New engine regs for 2016 - again?!

[miatanut]

Originally Posted by wnut

It is not currently not a particularly efficient in road cars; the most economic of which are not hybrids;

Really?

http://www.volkswagen.co.uk/about-us/futures/xl1

Sure, there are a lot of gasoline hybrid SUV's which aren't particularly efficient, but the manufacturers put hybrids on them to improve their CAFE. Yes, there are a lot of very small cars, like Smart cars, which get higher fuel mileage than a lot of hybrids. There are a lot of mid-sized diesels which get higher fuel mileage than a lot of petrol hybrids.

Any place you do an apples-to-apples comparison, the hybrid version gets better fuel mileage than the non-hybrid with the same type of engine.

Then, VW goes all-out with the XL1 and puts a small diesel in a very aerodynamic, light weight car and equips it with a hybrid. They would not have messed with the hybrid component if it didn't help them meet their objective.

[wolfhound]

McLaren & Honda have joined the calls for opening up the engine regs to allow more development.

Wonder if the Honda is not as strong as originally hoped?

http://www.motorsport.com/f1/news/mc...ngine-unfreeze

[wnut]

Originally Posted by wolfhound

McLaren & Honda have joined the calls for opening up the engine regs to allow more development.

Wonder if the Honda is not as strong as originally hoped?

http://www.motorsport.com/f1/news/mc...ngine-unfreeze

Thanks Wolfhound.

"And Honda's F1 chief Yasuhisa Arai is quoted by Speed Week: "Engineers and fans have one thing in common, which is their desire for competition.
"This is only possible if parts can be developed," he added."

Ditto this!

[wnut]

Originally Posted by miatanut

Really?

http://www.volkswagen.co.uk/about-us/futures/xl1

Sure, there are a lot of gasoline hybrid SUV's which aren't particularly efficient, but the manufacturers put hybrids on them to improve their CAFE. Yes, there are a lot of very small cars, like Smart cars, which get higher fuel mileage than a lot of hybrids. There are a lot of mid-sized diesels which get higher fuel mileage than a lot of petrol hybrids.

Any place you do an apples-to-apples comparison, the hybrid version gets better fuel mileage than the non-hybrid with the same type of engine.

Then, VW goes all-out with the XL1 and puts a small diesel in a very aerodynamic, light weight car and equips it with a hybrid. They would not have messed with the hybrid component if it didn't help them meet their objective.

This is the bit that gets me miatanut:

Any place you do an apples-to-apples comparison, the hybrid version gets better fuel mileage than the non-hybrid with the same type of engine.

It is wrong to compare apples to apples, what we are looking for is the best possible economy, and the light turbo-diesels trump every other form.
It is impossible to carry a huge mass with a relatively low energy density around losing energy in converting kinetic energy to electrical energy storing it and then converting it back.

If you want the poster boy for the best current road going car then look at the Porsche 918 spider which is far more advanced than the F1s, proving F1 is advancing nothing with the current hybrid nonsense.

As for VW, I currently own a VW Golf Gti Manual Turbo, great car when it goes, I have never had a car that has had so many unexplained electrical glitches and gremlins in my life, nothing but new bigger and better troubles, the thought of those muppets having further access to my bank account by adding so called economic hybrid technology to that thing just plain beggars belief! Last VW rotbox I will ever own, they have no idea how to assemble a reliable car, and have very expensive ideas way beyond their ability to implement them!

The next challenge is how green clean and economic is the hybrid junk over 10 years and 300 000kms?

Sorry for the rant, that thing really rubs my nerves raw!

[Casper]

Originally Posted by wnut

This is the bit that gets me miatanut:

Any place you do an apples-to-apples comparison, the hybrid version gets better fuel mileage than the non-hybrid with the same type of engine.

It is wrong to compare apples to apples, what we are looking for is the best possible economy, and the light turbo-diesels trump every other form.
It is impossible to carry a huge mass with a relatively low energy density around losing energy in converting kinetic energy to electrical energy storing it and then converting it back.

If you want the poster boy for the best current road going car then look at the Porsche 918 spider which is far more advanced than the F1s, proving F1 is advancing nothing with the current hybrid nonsense.

As for VW, I currently own a VW Golf Gti Manual Turbo, great car when it goes, I have never had a car that has had so many unexplained electrical glitches and gremlins in my life, nothing but new bigger and better troubles, the thought of those muppets having further access to my bank account by adding so called economic hybrid technology to that thing just plain beggars belief! Last VW rotbox I will ever own, they have no idea how to assemble a reliable car, and have very expensive ideas way beyond their ability to implement them!

