Honda F1 project leader Yusuke Hasegawa has outlined a number of reasons why Honda has been struggling so badly in the beginning of the 2017 Formula One season. He confirmed that lots of problems were not discovered while running on the dynamo meter.
Tensions between McLaren and engine partner Honda reached new heights in Montreal after the Japanese manufacturer did not deliver a long-awaited engine upgrade. Worse, Fernando Alonso’s RA617H power unit failed within sight of the chequered flag, thus denying the team a maiden points finish in 2017 and extending its worst-ever start to an F1 campaign.
While the flaws of the Honda plant are well documented, the apparent lack of reaction from the constructor is wearing McLaren’s patience thin. Implementing the pre-chamber technology on the 2017-spec engine has been a headache and created issues, which have been amplified by the switch from Esso to BP fuel over the winter.
The pre-combustion system would have unexpectedly increased engine vibrations, thus weakening the MGU-H according to Honda’s head of F1 project Yusuke Hasegawa. Despite the element being revised in Russia, the MGU-H broke down after two grand prix weekends.
I wonder if Honda bit off more than they could chew when they decided to change the turbo architecture and the combustion chamber.
They could quite easily have done the turbo change for the start of the season, using the combustion concept from last year. That would have allowed them to focus on sorting the turbo and MGUH first before they tackled the combustion change.
Both Ferrari and Renault introduced their pre-chamber injection systems mid season. Mercedes may have too.
I know they were setting ambitious targets - like matching the Mercedes PU from Abu Dhabi last year at the start of this year. But they have failed dismally, and that must be as disheartening for the people at Honda as it has been for McLaren.
Honda Yusuke Hasegawa, F1 General Manager, said that if I am in time for sufficient updates, if I improve the ICE (engine body) which is the main improvement of the output, the exhaust gas with higher combustion efficiency The temperature drops. Then, since the regenerative energy from the exhaust turbo and MGU - H decreases, it also becomes necessary to modify it. The situation is more complicated than imagining.
Honda Yusuke Hasegawa, F1 General Manager, said that if I am in time for sufficient updates, if I improve the ICE (engine body) which is the main improvement of the output, the exhaust gas with higher combustion efficiency The temperature drops. Then, since the regenerative energy from the exhaust turbo and MGU - H decreases, it also becomes necessary to modify it.
May this explain why the Honda PU is so fuel hungry? In the sense that they need to "waste" fuel running the ICE at suboptimal efficency levels just to reach reasonable power figures from the MGUH/Turbo..
I wonder if Honda bit off more than they could chew when they decided to change the turbo architecture and the combustion chamber.
They could quite easily have done the turbo change for the start of the season, using the combustion concept from last year. That would have allowed them to focus on sorting the turbo and MGUH first before they tackled the combustion change.
Both Ferrari and Renault introduced their pre-chamber injection systems mid season. Mercedes may have too.
I know they were setting ambitious targets - like matching the Mercedes PU from Abu Dhabi last year at the start of this year. But they have failed dismally, and that must be as disheartening for the people at Honda as it has been for McLaren.
I think you are right. But past is something we can never change even if it just one second before.
Some interesting insight regarding Engine testing from Toni Cuquerella (Ex-Ferrari Engineer)
"In Honda's case, might have happened that they had invested a lot, but they chose poorly, or haven't invested enough and underestimated the relevance of this project", explains to El Confidencial Toni Cuquerella, Ferrari engineer until last year and nowadays sporscaster for Movistar F1.
"I'd say that Honda isn't a leader in this technology"
"The dyno is a power bench. It's more than fifty years old, it's nothing new", Cuquerella explains. They have been updating from then, but in the recent times have reached a crucial importance. “They are getting more similar to a real car. But still it's not enough. In F1 you don't have private tests any more, so the trend is to have dynos more and more sophisticated, which might not mean to have an entire car but almost. If you test the engine and its power, this will depend of how the gearbox is integrated with the engine. And it is related to the chassis, how it bends how it vibrates...".
