Perfect Reliability - Good or Bad for F1?

[ESPImperium]

The rules for 2013 was to have 6 for the first season and 5 for there on in.

So they will now go straight to 5 engines because they will give the manufacturers one more year to develop. That would fit the other numbers.

The good side is that the design life keeps improving. This is a sensible way of containing cost. The days are long over since the engines had to be designed on the ragged edge to achieve a suitable power level. Nowadays you can have durability, performance and fuel efficiency if you go for the right spec. The 2014 engines may not be optimal in all points but they come close enough IMO to be called an important piece of progress. I'm sure they will not be totally reliable with additional systems like ERS and turbo charging. Every complexity level will first increase the failure rate before experience will reduce it again. So we will probably see some more failures in 2014 than we are going to see in the next two and a half years.

I doubt that, i think they will stay with the 6 for 2014 and then go to 5 from 2015 for reliability concerns. There will be further cost cutting as well for 2014 as well in the transmission department where a transmission will have to last at least 6 or 7 GP, so they will have only 3 gearboxes per season, but teams being allowed to have a gearbox for speed circuits, one for acceleration circuits and one thats more of a hybrid.

The next thing i envisage that will happen is teams will have to use a standardised and open to all telemetry system, but that is in the future. The reason for this is to stop the bigger teams running a 3rd car in each session back at their base, as Red Bull, McLaren and Ferrari all have a driver in their simulator doing each session with their race driver. Red Bull have Vergne in the simulator, Ferrari usually put Gene in the simulator, and McLaren have Paffett in the simulator Renault have Fauzy in their simulator, even STR have a driver in their simulator (Albeit after the session in the Red Bull simulator) for their third car.

The FIA are wanting to prevent the teams from having a 'Control Room' for races at their bases.

Once the new engines come in, the reliability will drop, but will eventually come back to where it is at present.

[Tyler]

It is sad to see a driver who's having a great drive go out due to something like engine failure but at the same time when there's a chance of something going wrong, having that thought in the back of your mind while you're praying that your driver makes it all the way to the finish in 1st place definitely adds to the excitement, so I say too much reliability is a bad thing.