The FIA will allow powerplant suppliers with the weakest powerplants to develop to catch up with the front runners.
Tokens for these developments will be issued one or two times a year.
2 Likes
Ah ā¦thank you for that Ian .
It is actually par for the course.
We had the Honda turbo engine from 1984 but nobody in the team with turbo experience and spent most of the season looking for the dreadful handling problems in the chassis and setup. All the magazines were full of worshipful stories of wonderfulness about Honda, but it turned out the engine was very poor in both power and throttle response.
Luckily Mr Honda had sent Mr Nakamura, his old team manager and mate, to some races for his opinion and his, surprising to us given press adulation, āengine no goodā.
All the engineers involved in the project (which was a short stroke version of the Judd designed F2 2 litre with 2 turbos attached) were sacked. They had underestimated the oppositionās quote of power output and it was a real knife and fork job.
The new team designed an engine which cooled properly and were astonished it could take so much more boost without damage.
When Mansell first drove the FW09 at Donington at the end of that season his first comment was the handling was better than he had expected but there was a problem with boost. The Honda technicians checked and said āboost normalā, we were running 2.8 bar max, the Renault in the Lotus were racing 3.4 bar back then, about 180 bhp more!!!
The 1985 engine was super powerful but the bottom end had not been designed with the bearings big enough - they had not expected so much power. Mobil developed a special oil but the engine had quite a few bearing failures.
The 1986 engine was basically the top end of the 1985 engine with all crank and big end bearings widened. The extra friction meant a bit less power than 1985 but the engine was then very reliable.
So basically 2 (3 years if you account for the testing with Spirit before we got the engine) of uncompetitive performance at the beginning.
We saw the same when they returned with McLaren.
Alonso must be having painful Deja vuā¦
10 Likes
1 Like
Barring a miracle thereās gonna be some major rescheduling - and hopefully some cancellations. I fucking detest āsportswashingā, and all the M-E races are plastic shit on donāt-care circuits. I hope Iran flattens the fucking lot of 'em and all the greasy tax-dodgers with 'em 
4 Likes
Iām finally getting around to reading about / listening to all the changes that lie ahead this year on the powerplant front.
Hadnāt at all appreciated just how different itās going to be. And sorry to be an old gt, but I really donāt think different is gonna be a good thing in this case (and esp. in quali)
1 Like
It is all about money. To keep the BIG cash from the car companies and get more coming in they dropped the MGU-H.
It is the only sensible way to keep the battery charged in a performance hybrid but at the time of discussion no road car had one (Now Porsche has 2 models so equipped).
Taking power and charging the battery on the straight was therefore invisible to the driver and fans, so not winged about.
Once it was banned the only way to top up the battery on the straight is to use the Electric motor as a generator, this will be obvious and winged about by drivers, so unpopular with fans.
5 Likes
Itās good to read this, because televisual media coverage of the sport is nauseatingly sycophantic nowadays (occasional Martin Brundle āslipā excepted). All changes are invariably represented as the best thing thatās ever happened to the sportā¦ 
Going backwards technologically to suit the whims of F1ās corporate P&L report fucking irks me, doing it to hamstring established teams to try to engineer a more level playing-field for new entrants smacks of the One Make mentality that is all that Yanks can understandā¦ (ā¦and so will eventually be what F1 becomesā¦)
1 Like
Indy car is at least quite good to watchā¦.
Shit, i never thought iād say that 
1 Like
Yeah, about that.
I am struggling to work out Honda (so not a small outfit) can bish up their NVH that badly and not notice it in the design sims.
Try reading the thread.
1 Like
Being slow is one thing but defining excitation is the basis of all of your CAE durability work under vibration (MrsKettleās job on road cars for a number of years). To get that this wrong is a fundamental issue that you canāt easily polish out.
1 Like
A post from elsewhere by @f1eng ā¦
āIntriguing reading about the high vibration causing problems for Aston Martin. Back as a young engineer in the 1970s I remember an assembly where the motor ran fine on its own as did the gearbox but when bolted together the combination of shaft stiffness and inertia of the heavier parts resulted in a destructive resonance in the running range.
I am pretty sure if the engine on its own had a problem it would have been seen on the dyno but equally if the assembly had a problem it would have been found on the test rig. Maybe it was but it was all so late no time to fix it yet, or maybe a packaging limitation.
Anyway my sympathy goes out to the guys who worked so hard to finish the car and will have a thankless few days ahead.
It is often hardest work being slowest.ā
1 Like
Give yer 'ead a wobble, son! Give yer 'ead a wobbleHats off to the Mercedes chassis guys.
The Aero, structural or setup guys at Merc never got the hang of ground effect, and the problem was likely one or some of those 3 IME.
Going back to flat bottom took away the most difficult/sensitive bit and the rest they have done really well.
The press had expected the engine to be good - so had I - but the McLaren, Alpine and patheric Williams efforts have that too.
Also pretty impressed by Audi - first effort with a completely new engine both cars in top 10, yes the chassis team is not completely new but well done!
I do hope the Aston/Honda combination works before long and we donāt descend into a public slanging match - which looks like it might given Adrianās comments already.
7 Likes
Just watched the F1 from Australia via F1 TV.
It was good!
I appreciate there ill be some - many? - who donāt want spoilers, but we felt it was a good race, perhaps spoiled a little by some early strategic decisions.
The changes re: engines/batteries do seem to have placed some strategy back into the hands of the drivers.
It wasnāt actually as bad as I expected tbh, though Iāll reserve judgement for a few races. The charge levels / overtale mĆøde all seems awfully automated and ābeginner-modeā on a game.
Still, some things are still the same: Ferrari are still absolute muppets
(Didnāt I read somewhere that Bono had gone to Ferrari from Merc? Lewis still had that utter wally on his radio this weekend)
Dominecalli sticking his 2 lira in and suggesting the best way forward is āwith no finger pointingā suggest itās an absolute shitshow behind the screens. Already quite hard to see how they move on from Adrian washing quite so much laundry in public
Ps: Stefanoās Propaganda TV didnāt show the Liam Lawson start replay. Not good for the brand, I suspect.
Here it is
1 Like
Those slower with the new rule hate them, those quick like them - shock.
Also the teams thinking the new rules give them a better chance of being competitive were, as usual, wrong. I have seen it so often before, the slow cars are slow because the people designing them arenāt as good as those designing fast ones.
5 Likes
Next rule change will be admitting thereās now Formula 1Ā½ racing alongside the four actual F1 teams.
The coverage I watched seemed very careful to minimise awareness of quite how comprehensively lapped the midfield wasā¦
WTF are Ferrari up to.
They have a decent car but seem incapable of thinking on their feet and adjusting strategy when it comes to VSC and pit stops etc,