The next challenge is how green clean and economic is the hybrid junk over 10 years and 300 000kms?

Sorry for the rant, that thing really rubs my nerves raw!

Diesels are going to get the chop from non-commercial use and in recent times the French have decided to ban them from Paris for emission reasons.
Sorry to hear about your VW experience but my VW is absolutely awesome with nil problems in five years. Tesla are leading the charge in battery technology and are building a greenfield site in the US to take it even further. Their latest prototype has a range of over 600km which is getting fairly useful and every new Tesla owner raves about the car.

All the above points to the ICE engine not being the primary motor within the next couple of decades and F1 will be forced to follow the trend especially if mainstream automotive manufacturers are involved.

[wnut]

Originally Posted by Casper

Diesels are going to get the chop from non-commercial use and in recent times the French have decided to ban them from Paris for emission reasons.
Sorry to hear about your VW experience but my VW is absolutely awesome with nil problems in five years. Tesla are leading the charge in battery technology and are building a greenfield site in the US to take it even further. Their latest prototype has a range of over 600km which is getting fairly useful and every new Tesla owner raves about the car.

The Tesla is interesting, and not hybrid, so it doesn't have to lug an inactive ICE engine around with it.
The Leyland idea of using a miniature turbojet powered generator as a battery backup would be the best way of doing a hybrid, very light and powerful and capable of running a genset at an efficient and constant speed, could use it to assist in peak load situations too, plus they run on any of the currently available fuels.

Originally Posted by Casper

All the above points to the ICE engine not being the primary motor within the next couple of decades and F1 will be forced to follow the trend especially if mainstream automotive manufacturers are involved.

We will probably end up with hybrids, mainly because the main stream automotive manufacturers will bend the politicians to implement what they want, and we as the motoring consumers will foot the bills.

F1 is a racing formula, but the current hybrid technology has very little relevance in sprint racing.

P.S. Did you see an electric motorcycle took out the superbike section at Pikes Peak Casper?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cX-_eB8nkk

Now this is cutting edge!

[miatanut]

Originally Posted by wnut

This is the bit that gets me miatanut:

Any place you do an apples-to-apples comparison, the hybrid version gets better fuel mileage than the non-hybrid with the same type of engine.

It is wrong to compare apples to apples, what we are looking for is the best possible economy, and the light turbo-diesels trump every other form.
It is impossible to carry a huge mass with a relatively low energy density around losing energy in converting kinetic energy to electrical energy storing it and then converting it back.

You won't get an argument from me that you can achieve a particular MPG cheaper by going diesel than hybrid, but if you are going for the ultimate MPG, you need to combine both.

Personally, I like the flywheel approach. It has a certain elegance about it. The challenge is developing a good CVT to put energy into it with minimum losses. Somewhere out there, there is an ingenious solution to a mechanical CVT and when somebody finds it, thousands of mechanical engineers will say "I wish I had thought of that!"

For me, racing is about encouraging people to find that solution. WEC is doing a better job of it than F1 currently, by leaving more avenues open, but I think searching for that sort of holy grail is racing serving its highest purpose.

Even in F1, funneled into a narrow chute for development, there are folks finding better solutions than others, and those solutions can eventually adapted to making better road cars.

I just think completely turning ones back to the whole concept of regenerative braking is walking away from a concept with huge potential. Yeah, it's expensive for now. So is building racing cars out of carbon fiber. But, as people keep developing the concept, the solutions will get better and cheaper.

Originally Posted by wnut

The next challenge is how green clean and economic is the hybrid junk over 10 years and 300 000kms?

The batteries are recyclable, just like the lead/acid lump that starts your car now.

We're both in agreement the best solution would be to throw off a lot of the restrictions and let everybody innovate and find their own way. It would be a lot of fun watching an F1 diesel compete with a hybrid car and maybe somebody else doing a gas turbine or something.

A lot of much better solutions would result.

[Oldtony]

Originally Posted by miatanut

We're both in agreement the best solution would be to throw off a lot of the restrictions and let everybody innovate and find their own way. It would be a lot of fun watching an F1 diesel compete with a hybrid car and maybe somebody else doing a gas turbine or something.

A lot of much better solutions would result.

