matt21 wrote:Nando wrote:Powershift wrote:The turbo cars of the 80's were the most powerful and efficient F1 cars of all time.
Could you elaborate?
They had about 900 hp with 195 l fuel allowed for the whole races in 1986 compared to around 750 hp with around 210 l fuel used for a race today.
This equals 4,3 hp/l in 85 to 3,6 hp/l today.
You've got to be really careful trying to make comparisons like this, making sure you are comparing like for like.
HP/l is power density, and there is no doubting turbos had massive specific power output.
In the turbo days they never ran full tilt for the race (much like today), they used to dial the boost up and down for fuel management. The old turbos were really quite crude, masses of extra fuel needed to be dumped in for charge cooling at max power.
You've also got to remember they were running very high density fuel/toluene mixes back in the day. So the fuel they had was of a higher specific gravity. Some blends were even thought to be more dense than water ie more than 1kg/l. The peak I have heard of is 1.3kg/l (but I have no source for that, and it does seem very high).
210 L of pump fuel @ 0.75 specific gravity = 157.5 kg fuel
195 of 100% toluene @ 0.86 sg = 166 kg fuel
The weight of the fuel is more important than the volume, it's why you'll find why commentators and teams tend to talk about kg of fuel rather than l.
