How can F1 be the top of auto tech with a 10-year engine freeze?

Blame Max He is useless on top of the ground; he aught to be under it, inspiring the cabbages.

He'd save the planet by keeping his clap trap shut wasting oxygen.

 

NASCAR baby... Dumb down the sport to the lowest common denomonator.
Doesn't make any sense to me. The sport has always been cutting edge, why change it now. I just do not see how this could help the sport. I think if there was only one thing they would do to help the sport would be to get rid of traction control. Lets make it a drivers sport once again.




Darrell.

 

They will have to dump that rule in 2 years maximum. I really don't see any point in it beside reduced costs, but the money will then be spent elsewhere. It's just plain stupid to drive around with 10 year old engines, technologically as well as ecologically.

 

when the hell is Max gonna retire? he's destroying the sport, season by season.

 

As much as I think this ban is pointless, it will be interesting to see what they come up with to make them faster besides better engines, I guess.

 

What Max doesn't get is that the value of F1 comes from two places. Firstly the R&D which is small in comparison to the advertising/promotional value.

If it's "worth" $600mm for Mercedes to be in F1, then they would probably not mind spending $400mm to be there - thats a bargain! The teams do not spend based on what they need to win, they spend based on the commercial value of it, given that winning is the only objective. If its worth it to win more for Benz than for Spyker, then Benz is going to spend more

Max trying to reduce costs by limiting what the teams can spend on is silly, because it does NOTHING to change the budget and instead they just spend elsewhere. Like wind tunnels, private tracks, supercomputers, huge facilities and transports, etc. If Max wants to cut costs he needs to set a spending cap. It may not be easy to do, however its probably no more difficult than monitoring how much teams spend on countless other things. They could set aside various financial requirements and just have an auditor go through it all, it wouldnt be that hard. No different than US and European corporations.

The way he is going he is just stifling innovation and killing the sport. And the V10 to V8 change was probably the most costly thing the FIA has implemented in YEARS.

 

Max Mosley said "There is no need to develop an F1 engine any further. The engine runs at 19,000 rpm, which is far faster than any comparable engine. It sounds good, it's reliable and amazingly the six partially frozen engines of the current manufacturers are really evenly matched."

im sorry but what kinda f*ucked up explanation is that???
if this is for saving money it wont work, cars will get faster in other areas with the money being diverted other areas, also how can they submit an engine that hasnt really gone under race conditions? i know they test, but theres a difference in testing in the middle of winter and 35+ heat of dubai that requires different engine maintenance/tuning?? has an official rule book/explanation been released?? that should be one hell of a read

 

Thats like the guy (I forget his name) who claimed that patents were unnecessary because "everything that can be invented, has been invented".

Max is just an utter utter moron.

 

The "no development" is a window dressing statement. The manufacturers will find all kinds of ways to tweak the engines regardless. When you think about it the fact that we still rely on gasoline engines today, is the amazing thing.

 

Sorry guys while I hate Max he's spot on about the F1 engine being irrelevant to the world. There's nothing in an F1 engine that could be shared technology in road cars. What? You're going to tell me you're more than happy to have your engine idle at 6,000 rpm as you sit at a stoplight? That's what an F1 engine does. Fill-her up!

The future is hybrid, hydrogen etc... Stop sticking your heads in the sand, looking back at the past and move to the future.

 

That's a common misunderstanding of how technology applies to the street. Many people think NASA is a waste because they don't personally fly around in rocket ships.

A more in-depth understanding reveals a quite different flow of technology than you presume. Carbon-carbon brakes, F1-transmissions, combustion cylinder design, fuel injection/valve actuation and lightweight material use are all things developed in F1 that have transferred over to street cars. Some years ago, active aero/suspension made F1 cars super fast and it was summarily banned by the FIA. Today, only the high-end cars have it. Who knows what advances in fuel economy and performance we may have achieved were it not for these things being banned?

Also, the future is certainly not hybrid and hydrogen.... unless you mean technologies that don't actually save us any pollution but allow feel-good treehuggers to *think* they are helping the environment when they really aren't. The KERS system the FIA is pushing is IMO one of the best ideas that they have had in a long time. But these proposals should not come at the cost of hampering the technology and progress of the cars.

 

But Charles, I just bought my new retro jacket with Gulf T shirt I like the past
Image Unavailable, Please Login

 

Mike whats the KERs system..? I could look it up but you love writing, great posts I hasten to add..

 

LOL - I type about as quick a I talk so I start going, look up and there's 8 pages of junk.

KERS = Kinetic Energy Recovery System. Basically utilizing braking energy for propulsion, i.e. harnessing some of the kinetic (heat/friction) energy generated from braking to power (usually) an electric motor.

An alternator requires more power to turn it as the amp draw on it increases. Imagine if you had some linear alternator (or similar device) on each wheel, hooked to a storage cell such that you could adjust the power draw on the alternator and therefor adjust the force required to turn it - i.e. an adjustable brake. Then instead of just wearing your pads, you could generate power that you could then kick into a battery or capacitor and boost into an electric motor that gives you a power gain later on.

