Most fuel efficent engine for 2010?

[WhiteBlue]

When you run leaner the engine is typically hotter, thus requiring more cooling capacity and that usually means larger sidepod openings and thus more drag and then higher fuel consumption... it is a vicious circle that must be balanced.

I do not agree with this opinion. The engine with the highest fuel consumption will have the lowest efficiency and will require the most cooling. Last year the Ferrari was considered a hot engine and it had the highest fuel consumption.

Higher power doesn't mean there is a higher cooling requirement because power can be used to dissipate energy via aero and brakes. So I would go strictly by fuel consumption to estimate the cooling requirements. For the KERS teams you must consider that their consumption will go up so for McLaren the Brawn or Force India figures are probably more applicable than the McLaren fuel figures.

[CMSMJ1]

When you run leaner the engine is typically hotter, thus requiring more cooling capacity and that usually means larger sidepod openings and thus more drag and then higher fuel consumption... it is a vicious circle that must be balanced.

I do not agree with this opinion. The engine with the highest fuel consumption will have the lowest efficiency and will require the most cooling. Last year the Ferrari was considered a hot engine and it had the highest fuel consumption.

Higher power doesn't mean there is a higher cooling requirement because power can be used to dissipate energy via aero and brakes. So I would go strictly by fuel consumption to estimate the cooling requirements. For the KERS teams you must consider that their consumption will go up so for McLaren the Brawn or Force India figures are probably more applicable than the McLaren fuel figures.

To add to this - it is my understanding that the hotter you can run the rads, the smaller they can be.

Lean running is not healthy in the long run

[ISLAMATRON]

When you run leaner the engine is typically hotter, thus requiring more cooling capacity and that usually means larger sidepod openings and thus more drag and then higher fuel consumption... it is a vicious circle that must be balanced.

I do not agree with this opinion. The engine with the highest fuel consumption will have the lowest efficiency and will require the most cooling. Last year the Ferrari was considered a hot engine and it had the highest fuel consumption.

There are many different types of effienciy calculations for ICE's... but the cooling requirements dont allways match up with the fuel consumption... as I have pointed out in the past rich fuel mistures are sometimes used just to cool an engine even though it may lower the power rating... that type of cooling is passed OUT of the exhaust pipes rather than through the cooling system(rads). Now, having those smaller rads(air inlets really) would lead to lower drag(&fuel consumption) and may actually lead to a better fuel consumption rating than if running lean with much bigger aero cooling requirements.

So you could have small rads with rich mixtures and poor fuel effiency but less drag, or lean mixtures with big rads and good fuel effiency but more drag... and the power levels varrying accordingly. It is a very delicate balance that the engine guys have to work with the aero guys to find the optimal setting.

The cooling systems for these F1 cars are pretty much even steven... all use pressurized water, AL rads and so forth, the only major difference is the internal cooling of the engines, but I cant see that being a huge difference at this point. Exhaust design could be a big differentiator, but they all use the same material for their headers.

Higher power doesn't mean there is a higher cooling requirement because power can be used to dissipate energy via aero and brakes. So I would go strictly by fuel consumption to estimate the cooling requirements. For the KERS teams you must consider that their consumption will go up so for McLaren the Brawn or Force India figures are probably more applicable than the McLaren fuel figures.

I have no idea what you mean in this last paragraph, please clarify, furthermore, I saw no proof that KERS effected fuel consumption last year.

[marcush.]

taking into account these words ,it comes back to my mind that brawn had their engine temps higher than norbert would have liked...so may be this was one reason why they did not match Mclaren in terms of consumption...they needed additional fuel to keep temps in check.

[Shrek]

Is it me or does Ferrari always consume the most fuel so that's why they partially went back to refueling in 1994 (i think)

[WhiteBlue]

Higher power doesn't mean there is a higher cooling requirement because power can be used to dissipate energy via aero and brakes. So I would go strictly by fuel consumption to estimate the cooling requirements. For the KERS teams you must consider that their consumption will go up so for McLaren the Brawn or Force India figures are probably more applicable than the McLaren fuel figures.

I have no idea what you mean in this last paragraph, please clarify, furthermore, I saw no proof that KERS effected fuel consumption last year.

