xpensive wrote:What if the WMSC had just gone with a 40 or 45 cc/second fuel-flow formula, left everything else free,
I wonder what we might have seen on the grid in 2013? Not totally convinved they'd be all I4 turbos.
From a presentaion by Jean Jaques His, head of Ferraris powertrain department
http://summit.fiainstitute.com/sustainability-workshop/documents/jj_his_presentation_2.ppt wrote:
CO2 challenge for road cars, and fuel consumption of a race car are different problems :
- Race engines are mainly operated at high load, in their best efficiency area, and potential improvement of fuel consumption for race engines is limited
- Road car engines are mainly used at low load, in their worst efficiency conditions. Engine efficiency at low load may be improved by solutions which are not fully relevant to race operating conditions
Therefore, road cars are going massively towards downsizing and hybrids, and will tremendously cut the CO2 emissions as long as the current reference cycle will remain
The main objective of transplanting downsizing / turbo charging / hybrid systems ….. to race cars is to develop and promote road relevant technologies for reducing fuel consumption of road cars
So the main objective here isn't to find what solution will give the most power from a given fuel flow in a race car, but to use technology that is similar to what is used in production cars, and help improve and promote that technology.
xpensive wrote:I could obviously not disagree more, only twenty years ago when the turbos were banned, it resulted in a fantastic variety of interpretations of the 3.5 liter formula, V8s, V10s and V12s, all with different layouts, it took the FIA to ban everything but V10s for the engineers to concur on one format. Just the way things should be if you ask me.
I am certain that a simple fuel-flow limit would trigger a never seen creativity among the engineers, while giving back some technical and marketing incentive to integrate the development of an F1 engine in the general such of the manufacturer.
The idea that engineers of the world would rapidly home in on a common concept is to my mind complete nonsense, in a perfect world perhaps, but luckily we do not live in a such. If that was the case, all production cars would be the same wouldn't they?
I happen to believe that a 1.6 turbo I4 would not prove to be the preferred xecution, evertything taken into account.
Actually, all teams already used V10 engines before V10 engines were mandated in 2000.
For any engineering problem, there is generally a narrow range of "ideal solutions" to that problem. Of course, depending on the funding the teams have it may take them a longer or shorter time to find this ideal solution to the very specific problem a F1 engine is. But this is generally considered a bad thing. Spending huge sums of money finding the ideal solution for a F1 engine, which isn't relevant outside the world of F1, is pointless engineering exercise.
