Idle RPM?

[Edgar]

Can anyone tell me how many RPM an F1 car idles at? I know they top out at about 18-19K but how many RPM are they doing when they are refueuling or waiting on the starting grid? Thanks for any help.

[Racer-X]

Can anyone tell me how many RPM an F1 car idles at? I know they top out at about 18-19K but how many RPM are they doing when they are refueuling or waiting on the starting grid? Thanks for any help.

Dear Edgar,

A F1 engine does not have a stable idle RPM. In fact they work very bad at low RPM's. When the engineers run the engines in the boxes or on the grid they always put the engine in a higher revolution than the idle one. The same is during the pitstop: as soon as the driver stops you can hear the instable noise of the Idle (which probably runs around 10.000rpm) but soon the driver accelerates to a higher RPM.

[Reca]

The following figure shows the result of a little engine noise analysis based on the on board audio from Takuma Sato pitstop in Melbourne.



The analysis starts with the car already stationary and stops when the guy in the radio talks. The black crosses are the various samples while the red line just connects them for a more obvious visualization. Notice that the instantaneous peaks caused by a single data, as for example the peak at about 4 s (or the rapid up-down between 6500 and 7500 @ about 1s), are probably results of some odd noise hence should be discarded. What happens at 2 and 3 s on the contrary is probably an rpm variation.

[Guest]

I think it was something like 4.500 rpm for last years BMW engine.

/ Fx

[Guest]

I was told by a Sauber engineer last year that their car idled at around 7000 rpm but for the race they turned it up to about 10000 to help with stalling and keep the hydraulic pressure up during pit stops.