The key of the modern dynos is the amount of variables that is possible to introduce in them. "All you have about the car and the track you put into the bench in order to have more credibility" the valencian engineer explains. "And then you have the correlation, you want the bench to be similar to the track. You do a lot of reliability testing, not only performance. All the great engine builders do race simulations with them. I don't know the level of Honda's dynos, if they are at the same level as the rest or behind, but I believe that they are not the leaders in this technology".
They have "first year" problems
In the first steps of the hybrid technology it was rumoured that Mercedes had invested in a super expensive and complicated dyno. What kind of instruments do you need in this times of hybrid technology? "The more you want to replicate the reality, they are more complex, sophisticated and expensive, becuse they have more elements to make them like a car. It's obvious that Mercedes understood this from the start. You have to invest in engines, but also in knowing how to measure them and knowing how interact the different elements integrated to the engine. Here, with the latest statements from Hasegawa, looks like they are a bit behind. What we don't know is how they invested their budget, if they have invested badly or not enough.
130 laps without even touching the tarmac
The engineering process of the engine works, in the following way. " First you make the parts in the simulator, then you build the prototype parts and build the first engines, although the parts have a very long fabrication process", which explains, for example, the time needed for an engine update. "When you have the first designs, they go to other dynos which they relate more and more to the real car, so when you go to the first test you are able to do 130 laps in Barcelona"
Is a car capable of doing such amount of laps with even touching the tarmac? "Because beforehand it has been tested in dynos that measured the cooling, the vibrations of the elements, how the different elements flex with the others... And all of this has to be done in similar conditions to the real ones. If you want to simulate Mexico, you will have to put in the dyno the same atmospheric pressure, which is lower because of the altitude. In Barcelona, for example, you have different humidity and temperature".
There are different versions of the dynos and even so Cuquerella knows the ones from Mercedes and Ferrari, he can't give us details due to confidenciality reasons. " One of the trends might be an entire car, where you do the race simulation. Might even be that the dyno splits into four, for the four wheels. Tha car is suspended over four benches, where it can do almost anything, a complete race simulation with the chasis" They have even developed dynos where the driver can get in and drive the car. "There are a lot of variants, you have to choose the best suited for your needs. We don't know which is Honda's one, but the trend is to complicated dynos where you put the whole car"
What does Toni Cuquerella think, as an engineer, about the current hybrid engines? "The fact they let the rules to be as complex is a technological show-off, for the engineers is something unbelievable to be able to work with this machines that had been so difficult to understand for the teams. But they are very far from what the spectators need, and they don't contribute to the show and have skyrocketed the budgets. The engines are incredible. There is nothing so complex and sophisticated. Only Le Mans is close. And even so, they have to check it if it's worth for Formula 1. The fan cannot even understand the 50% of what's in the car".
Putting engine problems aside for a moment I must admit that I'm a bit puzzled of what Honda is trying to do now.
According to the various bits and pieces from Sakura that we hear from Wazari, AMuS, Hasegawa and so on we know that:
- The core concept of the combustion is causing all sort of problems.
- Their bench at the moment can't replicate the real use scenario with "decent" results.
- Their original concept was good on the single cylinder but didn't translate into the V6.
- Because of the already mentioned bench problems they can't fix their problems fast enough
- They are underfunded compared to the others.
- They are understaffed.
- They lack the "F1 method" used by the others team and use a more "R&D method" instead.
- Time is phisically running out, they have to get to the top before the start of the 2020 season in the worst case scenario, otherwise the whole F1 PU project would get remembered as the greatest failure in motorsport history (and we are halfway there).
- McLaren, Alonso and presumably the Honda boards are frustrated by this mess. Money is literally burning for nothing positive in return.
- There's a tangible risk of starting the 2018 season with a terrible PU again supplying only Sauber and Ericcson, and we all know that that would be a Minardi scenario that won't attrack any other team.
First thing that come out of this is that Hasegawa-san is probably going to have his career destroyed and I feel sorry for him, but then:
- Continuing with "the Honda way" will get results very late in the future, if it will ever produce a good result at all, and will probably end the McLaren Honda relationship as soon as this summer.
- Changing to a more "F1 oriented method" will require a tons of money and a enormous changes in the factory to get results as soon as 2018.
