Motors The Official bit-tech F1 2013 Thread

Sounds like Apollo 13 - turning everything off to get it home.

Gutted for Webber, and Hulk, but no feelings for Alonso - looks like he wrecked his own race (as well as JB's) when he tagged Button on the first lap.

Grosjean was incredible, to be fair, not only making his tyres last but having enough left in them to race near the end.

Nice to see Massa with a decent result and Rosberg's podium was well deserved. Also a positive race for Force India, with both drivers in the points.

 

The quickest way to lower costs would be to ban pneumatic valve engines and have a regulation front wing/rear wing/diffuser that doesn't change all season.

The big teams will always find ways and places to spend huge amounts of money, but taking away development of the four most expensive parts would drop the barrier to entry, particularly for engine manufacturers.

 

@fix-the-spade: In other words, you want Indycar.

 

The V8 engines, for their performance, were extremely cheap. Now that the regs were frozen there's very little spent by the manufacturers on them (relatively speaking), certainly nothing like as much as the new V6's with the enhanced ERS systems are going to cost.

The way to control the teams is fix a spending agreement, one which all the teams can agree on, and force them to keep their budgets and technical/technological information entirely within the team budgets. There is a resource restriction in place, but a few teams either can't match the maximum budget, or spend beyond it (Red Bull, for example).

 

For the engines you could do a lot worse.

Indies are running 2.2l twin turbo V6s with limited revs and fuel flow, they're getting north of 700bhp and 300lb/ft out of those and they cost $80k each. Teams with Honda engines are spending $950k-ish for the entire season, that's the most expensive engine on the grid.

Take the restrictors off and you could have an engine pushing 15'000 rpm, more power and quite an exciting F1 engine.

Meanwhile F1 teams are rumoured to be spending $20 to $31 million on their engine packages, that will be limited to 15'000 rpm and have around 600bhp, 750 with the new ERS at full power. We're about to go into five years of unfrozen engine development too, costs are probably about to go even higher.

Something's gone horribly wrong when Indycars are going to have more powerful engines than F1 cars for five percent of the price. 15'000 rpm is possible for mechanical valve springs, so there's no reason for pneumatics to be in use anymore. With them gone the cost of developing an engine drops enormously (which should encourage manufacturers big and small towards F1).

For the chassis, not so much like Indy but different restrictions to now. Indy runs a spec chassis, aero and suspension (but not dampers). I want spec wings and diffusers in F1, but open season in chassis and suspension tech. Big teams are taking new wing packages to every race right now, that's somewhat silly even for F1.

 

Renault spent about $160million on it's sixteen engines in 2011 (don't have any newer numbers than that), $10 million per unit still sounds pretty horrific to me, frozen development or not.

That's not what the teams paid either, Renault took an $80million loss in the process. Engine costs have to drop somehow or the manufacturers will just spend until the board kills their project.

 

I didn't watch the race.
For the first time in ever, I watched the quali, and saw:
Vettel clear by .7
Webber around as quick as the Mercs on the primes.

And that's where i had a good idea of what's going to happen.

I ended up keeping half an eye on Autosport's live commentary.

That said - RBR had a flawless season (again). GG to them.

 

Pneumatic valves are the future of car engines though imo. That dev cost should be transferred to road cars as the tech can be tuned between performance and efficiency to a far greater nuance than spring-loaded valves. I know it's more components and initial cost, but it seriously can't be TENS OF MILLIONS more!

 

Vettel alone has outscored Mercedes in the constructors championship, won the last 6 or 7 races pretty much unchallenged, I really hope someone (perhaps with help from the reg changes) can actually take the fight to him next year

 

But did he win the last 4-5 due to Adrian Newey 'traction control'? Cause there's lots of evidence to suggest that Mark Webber doesn't have it and he's buried in the top-end.

 

I doubt it, pneumatics have been in F1 for thirty years now and there's no overlap with a production engine. Normal engines don't rev hard enough for them to be relevant and pneumatics require constant recharging of the nitrogen supply, you can't use compressed air from the atmosphere because it's full of water vapour.

