Motorsports Thread

[Deleted member 26715]

I think that's covered in the F1 technical roadmap which is looking much more electrical for the 2026 regs. Lets face it, I can't see Renault sticking around much longer, and even Mercedes must be starting to think ICE is at the end of the road as they invest in their EVs.

Maybe we'll get F1 Tesla at some point... (although presumably no driver... )

I'm still not convinced that electric is the answer, which is why the innovative F1 boffins could help out, not sure if it's a hybrid or even a different fuel combustion engine, hydrogen etc.

 

[CharlesF]

Is the Mercedes W13 such a poor car this year, and why?

I have tried reading the technical reports but do not have a good enough background to properly understand them, plus the accompanying photos don’t help!

 

[figbat]

I'm still not convinced that electric is the answer, which is why the innovative F1 boffins could help out, not sure if it's a hybrid or even a different fuel combustion engine, hydrogen etc.

Well F1 cars are already hybrids and road-going hybrids are 20+ years old, so hardly new technology. In this respect, arguably, road cars led F1 to this territory.

Combusting any fuel will always be problematic in terms of emissions. Sure, if you burn hydrogen you don't get any carbonaceous emissions, but you still get NOx and you still have a combustion engine with thousands of moving parts needing lubrication, which needs replacing over time.

 

[Reynard]

Indycar run on ethanol and have done for a very long time, so alternative fuels are nothing new in motor racing.

I'd like to think hydrogen is the answer, but it would mean much more stringent impact tests than currently in place, as well as far more armouring on the fuel tank and hoses - assuming some form of ICE is retained. Hydrogen can be burned in a modified ICE, not just used in a fuel cell like in spacecraft. The problem is that it has to be kept under high pressure, which is not so good in situations involving high speed impacts.

Formula E is looking at fuel cell tech for the future as opposed to batteries, btw.

Nitrous oxides are predominantly produced by nitrogen bound in the fuel, particularly so with diesels. Ergo all the controversy a few years back. Petrol engines also produce them, but to a lesser extent as you're using a lighter, more refined fraction of crude oil. Pure hydrogen doesn't have that, although if burning hydrogen, you will produce a small amount (probably) due to the high temperatures of combustion. Although I will say that combustion chemistry is not my area of expertise, so I suggest some further reading may be required.

 

[figbat]

As I understand it, NOx is principally driven by high temperature combustion of atmospheric N2, hence why you can get different NOx levels out of the same engine dependent on combustion management. There’s not a lot of nitrogen in road fuel but there’s plenty in the air.

 

[Reynard]

I think both, but you are probably correct - as I said upthread, it's not an area I've explored beyond what I did in my IC engines and thermodynamics courses as an engineering undergrad. Breaking things was much more fun...

But diesel is far less volatile than petrol, and so requires higher combustion temperatures, which is why, for all their greater efficiency, diesel engines (combustion via compression) are dirtier than petrol (combustion via ignition).

 

[FishFright]

Maybe we should stick the poor little cherubs in some turbo-era (early / mid 1980s) cars and see how they cope...

It would be a walk in the park for a present F1 driver. Bar a change in throttle control every other metric is very much higher then back in those days. The old turbo cars only raced with 650 - 700 bhp and cornered way slower than today.

Until they crashed of course.

 

[Reynard]

It would be a walk in the park for a present F1 driver. Bar a change in throttle control every other metric is very much higher then back in those days. The old turbo cars only raced with 650 - 700 bhp and cornered way slower than today.

Until they crashed of course.

I'm not quite so sure... Slower doesn't necessarily mean less physical.

You forget that flappy paddle gearshifts (introduced in 1989 on the Ferrari 639 / 640) and electronic everything didn't really become universal till a good deal later, so the cockpit would have been a simpler - if much busier - place. Most drivers finished with bleeding hands after racing around Monaco.

Chassis were nowhere near as stiff as today either, so handling was far less predictable. This was an era where constructors were transitioning from the more tradition aluminium and aluminium-skinned honeycomb construction (hence the origami-type blocky shapes to the cars) to carbon and kevlar composites, and not everyone got it right. The BT55 (1986) and the Lotus 102 (1990) were classic cases of building a blancmange - according to someone who drove both competitively, they were bloody ghastly.