I won't be surprised if Honda pulls the plug soon, it would probably be the less expensive option for them, even if they have to pay McLaren a lot.
Sorry, but I find it hard to believe that Honda's budget is half of the Mercedes and Ferrari. Just look at how much money they are spending at McLaren alone. I thought they also build a state-of-the-art facility for the development of the F1 engine.
The dyno problem, as reported, was more about reliability issues not being seen rather than performance. I suppose it doesn't necessarily rule out the possibility of performance gains being seen on the dyno, but not on track, but that isn't what the text of the article said. The one-cylinder to six-cylinder thing seemed to be about more of an attempt to keep pushing R&D until the last minute to get gains, and then the gamble didn't pay off as the six-cylinder version saw unforseen issues - at least there are some interesting lessons to learn there, both technically and in project management. The budget and manpower thing seems strange, I thought Honda were plowing money in. The "F1 method" rather than "R&D method" doesn't make much sense, I don't know what the difference is, F1 _is_ R&D. Seems Honda just got the cut-off time of research versus consolidating what they had into a reliable package wrong, thought they could keep going either to get bigger gains, or because what they had was barely functional in time (bear in mind this is their first attempt at something along the lines of HCCI or TJI). Probably the unexpected severe vibrations have also absolutely messed all the plans up. Frankly there's no way of really knowing what the root problem is - lack of expertise because they haven't used such technologies before, bad management, bad dyno to track correlation, taking some educated guesses / gambles to catch and leap-frog the opposition that didn't work out, trying to do too many things all at once - could be any or some combination of these. All these are based on rumours and conjecture and snippets out of Honda. The only really well established fact is that the current version of the engine is really poor, as was the 2015 one. The 2016 actually made some half decent progress on reliability and to some extent on performance, but that concept is in the bin now. Tough times, it's going to need a miracle to see a big jump in-season, but I'm hoping for one.
Honda Yusuke Hasegawa, F1 General Manager, said that if I am in time for sufficient updates, if I improve the ICE (engine body) which is the main improvement of the output, the exhaust gas with higher combustion efficiency The temperature drops. Then, since the regenerative energy from the exhaust turbo and MGU - H decreases, it also becomes necessary to modify it.
May this explain why the Honda PU is so fuel hungry? In the sense that they need to "waste" fuel running the ICE at suboptimal efficency levels just to reach reasonable power figures from the MGUH/Turbo..
This was true for the last engine (RA616H) last season. I believe it was Canada that they introduced a new turbo design? The fact the engine had become more efficient with the last upgrade and therefore there was less exhaust energy to harvest so the idea was the new turbo, and mapping along with it, was in an effort to claw some of that back. I think it was mentioned on here (light years of pages back now) that they had an engine mode that deliberately ran the engine in a way that created a denser exhaust flow to increase the amount of energy they could harvest for the battery over a lap.
So you are potentially right, it's possible they are running a "map" that increases harvesting results much more of the time.
From what i can tell Honda have a full AVL track simulation dyno system.
But it is a rigid test stand type system not a full chassis simulation.
If they are still having vibration issues the chances of finding the solution on the dyno without a full chassis simulation is pretty slim.
But it's important to remember that a 90 degree V6 with straight crank pins will always be an odd fire engine and will inherently be vibration prone.
Tensions between McLaren and engine partner Honda reached new heights in Montreal after the Japanese manufacturer did not deliver a long-awaited engine upgrade. Worse, Fernando Alonso’s RA617H power unit failed within sight of the chequered flag, thus denying the team a maiden points finish in 2017 and extending its worst-ever start to an F1 campaign.
While the flaws of the Honda plant are well documented, the apparent lack of reaction from the constructor is wearing McLaren’s patience thin. Implementing the pre-chamber technology on the 2017-spec engine has been a headache and created issues, which have been amplified by the switch from Esso to BP fuel over the winter.
The pre-combustion system would have unexpectedly increased engine vibrations, thus weakening the MGU-H according to Honda’s head of F1 project Yusuke Hasegawa. Despite the element being revised in Russia, the MGU-H broke down after two grand prix weekends.