There are fuel consumption figures based on 2009 races available and I am assuming we are using these for comparison here. Generally those figures express the efficiency of the engine and the power utilization of the car. One cannot view these figures unrelated from the vehicle. For explanation:

The Merc engine was used by McLaren, Brawn and Force India. When you analyse these you find two points.

Best fuel consumption was achieved by McLaren which was using KERS for top end power almost all of the season. It saved them a fair amount of fuel. Of the two non KERS runners FI was having the better fuel consumption. The main difference between the two cars is the downforce level. Brawn was running at higher throttle to utilize their better downforce.

My quotation above referred to the expectation that McLaren will not have KERS in 2010 that saved them fuel in 2009. So their consumption will go up compared to 2009 figures.

I also expect the MP4-25 to have competitive downforce on a level which we saw last year at Brawn or higher. So this will also push them higher in consumption. I have not considered the effect of carrying more fuel weight all the time which will generally increase fuel consumption this year for all competitors.

Regarding the energy balance of an engine you basically distinguish between mechanical power and heat. The higher the efficiency of an engine the less heat it produces from a given amount of fuel. It means that more power is available to be used to overcome drag and to accelerate. The energy from the mechanical power generation will ultimately also be dissipated by the brakes and by turbulence into the air.

[WhiteBlue]

[mx_tifoso]

I don't exactly remember the reasons you gave for double posting so much, but it went somewhere along the lines of the site being too slow and the mouse giving you problems right?

Regarding the site, if it or the connection is ever sluggish don't hit the submit button more than once, because that'll be the amount of submitted posts that will appear. Just hit it once and wait, please.

And also please buy a new mouse!

[ESPImperium]

As the rule of thumb, going on the 2009 engines and 2009 race pace, the table for fuel tank size to HB looks like this:

Mercedes FO108W = 155KG tank running optimal 760HP
Ferarri 056 = 165kg takn running at optimal 755HP
Renault RS27 = 140KG tank running at optimal 745HP
Toyota RVX-09 = 135KG tank running at optimal 738HP
BMW P86/9 = 158KG tank running at optimal 752HP

Time comparisons from the Mercedes block to the Toyota block from 09 is arround 0.3 a second a lap, but the thing was the cars the Toyota power was in, those cars were better designed from a aero angle than the Mercedes and Ferarri cars if you exclude the Brawn BGP001.

Rumor has it that the CA2010 can pump out arround 770HP, but if that was taken as its optimal power, you would look at somewhere near 177KG of fuel, just to make it over the line and no more, more like 180KG is ideally needed as you will see the cars doing less reconaciance laps this year before a race, more like Pits to Grid, no cutting thrugh the pits to loose some fuel weight.

They can do as many recon laps as they want, refueling is allowed even while sitting on the grid AFAIK. Recon laps will be the new sunday morning warmup. It might get to the point where teams might be limited on recon laps by the FIA... but that is already somewhat limited by when the track is opened for recon laps.

How/where are you getting these fuel weights and HP numbers?

The figures are from a couple of sources, my data for the tank size data for last year, and from what ive read post and pre season in blogs and such from people who have access to the people in the know, so in that way are pretty relyable.

As for recon laps, i thought that refueling on the grid was the same as last and previous other seasons uner the refueling rules that it was banned under the saftey aspects. But is there going to be a 30min warmup for the drivers on sunday like there was in the early 90s, when i remember having to get the times of Sunday Practices to guess the weather and who was running a quali engine via the good old buliding block TeleText/Ceefax system. No beautiful red button then.

I would like to see a Sunday Warmup back, but is there space on the undercard now, with GP2/GP3 and Porche cup??? I think not.

[ringo]

I agree the performance can't be viewed independent of the cars however the thermal efficiency of these engines can be.

The logical way to get an indicator of the efficiency is if we had 2 different engines in 1 type of car.
The problem is we only have examples of 1 type of engine used in 2 different cars in F1, but then it doesn't say much because we want to compare different engines not the cars.

By definition brake thermal efficiency = brake power/ (mass flow rate x calorific value of the fuel)

So we can see an engine's efficiency is not affected by the car's themselves.
not even the specific fuel consumption is. Only factors are the fuel, combustion efficiency and mechanical efficiency.

We need to know the actual power output of each car and the kind of fuel used before we can infer anything about the efficiency.