The BMW turbo was putting out 1500 bhp in qualifying trim, btw. The guys at Brabham used to blank off part of the system with a plank in order to get that out of it. It ran with "only" 1000 bhp in race trim.

I get these moments where I wonder what the result would be if that BMW engine was bolted to the back of a modern F1 car with a much more rigid chassis...

 

[FishFright]

I'm not quite so sure... Slower doesn't necessarily mean less physical.

You forget that flappy paddle gearshifts (introduced in 1989 on the Ferrari 639 / 640) and electronic everything didn't really become universal till a good deal later, so the cockpit would have been a simpler - if much busier - place. Most drivers finished with bleeding hands after racing around Monaco.

Chassis were nowhere near as stiff as today either, so handling was far less predictable. This was an era where constructors were transitioning from the more tradition aluminium and aluminium-skinned honeycomb construction (hence the origami-type blocky shapes to the cars) to carbon and kevlar composites, and not everyone got it right. The BT55 (1986) and the Lotus 102 (1990) were classic cases of building a blancmange - according to someone who drove both competitively, they were bloody ghastly.

The BMW turbo was putting out 1500 bhp in qualifying trim, btw. The guys at Brabham used to blank off part of the system with a plank in order to get that out of it. It ran with "only" 1000 bhp in race trim.

I get these moments where I wonder what the result would be if that BMW engine was bolted to the back of a modern F1 car with a much more rigid chassis...

The bleeding preventable but the constructors didnt care to do for 1 race.


Modern cars certainly handle better but with double the G's cornering and the braking G's the loads are in another league.

Beware BHP inflation , a youtuber followed the max HP in print from around a 1000, to 1200 and then 1500 a good few years later. So in single lap trim they had roughly what's a available all the time now.


For some strange reason people think modern F1 cars are much easier to drive, 10 times the complexity and much higher G loads on the body make it a bit silly to think they are easy.

 

[Reynard]

The bleeding preventable but the constructors didnt care to do for 1 race.


Modern cars certainly handle better but with double the G's cornering and the braking G's the loads are in another league.

Beware BHP inflation , a youtuber followed the max HP in print from around a 1000, to 1200 and then 1500 a good few years later. So in single lap trim they had roughly what's a available all the time now.


For some strange reason people think modern F1 cars are much easier to drive, 10 times the complexity and much higher G loads on the body make it a bit silly to think they are easy.

My sources are contemporary to the cars, so likely more reliable than average.

The argument that modern cars are easier to drive than older ones is as old as the second season of motor racing... I think modern tech just swaps one set of problems for a different set. Where the easy bit comes in, IMHO is that the driver is far less autonomous than in the past, given how much input comes from the team, both at the circuit and from the factory. There are far more people to do a lot of the thinking in terms of tyre choice, strategy, set-up etc than there used to be.

 

[figbat]

Watch that footage of Senna driving around Monaco - see how easy that looks! Most of it done with one hand on the wheel too.

 

[Reynard]

That's the thing - good cars make it look easy. But appearance and the doing thereof are very different.

Nearly 4000 gear changes at Monaco during the race, so in the pre flappy paddle era, you would be driving one handed, near enough.

 

[icowden]

For some strange reason people think modern F1 cars are much easier to drive, 10 times the complexity and much higher G loads on the body make it a bit silly to think they are easy.

You only have to look at the steering wheel - it makes a PS4 controller look simple!

 

[icowden]

Is the Mercedes W13 such a poor car this year, and why?
I have tried reading the technical reports but do not have a good enough background to properly understand them, plus the accompanying photos don’t help!

I don't think we'll know until the weekend. They seem to have gone for a design choice but in real world testing it doesn't *seem* to have worked as well as thought. It will be interesting to see if they stick with the design from second test or go back to the design from first test.

Without knowing fuel loads and how the engine was dialled in, it's impossible to compare the teams. I think it could be interesting though with potentially a much more mixed grid than usual as all the teams are trying to find the best way to make these cars work.

 

[icowden]

Watching FP1 - the porpoising on Mercedes doesn't look good compared to Red Bull. They must be feeling seasick!