Formula E heads to Mexico for the fourth round of the season with Bird and Virgin leading the championships, a new driver in the field. We preview what to look out for in Mexico.
Please discuss here all your remarks and pose your questions about all racing series, except Formula One. Both technical and other questions about GP2, Touring cars, IRL, LMS, ...
andylaurence wrote:I really enjoyed the race. Yes, the formation lap was daft and they should probably race from cold next time.
They should, electric motors or batteries don´t need to warm up, you can apply full power from a cold motor without problems, only the tires need some warming, and that can be done at the grid
Add to that energy managment is crucial, so they don´t want to waste one single electron more than needed for that lap, and you have a extremely slow warm up lap.
I'm not sure I can think of anything good to say...
This series is supposed to be some sort of advertisement for electric power, but these electric cars weigh more than an F1 car, produce 1/4 of the power and can only limp round the track at painfully slow speeds for 12 laps. How exactly does that make electric power look like a viable replacement for the ICE?
As for the drivers...
A few decent but aging ex-F1 midfielders. A bunch of F1 rejects from midfield or backmarker teams with 1-2 (or less) seasons under their belts. Some (mostly aging) midfielders from other series. Perhaps 2-3 younger drivers whose careers are actually on the rise, although I'm doubtful any of them will make it to F1* (and choosing Formula E over faster and more relevant feeder series will not help their careers).
*If you are going to tell me Sam Bird, he's getting too old to be an F1 rookie, and Merc doesn't have a feeder team.
Andres125sx wrote:About energy recovered when braking.... telemetry data on TV showed they´re recovering up to 140KW when braking, same power they use acccelerating...
Anyone knows what are the real numbers? I´m curious about how much energy they recover
The braking phase is shorter than acceleration, so considering the time under braking compared to accelerating there are more kWh used in acceleration. Hope that makes sense.
Raleigh wrote:I'm not sure I can think of anything good to say...
This series is supposed to be some sort of advertisement for electric power, but these electric cars weigh more than an F1 car, produce 1/4 of the power and can only limp round the track at painfully slow speeds for 12 laps. How exactly does that make electric power look like a viable replacement for the ICE?
As for the drivers...
A few decent but aging ex-F1 midfielders. A bunch of F1 rejects from midfield or backmarker teams with 1-2 (or less) seasons under their belts. Some (mostly aging) midfielders from other series. Perhaps 2-3 younger drivers whose careers are actually on the rise, although I'm doubtful any of them will make it to F1* (and choosing Formula E over faster and more relevant feeder series will not help their careers).
*If you are going to tell me Sam Bird, he's getting too old to be an F1 rookie, and Merc doesn't have a feeder team.
Better be careful Andre will get you. It was boring.
“To be able to actually make something is awfully nice”
Bruce McLaren on building his first McLaren racecars, 1970
“I've got to be careful what I say, but possibly to probably Juan would have had a bigger go”
Sir Frank Williams after the 2003 Canadian GP, where Ralf hesitated to pass brother M. Schumacher
Belatti wrote:They are so slow, heavy and with little mileage that they should start recovering from the front brakes, too. This way they could choose between lasting longer or enable the full power for the race.
Belatti wrote:They are so slow, heavy and with little mileage that they should start recovering from the front brakes, too. This way they could choose between lasting longer or enable the full power for the race.
You'd need 4WD for that. Which would be great.
Not necessarily, you can use front electric rotors to capture energy and then disconnect them automatically for traction.
It would be nice if we turn the chat here towards more technical grounds... We all know the weight, speed, mileage and drivers are sh*t compared to F1, we will not discover anything new there, so lets move on and think about how could performance be improved.
I would like to know the torque/speed curve of the electric motor because it seems to me that on the on-boards, the car does not accelerate much in the moments previous to the gear change.
Last edited by Belatti on 14 Sep 2014, 00:42, edited 1 time in total.
"You need great passion, because everything you do with great pleasure, you do well." -Juan Manuel Fangio
"I have no idols. I admire work, dedication and competence." -Ayrton Senna
SiLo wrote:What sort of speeds where they hitting? I saw some of the race and it looked... pedestrian. Like, really slow. And sounded... crap.
Top speed is limited to 220kph (136.7mph) but I heard that they were only reaching about 90-100mph on that track. The sound is roughly 10dB louder than an average road car travelling 70mph. They looked fairly quick onboard, but as soon as they cut to that camera that was panning down the main straight they didn't look quite as fast!
I enjoyed this race quite a bit.
1. It was refreshing to see more different racing televised (never see F3, etc in the US)
2. I liked seeing all those drivers, I enjoy a lot of them in other series. Its neat to see some sports car drivers in a single seater, and its good to see more racing faces. Also who doesn't want to see Little Prost vs Little Senna, just as a side bonus?
3. Most importantly the cars were different and interesting. It will be fun to follow this technology and watch it evolve from the piddly 2 cars for 24 laps.
