Do F1 Cars Not Have Batteries?

Has the current design eliminated a battery for storing some amount of electrical energy for the ignition and engine management systems? Since Grosjean's Lotus's DNF was blamed on a failed alternator, and there has been speculation that Vettel suffered it too, the nature of their sudden failure seems out of character with an alternator failure. Are the batteries so small that the cars have no capability to run any distance at all once the alternator fails, or is the alternator just another component that gets blamed when the team doesn't want to say what actually happened?

 

apart from KERS, no battery to start up. Starter motors are heavy .

I'm not sure what you mean with the size of the batteries that the cars can't drive any distance?

 

I could be very wrong eek, but believe they carry just a tiny battery. The alternator keeps it charged in the usual fashion and it powers all the systems.

Lose the alternator and it's just a matter of time until the battery goes flat and everything shuts down - Same as in the "real world"

I guess it's possible the alternator is directly powering everything, but their output is so unregulated I believe there's still a little battery there. (?)

KERS is, currently at least, a completely separate system - It won't power the ECU's etc.

I think......

Cheers,
Ian

 

I think so too, there needs to be a very small battery to charge the electronics, for instance, the radio and the steering wheel computer screen. See 1:29 in the video below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Wn1EFLa2C8&feature=player_embedded#!

I think the battery is located in the car at 4:08.

 

This is my thought as well. So if the alternator went south, the teams would know this through telemetry and would have been talking about it while the systems ran the tiny battery down until the voltage was too low to power the logic in the electronics. In a street car you have a good half hour or so before this happens but much much less in something like an F1 car with a tiny battery. If this were the case, one would think there might have been more notice than the sudden drop of RPMs in Grosjean's car, unless he had been driving around a lap or two after it had failed? You'd think they would pit and call it a day if that had happened rather than running it down until the engine quit. Just a thought.

 

I have a feeling it's not a couple of minutes but more like a couple of seconds before the battery dies. Red Bull said they saw the issue start during the safety car, but what are they going to do? Pit and retire or keep going and hope it comes back? In both cases, the drivers were in line for a podium so you don't just retire the car, you keep going and hope it fixes itself and if not, retire on track.

 

I believe Ian to be correct eek. A battery would act as a current stabilizer (kind of like a capacitor) between the alternator and electrical system. Unlike the battery in your car, which is larger than it needs to be in order to provide "Reserve Capacity" in the event of a charging failure, F1 car batteries are designed to be as compact and lightweight as possible, hence virtually no RC. When the alternator dies, so does everything else; probably within seconds.

 

Makes sense.

 

Dunno about "seconds", but I agree, it's going down fast.

More significant however is to note that it doesn't need to be able to start the thing. Very few CCA's onboard! As an aside, FF all the way to F3 don't even have alternators - We just stuck a freshly charged battery in for the race and/or charged between sessions. IIRC, even F2 (back in the day) was the same way. Don't know if it's like that today, but it certainly used to be the case. [We didn't have any fancy-ass telemetry or radios either. Actually, we didn't have *any* telemetry! "Men were men" back then ]

Cheers,
Ian

 

The battery on an F1 car is more like a big capasitor, it can smooth out the A/C ripple from the alternator, and keep the system running for a few seconds (certainly less than a minute), but when the alternator goes, you better be in the last couple of turns in the race.....

I suspect that Vettle's and GrossJean's alterntors got insufficient cooling durring the Safety Car incident.

 

Interesting failure in a total loss system (once the alternator failed). Considering the capacity of new technology battery systems, I am somewhat surprised the current draw and overall power requirements cannot be satisfied with a battery that weighs less than 2 pounds.

 

Wasn't that the claimed reason for Lettuce dropping out in Valencia? I thought they said alternator failed

 

That was it, I believe.

 

you are forgetting that the ignition is still electronic, at umpteen thousand revs per minute, those spark plugs require a lot of power to keep firing, which has the greatest appitite for power...the telemetry is probably is the next larger consumer, etc... the power requirement is large even if a large std capacity were to be used.

 

As noted in the OP. Also confirmed that Seb suffered the same fate. From Autosport;

He goes on say they're continuing to look for the reason and will probably use a whole different batch at Silverstone.

Cheers,
Ian
http://www.autosport.com/news/report.php/id/100770

 

The Renault-supplied alternator failed on both the Lotus and Red Bull cars. I also read Petrov's alternator (also by Renault) failed in Monaco as well, so it must be a common design defect.

I wonder what Kimi or Webber did differently in the races for it not to fail for them.

 

Here is a good article on the F1 ALTERNATORS...

http://scarbsf1.wordpress.com/2012/06/28/renault-european-gp-alternator-failures/