The Ferrari engine could be the most efficient one, but it's fuel could be the worst. The F60 could also have a less efficient gearbox, or maybe very poor lift to drag ratio.
They have taken steps to improve most of these, so they could very well have the best mileage in 2010, with little changes to the engine's efficiency.

[WhiteBlue]

The Ferrari engine could be the most efficient one, but it's fuel could be the worst. The F60 could also have a less efficient gearbox, or maybe very poor lift to drag ratio.
They have taken steps to improve most of these, so they could very well have the best mileage in 2010, with little changes to the engine's efficiency.

All signs from 2009 point to the Ferrari engine being the worst in power and fuel consumption and running relatively hot. Even if they build the best possible chassis it will not improve their engine dramatically. Ferrari's fuel consumption penalty for 2010 is likely smaller than McLaren's because they ran their KERS system a lot less. But that is not going to compensate for less power and a thirstier engine. I also doubt that they can make more progress with help from Shell by running even hotter. There is a natural limit to thinning the oil by higher temperatures. At one point you simply get too much wear.

The fuel figures can be found here:

http://f1numbers.wordpress.com/2009/12/ ... -fuel-use/

[WhiteBlue]

For the power stakes the best source is probably AMuS with a translation done by James Allan.

http://www.jamesallenonf1.com/2009/11/a ... e-in-2009/

[marcush.]

what is wrong with my perception that I cannot see the dramatic discrepancies between competitors in fuel ..with no more refueling ,you will not see those huge 40 or 50 litres differences of car weight that we saw at times when teams gambled on weird strategies.so the weight aspect will be a modest point ,only randomly affecting race outcomes ,no more .You will never ever see that because of the consumption figures a race will be decided ...my 2cents.

as I read the graphs ,

-Brawn and Ferrari had the same fuel consumption in 2009 so No problem for Ferrrari there

-the renault vs ferrari had ,basesd on a 70lap race an advantage of 9kilogrammes of mass .the impact of this is only really relevant in the first third of the race if at all .
to all of my knowledge the potential performance gains or losses due to this amount of added mass will easily be soaked up by driver inconsistencies ,good or bad starts ,track position etc in the first third of the race,a bodged pitstop,
So to me this is really not a deciding factor ,when there is a potential of say
5 seconds over the race distance is talked about ,but you will need to go to lap 17
before you even can make full use of the cars potential anyways...
towards the end of the race ,all competitors will assume the same fuel load ,zero + mandatory fuel sample allowance,+ safety margin.

remember with kers no more ,even USF1 should easily reach the minimum weight.

[dave kumar]

I agree the performance can't be viewed independent of the cars however the thermal efficiency of these engines can be.

The logical way to get an indicator of the efficiency is if we had 2 different engines in 1 type of car.
The problem is we only have examples of 1 type of engine used in 2 different cars in F1, but then it doesn't say much because we want to compare different engines not the cars...

How useful would it to compare fuel consumption figures for 2007 - 2009? The alleged engine freeze should mean that variations in consumption are down to the changes made to the car it was used in over the 3 seasons.


Is it true that downforce levels have increased year on year (for all the cars, even those that didn't have a DDD at the beginning of 2009) despite the efforts of the TWG? If downforce was correlated to drag then we would see a similar increase in fuel consumption in all 3 seasons.

The thing is that I think that the aero development in F1 has focussed on increasing downforce without significantly increasing drag - or the case of the DDD, probably reducing drag. And unless we can infer drag to lift ratio (let's call it aero efficiency) from avg laptimes then we can't know what part of the fuel consumption equation is contributed by the engine efficiency and what part the aero efficiency.

And let's not forget mechanical efficiency (rolling resistance)!
May be we can quantify it as follows ....

fuel_consumption = season_avg_laptime^-1 * (engine_efficiency + aero_efficiency + mechanical_efficiency)^-1

With a few constants in there to reflect relative contributions of each term. I think we need to normalise the RHS by the average laptime because the faster the car the higher its fuel consumption all other things being equal. Oh but then we introduce the weight of the driver's right foot in to the equation.

[WhiteBlue]

-Brawn and Ferrari had the same fuel consumption in 2009 so No problem for Ferrrari there

You need to compare STR with Brawn to see how the Ferrari engine did in a non KERS car. The Ferrari data are impacted by their use of KERS while Brawn did not use KERS.