Now that is the most intelligent contribution for a while!
Sitting here at the end of a year which has produced some outstanding racing, in cars which have been challenging to drive and have provided a huge leap forward in efficiency, I really wonder at some of the derogatory comments about ERS/KERS/ICE power packs.
Certainly one manufacturer has done it better than the rest and thus has deservedly dominated. But even that has seen match racing at the front between team mates while competition down the field has provided passing and some spectacular duels.
If an eighty year old Luddite with a hearing problem wants to denigrate his own business because "it isn't loud enough" can you please consider it the ravings of someone who either has a nefarious plot afoot or a hearing problem.
Why some around here follow that path I'm sure would be an interesting study in "group think". Most probably it is an inbuilt resistance to change, particularly the essential change being forced on us by our past wasteful and polluting use of fossil fuel.
Meanwhile, YES PLEASE! free up the regs. to allow a wider base of solutions but please no reversion to the past antiquated technology.

[Sodemo]

Why can they not adopt a BOP type formula like the WEC or GT3 racing? You would get a variety of engine solutions and the manufacturers could peddle their hybrid formula if they wanted, and other teams could pursue things like turbocharged V8s or whatever they wanted etc. It seems to work at least in the WEC with not much arguing over the BOP.

[miatanut]

Originally Posted by Sodemo

Why can they not adopt a BOP type formula like the WEC or GT3 racing? You would get a variety of engine solutions and the manufacturers could peddle their hybrid formula if they wanted, and other teams could pursue things like turbocharged V8s or whatever they wanted etc. It seems to work at least in the WEC with not much arguing over the BOP.

With the GT's, you get arguing about BOP.

There isn't arguing about BOP (except for diesel/petrol equivalence) in prototypes because there really isn't BOP. There is a rulebook and a menu of energy storage options to choose from, and everybody goes off and builds their car to the rules. The diesel/petrol thing has been tough because racing diesels are in their infancy and it's tough for the rules makers to predict the progress in the coming year. It's a good problem to have, when there is so much innovation in an area that you have to keep tweaking the rules to adjust for it.

I think the WEC prototype model would be a good model for F1.

[wnut]

This for me is most of the problem:

"A former Toro Rosso driver, Jaime Alguersuari, agrees, saying that the latest generation of F1 car has made the sport "accessible to anyone".
"When I came in, it was inaccessible. Even a test was gruelling and you would have to adapt your driving over many months," he told Marca sports newspaper.
"Those who came in were special. Now, F1 is a big (Renault) World Series, with harder tyres and heavier cars with less downforce and speed," added Alguersuari, who is now a driver in the new Formula E series."

http://www.grandprix.com/ns/ns29702.html

F1 cars should be F1 cars not Toyota Prius in disguise.

[JacobP]

They should switch to 4-cylinder engines. Having two less cylinders to worry about will reduce costs by one third relative to V6 engines, just like this happened when the engines were changed to V8 from V10 configuration. Having less gears in transmissions could also help to save money. Five-six gears should be enough.

[JacobP]

Originally Posted by wnut

F1 cars should be F1 cars not Toyota Prius in disguise.

Driving F1 car should be challenging, but not entirely different from the lower series. However, I disagree that F1 cars should be more "difficult" to drive. Ideally, we need cars so that a talented GP2 driver could jump into F1 car for a weekend or two to start producing reasonable results. If it takes months or a year to adapt to F1, there is something wrong with it.

[Paradise City]

Originally Posted by JacobP

Driving F1 car should be challenging, but not entirely different from the lower series. However, I disagree that F1 cars should be more "difficult" to drive. Ideally, we need cars so that a talented GP2 driver could jump into F1 car for a weekend or two to start producing reasonable results. If it takes months or a year to adapt to F1, there is something wrong with it.

I disagree. I think F1 cars should be more tangibly difficult, so much so that the average rookie will need to acclimatise to the new rigors of F1, that if a rookie does climb in and flies off the bat, we know then we've got a once in a generation Senna 2.0.

[Pingguest]

Originally Posted by wnut

The regulations do however mandate the axle loadings 314 kg and 370 kg front to rear, so in effect have ruled out any weight saving or redistribution of the equivalent ballast, to my mind demonstrating that the KERS and ERS systems are not even worth their weight in ballast.
If the regulations in regarding the energy harvesting and recovery systems were open and made carrying such systems a weight penalty, we may actually see something worthwhile developed. The current regulations are just allowing the manufacturers to try and legitimise dodgy technology by paying money to F1 to run the systems, on top of which nobody outside an inside group has any idea what is actually going on, everything is top secret.

In other words: the regulations should be changed, because the current one are relevant for manufacturers. Regulations that make Formula One relevant to stakeholders and thereby valuable, is something the series truly needs actually.

[Sodemo]

Get rid of power steering and make the cars wider and have wider rear tyres. That would make them work more for their money. I honestly do think that F1 as a sport is in the hands of incompetent lunatics, both in the sporting/commerical sense and in a technical sense too.

