Engine freeze to be shorten to five years

[Principessa]

http://www.f1technical.net/news/7967

The F1 teams seem to have agreed to shorten the 10-year engine freeze to 5 years!

[Ogami musashi]

Very good news, and it also seems teams agreed (except ferrari but i think they will at the end) to go for budget caps and scrap all the aero testing bans.

All seems to be good news.

[bar555]

Great news to hear

But i really missssssss the past years since 2005 , when we used to have a new engine every year ( smaller , stronger , higher revs , lighter ) and a few specs in a season . Teams really relied on engine development .

Let's hope for the new eco engines much sooner than 5 boring ( as regards engine) years

[uzael]

Budget caps are a joke. With car companies all over the world in different legal districts there will be no way to reasonably account for the costs of R&D. Take RedBull and ToroRosso. The cars are technically designed by a 3rd party company so that both teams can use the cars without violating the concorde agreement. how then can this 3rd party be expceted to meet the salary caps of f1 in general? Even sports here in the US which use salary caps can only apply them in the sense of player salaries, which are directly regulated by the sport itself.

Ultimately, the idea of budget capping, much like cost cutting in general will be a waste of time. Teams with budgets of 300m will spend it, no matter what.

[Ogami musashi]

For sure it will be hard to police, but since This is a teams proposal i think it should have some effects after all in the sense it can really have an effect on what is spent for the track.

As you know Renault won the 05 and 06 championships with far less budget than Mclaren, ferrari and honda.

So i think this is possible to be efficient in competition and have a budget cap.

Now the policy is another subject. Let see what happens.

I'm in favour for that rather than the bans and standard parts proposals that kill softly the F1 technology story.

[checkered]

Ten years to

five years is what pot[ai]to is to pot[a:]to. Even the pre-homologation rules have been too restrictive and it's only against those self-imposed conditions that any freeze has appeared even moderately sane. The regulations and conditions in F1 have gone from integrative to derivative and one doesn't need to draw very unlikely parallels to see that the evolution in the management philosophy of the sport is being physically reflected in the vehicles it produces. We've left the f(F1) and going off on a falling tangent slope. Alas, in time what's below the bottom line will also align itself to the currently preferred reality. No wonder Tomba and Principessa have to report that Toyota engineers, for example, are exploring challenges above and beyond F1.

It is clear that recently technologies such as VCR have come to age. Sufficient investment, will and resources exist to make variable compression close to a standard in new ICE/hybrid vehicles in five years' time. Except F1, apparently. Meanwhile there's a vast number of proven and near ubiquitous engine technologies that F1 has already discarded in spite of their direct relevance to almost all contemporary vehicles and their clear advantages. I trust I don't need to name examples of these even if we've come to not question why those should be kept outside the realm of some of the most capable automotive engineers in the World. This needs to change. The disconnect between F1 related R&D and its returns is frankly appalling. If the five year scheme is accepted, it is the first order of things for the manufacturers to use this time in addressing this is a sustainable fashion.

Such a solution cannot be built around a single concept. There are very few things that are essential in steering the sport. It needs to be understood that no one man, nor even a few good men alone can realise the full potential that can be unleashed. A budget cap will seem like a ludicrous proposition if you end up earning, or saving, more (much more) from an idea than you invested in it. I know I don't have all the answers, not even close. But at least I'm willing to ask questions. What about F1?