The good part of it is that Max has said that he will not put restrictions on what mechanisms may be used to generate the power, or to utilize the power... with the ingenuity of F1 engineers, I bet we would see some really cool implementations. And that's a real cutting edge area that would apply to road cars (Max got something right for once!)

But I still think they can do that without having to freeze any engine development. I think it's insanity for Max to claim that the gasoline engine has been pushed to it's maximum capability. I'm sure 20 years ago they thought the same thing!

 

Cool dog!

 

Yes I know I 'am

Yes sounds like Max has something right with that.. great idea thanks for the explaination Mike it makes good sense.

 

I wonder if they are trying to make F1 as boring as possible with as little technology as possible, because that seems like the only thing that Mad Max and Bonzo Bernie are any good at.
Please put someone semi-intelligent in charge of the world's most expensive and popular sport.

 

I am still wondering how that KERS will look like. I mean, if they don't want to simply feed the electric system with the regenerated energy, they have to built in a powerful motor somewhere in the drivetrain, and this will change the complete car, from layout to setup. Even with the engine freeze it will be the most dramatic change since they switched from front- to midengine...


Steve, cool jacket you have there

 

In 2010 they are planning to put a giant slot in the center of the track. Then the drivers can stand in the pits and run it like a big slot car track.

 

This is the part I find very interesting. There's the energy harvesting through the brakes, or possibly though moving bodywork - such as piezo elements on the wing surfaces that generate currents based on pressure from wind force? Also they can harvest energy from the heat of the exhaust and brakes, etc. I bet there will be some innovative ways to do this. Then there is the energy use part. Imagine if they put a "little black box" inline between the tranny and diff... its just a motor with no gears -just each end of the armature connected to diff and tranny, respectively. With no load on the motors coils, and really good bearings, it will generate little drag when not being used and could potentially give a lot of oomph when needed. It would place tremendous current loads on the storage system as energy his being stored, and tremendous draws as the energy is being used. That would mean some serious R&D into very high end energy storage technologies as well as low-loss transmission tech.

In addition, imagine they distributed it - energy gathering at each wheel, and energy use at each wheel (alternator/motor combo at each wheel). Maybe a central ECU controls energy delivery so they can effectively have 4WD or send the power to the wheels with traction. Or, they could set the engine control to raise the revs a bit more when the power is not being used (like during braking or long sweeping turns), and use the extra RPMs to drive an energy production device which will then store it, giving them a short duration but very intense power burst... almost a "push to pass"

There's so many cool things they could do with it and I will be very interested to see what the engineers come up with.

 

Only through the brakes I guess. Efficiency of the piezo elements would be far too low for reasonable usage. You would run into problems with securely attaching the bodywork as I doubt piezo elements carry that much load...

Exhaust maybe. I recently had to calculate the maximum power which can be obtained by using the exhaust gas as a source, it comes down to a couple of kilowatts, not very much compared to the weight of the generator you have to use. It's more an option for street cars, powering the AC etc. Weight is generally the biggest problem with electric generators and motors as a lot of copper is needed for the coils, making them very heavy.

I think you can't efficiently recoup brake heat... directly using the kinetic energy to operate a generator should be better, afaik it's the way they're planning it at the moment.

I guess the load in 'idle' (= no load on coils) is too high, consuming too much power from the engine. Normal hybrid cars use an oversized alternator as a motor, but then, their engine loads the car's batteries - we don't want that, we want to use the whole engine power for speed! I think you need some kind of clutch here... whose electronic control would be most interesting (at least for me ). Anyway, I'll do a quick calculation about the power consumption of your idea later, maybe tomorrow. I'm interested in how much it would really be in the end.

There is a new generation of batteries in development, so called lithium polymer (Lipo in short). Had my hands on them half a year ago when we planned to use them on the car I was involved in developing, but they weren't reliable enough (yet). This could be an area where F1 could prove that their development is useful for ordinary cars!

That's another point I've already though of! With the brake energy recovery, you actually have an electric motor at each wheel or at least at each pair of wheels, rendering the car a 4WD....

So am I

 

Here's some more info about KERS and the company involved. IIRC they supplied some trannys to the early racing 550 Maranellos

http://www.xtrac.com/pdfs/Torotrak_Xtrac_CVT.pdf

 

Yup, and at the time when he said that, it was either right before or right after the introduction of the automobile.

 

Perhaps the engine manufacturers themselves should have a say.
Do you really care if the engine turns 20,000 rpm vs 18,000 ? In an equal field can you tell the difference ? Does it matter ?
What F1 needs is;
#1; closer competition each and every race. Do you cheer when the tach needle hits redline turn after turn or when Sato passes Alonso ?
#2; If one is going to lead motorsport and automotive technology lets not figure ways to burn more fuel per lap in a quest for tenths of a second that spectators cant differentiate. Let the engineers figure out how to squeeze maximum HP per litre of fuel burned.
More efficiency = more HP = faster laps.
I say instead of engine size, rpms etc, give them 30 gallons per race and let them have at it.