When you look at drivers like Mansell, who wrung the neck of cars to get a lap out of them, you had to be quite built to drive one of those things back in the 80s, now I think any skinny kid with skinny jeans straight out of karting can drive one.

[JacobP]

Despite all the whining that the new V6 hybrid engines have made the F1 show worse, they actually did the complete opposite. They broke Red Bull's stranglehold and breathed in a new life into F1. Honda decided to produce F1 engines, which is another bonus. The costs do seem to be a real problem that needs to be solved somehow. Personally, I would have liked to see a rule that limits every engine to only three teams. This could have opened a possibility for the development of an affordable Cosworth engine. However, once Renault and others got permission to supply an unlimited number of teams, Cosworth lost its customers, all except one team, and left F1 this year.

[wolfhound]

It looks like we will have engine development throught the 2015 season as there has been a loophole found that a horse and four have just charged through. Namely there is no date in 2015 that engines have to be homologated by. last year all engines had to have their spec fixed by 28th February this year there was no date in the regs so we now have engine development for the whole year subject to a limit of four engines per car.
http://www.autosport.com/news/report.php/id/117259

[Mike Harte]

Originally Posted by wolfhound

It looks like we will have engine development throught the 2015 season as there has been a loophole found that a horse and four have just charged through. Namely there is no date in 2015 that engines have to be homologated by. last year all engines had to have their spec fixed by 28th February this year there was no date in the regs so we now have engine development for the whole year subject to a limit of four engines per car.
http://www.autosport.com/news/report.php/id/117259

This point was raised and discussed a number of weeks ago on this thread (or possibly another one on tenths), and although this "loophole" does exist, the FIA has pointed out that another section of the rules/regulations make it abundantly clear that only one homologated power-unit type can be used in any one season.

Therefore, teams would be unable to introduce a second power-unit mid-season.

[wnut]

Originally Posted by Paradise City

I disagree. I think F1 cars should be more tangibly difficult, so much so that the average rookie will need to acclimatise to the new rigors of F1, that if a rookie does climb in and flies off the bat, we know then we've got a once in a generation Senna 2.0.

It is not so much difficult to drive, but they should be able to reward talent, and the car should be adjustable enough to set up for driver preferences.
A lot of what we see in current car design was brought in as anti Schumacher measures, because Schumacher liked a car that oversteered and went where you pointed it and kept winning everything. Now they all just seem to understeer desperately and shred their tyres before they can even be pushed. Additionally the cars are essentially just basically touring around in the wake of the all conquering Mercedes saving fuel.
I believe the Mercs have a 3 second a lap advantage over the rest of the field and are basically cruising around doing as much as necessary.
Not really racing is it!

[wnut]

Originally Posted by Pingguest

In other words: the regulations should be changed, because the current one are relevant for manufacturers. Regulations that make Formula One relevant to stakeholders and thereby valuable, is something the series truly needs actually.

Pingy, if you want to succeed at the pinnacle of motorsport you should have to do so in the best racing formula possible, not have the formula whore itself out to your commercial wants and needs!

[miatanut]

Originally Posted by wnut

Pingy, if you want to succeed at the pinnacle of motorsport you should have to do so in the best racing formula possible, not have the formula whore itself out to your commercial wants and needs!

But that would be F1 turning it's back on the whole Bernie model!





On the other hand, I thought F1 was quite fabulous during the Garagiste era, dirty overalls and all.

[Casper]

http://www.autosport.com/news/report.php/id/117259

This lot couldn't run a raffle....

[greentrumpet]

Originally Posted by Casper

http://www.autosport.com/news/report.php/id/117259

This lot couldn't run a raffle....

To keep RBR and Ferrari onside?

[Pingguest]

Originally Posted by wnut

This for me is most of the problem:

"A former Toro Rosso driver, Jaime Alguersuari, agrees, saying that the latest generation of F1 car has made the sport "accessible to anyone".
"When I came in, it was inaccessible. Even a test was gruelling and you would have to adapt your driving over many months," he told Marca sports newspaper.
"Those who came in were special. Now, F1 is a big (Renault) World Series, with harder tyres and heavier cars with less downforce and speed," added Alguersuari, who is now a driver in the new Formula E series."

http://www.grandprix.com/ns/ns29702.html

F1 cars should be F1 cars not Toyota Prius in disguise.

Strangely, heavier cars with less grip were always considered and propagated as more difficult to drive. Some people still believe the H-pattern manual gearbox should be reintroduced to make drivers work harder. Nowadays we have heavier cars with reduced grip that require more work to be done inside the cockpit and suddenly that is not what is desired?