 anorak - that article is years out of date. You can tell that anyway from the tech but when it starts talking about the new ruling for 2001....
Much of the core technology isn't that different, significantly because they first restricted and then effectively froze development a few years ago, but the engines aren't 3l V10s any more but 2.4l V8s.
In the time of the 3l V10s, from memory they peaked at over 900bhp. For a while they were revving to about 19,000, but as the materials science for this got increasingly complex they restricted it to about 17,000 on cost grounds - after all there's no real sporting value to everyone spending an extra $50m to get to exactly the same relative performances with little noticeable difference in outcomes.
The 2.4l V8s were about 750ish from memory when they came in; I've not heard more recent figures but due to development restrictions I doubt they're much different. The other interesting technology now is the extra hybrid power source and the large kick that can offer; interestingly it was very nearly raced (in a different form) by McLaren in 1998, though a late rule change that was suspected to be at the behest of another team banned it.
Otherwise - the core reason the engines are recognisable is that they're required in the rules to be so. Turbos were restricted then banned in 1998 after, at the design peak in 1986, reaching 1500bhp from 1.5l engines. They're quite likely to be back in a few years though, albeit in a very different form to their mid-80s incarnation. Turbines - what I suspect we'd actually be running otherwise, although indirectly as electric generators for capacitor packs - were banned even earlier. I don't think Wankel engines have ever been legal in F1. Diesel definitely isn't.
When we say recognisable though, I'm not sure people realise just how alien these engines are within the limits of a piston engine. They barely do anything below what would be red-line revs for a road car and generate almost no power until they're past 12-13,000RPM. Piston speeds are firmly supersonic and the elasticity of the metal needs to be factored in, yet I read once that the pistons were getting so close to the tops of the cylinder heads in combustion that there was a visible ring of clear metal in the combustion deposits because there wasn't space there for the deposits to form. The real shock though is the noise; we're all used to what a road performance engine sounds like, but a 17,000RPM V8 (and even more so a 19,000RPM V10) howls and screams like no road engine you'll ever hear, bike included. Animalistic, harsh, edgy and the sort of sound that lives with you; TV doesn't come close to capturing it.
Regarding the recognizability of the engine technology - it's fascinating to know how much materials science technology has filtered down from F1 into road-going cars.
The high-revving (9000RPM) F20C1 Inline-4 from the Honda S2000 has a peak piston speed that matches the highest-revving F1 engines at 25 m/s. The BMW S54B32 Inline-6 from the E46 M3 nearly matches the naturally-aspirated efficiency of F1 engines, at 14.3 bar mean-effective pressure (MEP).
We can also thank F1 and similar racing series for composite cylinder liners, titanium valve springs, hydraulically actuated cams (e.g. BMW's Double-VANOS), hydraulically actuated clutches (e.g. BMW's Sequential Manual Gearbox), dual-clutch transmissions (e.g. Audi and BMW Dual-Sequential Gearboxes), ceramic-composite brake rotors (e.g. Porsche PCCB), direct port fuel injection, etc.
Here, here. It's a joy to see the technological advancement from the race teams trickle into road cars through the years. BMW's current M3 V8 was once manufactured on the same floor as their F1 V8s.
This is also one of the big losses we every-day drivers will suffer as a result of BMW, Honda, Toyota, etc., abandoning the sport.
I've been to one F1 race, sitting at turn 1 in Shanghai. There was a TV helicopter maybe 50 meters over our heads -- and its noise was completely drowned out by the cars' engines.
The thing that impressed me most at an F1 race was that the gear changes - a barely audible deep pop-pop-popping noise on TV - on corners could be physically felt in your chest. Until the second and subsequent cars went past I thought an engine component had catastrophically exploded!
Series 10 episode 8 is also a good one. Richard Hammond gets to drive a Renault R25, circa 2005. He had a hell of a time even getting the thing onto the track. The pit crew actually had to tow the car back to the garage to warm it back up; the tolerances on those motors are so tight that, when cold, they are effectively seized.
Around that period they had the central display at the Goodwood Festival of Speed. Clearly their engine management shop had been bored one day, because they'd written a test programme which enabled them to play tunes on the engine just by revving it, and were showing off for the assembled crowds. It's honestly that fast revving and high pitched that it could do a pretty decent job.
I note in the interests of the soundtrack they skipped the 80s turbo cars completely! No bad thing though; they were spectacular performers but not spectacular noises, to me at least.
I'm fairly sure I've seen all the cars they had in the advert running in person. What it's really lacking is the physicality, unsurprisingly; the pops and cracks of the overrun, the way the howl of even the older engines just reverberates and I think must have some key harmonics that are out of the range this reproduces, the guttural roar of the engine at low (for it) revs just shaking the world as it brings everything together.
Think of the difference between an orchestral recording and hearing the orchestra in person. Now give it the power of Metallica in concert. Welcome to live F1 engines.
Well, controlling 16 sparkplugs with a mechanical distributor at that rpm was always going to lead to timing issues. That much power from such a little engine, when it did work, is amazing to me.
One thing to keep in mind.. this article about 10 years old. The current engine configuration is a 90-deg 2.4L V8, rev-limited to 18,000 RPM. Typical peak power output is around 700bhp. Additionally, a team is allowed to use a maximum of 8 engines per season without penalty, which forces teams to run the engine more conservatively. This specification is frozen until the 2013 season.
Over the years, teams come up with creative ways to increase power output while still complying with the F1 rulebook. Then the FIA tends to ban the new methods or otherwise limit the engines in order to keep power output down. Power peaked in the early-mid 2000's with the 3.0L V10 format, with some engines producing as much as 950bhp at nearly 20,000 RPM.
The primary reasons for managing engine output are driver safety and development cost. In the early 2000's, Ferrari spent an average of $300M/year on their Formula 1 efforts. The cost to be competitive in F1 led to some manufacturers pulling out of the sport. Limiting engine specifications and the number of engines a team can use in a season has helped bring down the costs, and the sport now has a full grid of teams participating.
You need to go back to the 80s to see when power really peaked. There were 1.5L engines in the mid 80s that produced in excess of 1,500HP in race trim. There is one on display at the BMW factory in SC that overran the dyno in qualifying trim. It's a tiny little thing surrounded by two giant turbos and intercoolers.
Of course you're right about this.. the turbocharged era produced incredible engine output. I worded my comment poorly.. I meant to convey that the power output of the 3.0L V10 format peaked in the mid-2000s.
The magic of F1 cars in the last years was for that although the power output of the engines has decreased and so is the downforce due to regulations lap times have stayed consistent. Its fascinating to see how people like Adrian Newey keep on pushing the envelope to produce brilliant cars with tough regulations.
This is tangential to the article but these things are not in F1 because they are bad but because several of the configurations are too good. Most of the above are banned. Today only 4-Stroke engines with reciprocating pistons are permitted in F1. See page 12:
http://argent.fia.com/web/fia-public.nsf/C5F0793AC322A70CC12...
The FIA also banned Rotary engines in Le Mans after the 787B won, enforcing all participants afterwards to use 3.5L F1 engines (correct me if I'm wrong there, might have changed since 1991?)
It kind of saddens me because racing platforms (esp. Rally) are big drivers of car innovation (suspension, safety, power). Arbitrarily banning things like rotary engines has - in a way - killed an immeasurable amount of research money that might have gone towards the topic.