Redmondo wrote:First post.
Based on what Sayshina has said about racing engines being on/off beasts, would be it be possible to only use 4 cylinders at the start and mash the throttle? In China Q2 Brundle said that the cars in the line-up could be on four or even two cylinders for cooling purposes.
Hmm, would it be possible to set up the ECU to do it? Certainly. But while engine maps are switchable by the driver on the fly, they're not free to switch however and whenever they please.
Would it be reliable? Yeah, probably. That's more or less how traction control worked anyway. You might run into a problem shutting off particular cylinders for longer than you ever did under traction control, but I'd bet that would be fairly easy to solve.
Would it be possible to hide doing this? Not a chance. The ECU tracks this sort of thing, and I'd be very surprised if the FIA didn't rule it cheating. And they check regularly.
Also, I think I've exagerated things a bit. Race engines really do tend to be sortof beast-like, but they're not all THAT bad. Well, not usually. You do care about transients, it's just that it's so incredibly hard to make a nice, docile engine with a wide powerband that also has great top end.
Peak power is critical, transient response is nice if you can get it.
Harding, if you're implying he said that was by rule, I'd ask you to remember that comentators are rarely any sort of expert. As far as I know, there is no such rule concerning kers use. However, there's also no good reason to use it when you're already traction limited, which the cars would certainly be at 100kph.
Caito, how would you go about making kers work as traction control? I mean how would you get away with it? You could theoretically do it with uncontroled dual torque kers, but not with heavily restricted and routinely checked push to pass kers. What we have today is the latter.