How long time to be widely adopted? The case the turbos.

[hollus]

The title was supposed to be: How long does it take for a new but dominating technology to be widely adopted? The case the turbos.
Is there a character limit for titles? Anyways:

We’ve seen this before. For example, Lotus introduces a ground effect car, it immediately proves dominating, and by the next season many teams have it, by the second next season they are designing their cars around it.
There is a case where that didn’t happen. The turbo engines. (The exact dates are of the top of my head, I’d be happy to be corrected).
Turbos had been in the regulations since the 60’s as an alternative to normally aspirated engines of larger capacity, yet nobody used them for a while. Fast forward to 1986: all top teams had turbos. Non turbo teams tended to be 1 or 2 laps down, the regulations were changed to limit the power output and many teams had special qualifying engines in addition to race engines. The technology was mature, and it was absolutely dominating. Everybody knew how to do it, the only limitations being possibly money. Yet, it took a long time to even start walking in that direction, even if AFAIK, nothing had changed in the regulations governing turbo engines in all those years. Let’s look at it in a bit more detail:
In 1977, after more than 10 years of turbos being ignored, Renault showed up with the first turbo powered F1 car. Not too surprisingly it was massively unreliable. By 1979 they had managed to extract more power, they were able of making the engine last whole races, and turbos won their first race in the modern era. One would think that other teams would then look into these turbos, which obviously had the power if they could be coaxed into lasting the distance, but it didn’t happen. 1980 passed without much novelty, still with the Renaults showing that turbos could make it to the front of the grid. By 1981, Ferrari had followed suit, more race wins followed. But 1982 was still ultimately won by non-turbo cars, which also outnumbered the turbos. It was only by 1983 that most teams starting to go that way, 6 years after the first appearance and 4 years after the first race win. If we didn’t know, and just reading this story, one would think that turbos were a nice but relatively minor innovation, say like the zero keel of the mass and J-dampers. But in reality we all know that turbos were a game changer and by then turbos were already what they continued to be for many years: An absolute must have.
So, what changed? One could conceivably have showed up in, say, 1974 with a well developed turbo engine, and considering the infinitely long straights many circuits had by then, beat everybody else by five minutes. What was the difference between 1981 and 1985? The regulations were the same, the potential was presumably there, but many teams hadn’t even tried, while Renault and Ferrari failed until then to turn turbos into a dominant force. What was missing?
Were some developments in materials necessary to make turbos reliable? Did something else in the regulations suddenly make turbos the must have, like, say, the cut down in ground effect? Was it simply a matter of the teams becoming aware of the possibility? Was it a case of the technology needing thousands of engineers and zillions of dollars to work on it for years to make it work and simply out of reach for a smaller group of clever people?
I saw my first F1 race in 1985 aged 10, not knowing who Niki Lauda was, much less what a turbo was, I just remember cars trying to find the last drops of fuel in the last lap. I missed the time, but there are several people here who saw it develop day by day. I await to be enlightened.

[Project Four]

This is a case of a combination of technology developing. If you look at what happened between 1977 and 1986 there were two significant advances that help. Firstly ‘Rocket Fuel’. Renault originally had started injecting water into the engines turbocharged ‘Charge Air’, this not only cooled the air but also for an unknown reason acted as a combustion stimulant, increasing the power. Renault and Ferrari used water injection and at the time denied that water constituted a power boost additive.

BMW believed more could be gained by manipulating the composition of the fuel and in combination with BASF produced something which was within FISA definition of fuel but could produce significantly more power. The product that made all the difference was toluene. By 1985 all front runners were running fuels that were around 86% toluene and 14% a "filler" of n-heptane, to reduce the octane to meet Formula 1 fuel restrictions. Toluene at 100% can be used as a fuel for both two-stroke and four-stroke engines; however, due to the density of the fuel and other factors, the fuel does not vaporize easily unless preheated to 70 degrees Celsius, Honda accomplished this by routing the fuel lines through the exhaust system to heat the fuel. Therefore, by 1984 BMW had reached 1,000bhp from a 1.5ltr engine at 4.5bar and through advances in turbo chargers BMW had by 1985 exceed 5bar and were producing 1,100bhp. At Monza in 1986 Gerhard Berger’s Benetton-BMW saw a bar reading of 5.5bar which was estimated to be over 1,300bhp.

The second key was computer control of engine management as to be competitive it was necessary to run as close as possible to the verge of detonation, which require sophisticated management of injection and ignition. The engines used between 1984-87, when fuel consumption was heavily restricted, operated on the verge of self destruction and how to use a host of sensors through the engine and sophisticated engine mapping to regulate the injection and ignition through most operating conditions.

[Carlos]

There may have been synergy between the USA CART series and F1; Cosworth developed the 2.6L DFX turbocharged V8 in 1975, which dominated CART for the next decade plus; F1 could not help but notice, turbos were widely used in American and European road cars in the '70's as a reaction to the Oil Embargo - manufacturer's reduced engine displacement; fuel economy at low revs, and added turbos for mid and top end power. Turbo's were very much a part of the era.