Even something like a S2000 that revs like crazy is nowhere near needing pneumatics to improve it's efficiency. Their presence is purely about chasing maximum revs and keeping the barrier to entry artificially high (just like Honda/Yamaha are doing in Moto GP as well).

 

The future of valve tech is electromechanical manipulation, allowing fully independent valve movement. For now full-phase VVT is very popular.

The reason F1 engines are expensive is nothing to do with the pneumatic valve followers, which as you rightly point out is a fully-matured technology now, but more to do with the nature of the regulations. The weight limits alone push the costs up massively.

Indycar is a good example, but the manufacturers are most certainly not making any money from their Indycar programs. $950,000 for 6 engines lifed to 2000mi each with that kind of technology? Nope.

 

Adrian newey despite his greatness has made bad cars before. Sennas williams car was a total mess the fact Senna got it onto pole was a miricle in itself, It also got him killed.

Nothing to say the redbull of 2014 might not be a dog that the williams was. And that was after major technical changes to the series.

 

But by the end of the year it was the fastest on the grid and won the constructors.

Newey and Vettel seems to be on the same wavelength, whatever the state of the car at the beginning of the season by the end they're demolishing everyone as the car moves more and more to Vettel's liking. I don't see that stopping, unless Newey clears out to design Americas Cup boats.

 

Agreed - they're the perfect storm under the current regulations. Next year it's wide open - nothing of the cars (or near enough) will be carried over, it's perfectly reasonable to assume that the RB10 mightn't be the class of the field, or getting anywhere near the Mercedes, Ferrari or McLaren.

 

I saw a vid where I think VW were testing it in a modified Golf or Passat or something.

EDIT: Yes sorry that was it - electromagnetic valves. Krik got it. My brain doesn't work.

 

Thing is: You can't really regulate costs in F1 without freezing development/turning it into a spec series. There's too much creative accounting going around, too many "sponsorships", etc.

Cost cutting is not something that I think we'll see in F1 in a hurry.

As krikkit said - RBR are the perfect storm right now. Whether they have an innovative traction control system that Webbo can't use or not. They are quite untouchable.

Next year I am hoping to see a mixup.
I am expecting all works team to lead the pack early on, due to having a touch more data than the others (inevitably - though the other teams will have sufficient data to build a car without a doubt).
ERS, turbos, etc are going to play a role (torque curves and all), as will the aero changes.

It's silly to think that RBR won't be in the top mix, but I am not expecting them to walk all over the other teams.

McLaren inevitably abandoned this season a while ago. They'd be stupid to keep trying too hard.
Mercedes is fighting for second, but moved half the team to next year's car quite some time ago, and spent massive funds on infrastructure to support their team at races from home (cost saving there).
Ferrari has their own wind tunnel back.

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/formula1/24725406

And as such, they will not win next year. A team needs efficient leadership, not a ****ing committee of egos.

Although, //backtrack// I can probably image that it needs a German to handle Merc-business interests and then Paddy to keep his eye on the team? I still don't know what Niki Lauda does.

 

Spouts a load of bollocks, thereby amusing the staff at coffee time and raising morale?

Shame to see Brawn leave, he's one of my favourite people in F1. I can see why he had to though, given Mercedes' penchant for buying up as many leaders as possible and trying to get them working together. Too many cooks and all that.

Haven't seen anything VW, but Koenigsegg has been working on EM valve actuation, they even have a Saab 9-5 test mule going:

(Worth watching the other 8 parts if you like that one, they're excellent)

They're also working on having an air-based KERS-type system for the next hypercar - using the engine to fill a compressed air tank on the over-run which can be deployed for spooling up the turbo and as antilag.

ETA: He says that in the video, doesn't he? Doh.

 

He's Niki Lauda, that's what he does.

I really don't see how getting rid of Brawn is going to help anyone at Mercedes, the only man who's consistently foiled Adrian Newey equipped teams (18 titles between them!).

If I was Ron Dennis I'd be personally calling Brawn every day offering him Whitmarsh's spot in charge of Mclaren.