Critically however there were some things that made it less enjoyable than it could have been.
1. The sound - The noise the cars produce on TV is shrill and un-enjoyable, and the balance of sound to commentator (on my station) was poorly balanced with the shrill noise drowning out the same band in the commentator voice. This got to the point where no sound would have been better than what was coming from my speakers.
2. The event - It was indeed too short, which needs to change. I feel the event ultimately need to be longer. Weather that's BTCC style longer or F1 style longer Im not sure. It would be nice to see a slightly different format than F1.
3. The cars - I can say I don't like the big rims ... put them at 15's or something! They need to get faster, obviously but they aren't too slow to be fun to watch. They are a bit ugly.
Overall thoughts:
Well the cars are interesting. It appears that they are very low downforce, and have fairly stiff side-walled hard rubbered tires. This appeared to contribute to how the cars handled and it looked like those drivers were certainly driving those cars hard at times with them bounce and skidding. From my armchair that's good to see, imho. All in all the cars didn't seem to be too undone by following another car closely, which bodes well for the racing.
What are everyone's feelings on how the choice of Wheel/Tire effected the racing?
As it appears 1 Transmission/1 Engine per season, to have so many transmission issues was just unexpected for me. Does anyone have any idea as to why we saw that? I believe 2 cars failed, and a third did also after what appeared to be a very light tap on the wall. Who's the transmission supplier?
While on this subject.. since its a spec series... why punish the team for a parts failure they have no control over...that seems silly? Having to buy a new part is punishment enough, it would seem to me.
What can be done about the sound? It was a serious turn off, and this is coming from a guy who is OK with the new v6's. (Definitely not the preferred sound but I can live with them.)
I mean seriously, I don't know what it sounded like in person but that was really to the point of unpleasant to me. My wife could said - That sounds like nails on a chalk board to me, and I tend to agree.
If anyone that was there and could comment on the live sound it would be interesting to hear your thoughts.
While two cars per driver does seem kind of silly, it was fun to watch the "pit stops" with drivers changing cars in a hurry, made for some "pit stop" action! (I miss the lemans standing starts of old!)
The track was not entertaining, and really as we saw with Nick's wreck, not very safe. The barriers were too close and those corner 'kerbs' were just too high and upset the car way too much. I really feared for Nick when I saw that accident, that could have been a whole lot worse very easily. If we are paving parabolic for safety then this issue today should have never happened and been unacceptable. We haven't see a formula 1 car have an issue like that in quite a while, is there any other reason than kerb/wall too close that anyone thinks contributed to his car getting do badly airborne? Because of the weight of the cars are they more dangerous in wrecks because they are carrying more energy (inertial) at a given speed, hence harder to stop before impacting something?
I do hope for the best and I want to watch the series but the TV stations or someone need to mix the car sound down or trim off the top 30% of the noise frequency range or something....
All transmission issues were caused by hitting things, not by general failure of the box. But indeed it looked like it requires only a small touch to damage it so they might want to improve it later.
The sound wasn't badly mixed on the online version so it's probably something that the TV channel needs to work on. They do have a strange sound, but the way it was mixed online sounded fine. Just not anything like a traditional race car.
The only thing that I didn't like about the racing was the super slow "warmup" lap. They should probably switch to tire-warmers or cold starts. The accompanying music thing is a fun idea, but the style of music didn't really match my taste.
On the technology side I'm really looking forward to next year. If a lot of big guys are allowed to start developing I expect we will see fast improvement of battery technology and the fragile gearboxes.
NTS wrote:All transmission issues were caused by hitting things, not by general failure of the box. But indeed it looked like it requires only a small touch to damage it so they might want to improve it later.
Thanks, I didn't catch the other 2 were caused by wall taps too, just heard the commentator say that two other cars got a grid penalty.
But still they crashed - why take a grid penalty for that which would already seem to be punished enough?
Maybe it should be revised to avoid replacing motors and gearboxes each race, but allow for replacement w/o penaly if the car is damaged in a wreck?
The speed down the straights was a bit of a turn off. I've always said they should have 2 shorter races, on shorter twistier tracks. Then you don't see the cars limping down the straights and you don't see them changing cars mid race and highlighting that the range is crap. Formula E isn't F1 so why try and copy F1 race format when it simply doesn't work with current electric technology.
Plus the younger generation seems to have really taken to the RallyX format of shorter sharper races, and I'm sure you'd be on to a winner...
andylaurence wrote:What's important about this series is that its not about absolute performance, but about competition. The top 7 cars were covered by a few seconds near the end of the race. The racing was pretty fierce and the cars moved around in the corners, locking up on the way in, which was dramatic.
Why is this of any surprise? Spec series almost always have close racing.
I enjoyed it, I took it for what it was, don't compare it to other racing categories unless you can point me in the direction of another fully electric series.
