F1technical.net

There was a lively discussion going in the W02 thread regarding the consistency of the MB engines and suggestions that Mclaren and FI are not being given the prime engines, but rather MB is hanging onto them for themselves and further conjecture that this may be the reason behind W02 eating rear tires.

The suggestion is most likely false. As I have said before, any claim that top end bhp has anything to do with what a team is looking for in a motor is irrelevant. Each team is going to apply their own ignition map over the engine which meet their aerodynamic needs. An engine with 800bhp at one rpm but 650bhp at another may be great for Mclaren, but terrible for MB. I am 100% positive the teams are looking for different characteristics in the motor anyway. I would be more interested in knowing if FI or MB request a different camshaft style to Mclaren than peak bhp.

That being said, I have built and tested enough Ferrari street motors to know specifically what each one of them makes, and there is never more than a 2% difference on the top end when all things are the same. I have seen all of two Cosworth DFV motors on the dyno as well, and both were about as identical as one can get, and that is with 40 year old F1 technology.

Sorry I had to close the thread for a bit there. In the next day or so I will move those pertinent messages from the W02 thread to here.

Engine equalization is a tough discussion because so much of it we can't see. We just accept them for what they are. That's why any information we disseminate about engines needs to come from sources like this:

http://www.pitpass.com/42676-Cosworth-c ... excellence

I highly recommend this read as it shows where things stand form an engine manufactures point of view.

It really discusses the key factor of degradation. Who cares if your engine can develop 750HP for half of one race, and 650 for the next race and a half right?

It's a good discussion and it makes all the sense to just make it another thread. For that, thank you.

Thanks for the link. Great read and informative.

The high tolerances and exacting requirements of the modern F1 engine means discreprencies will be minscule.
As the production line is also a highly controlled environment, all engines will be near equal as near as dammit.

The FIA require engines to be up to spec, as do customers. The FO108X will be the same unit as that in the W02 or MP4-26. Barring cooling, oil and exhaust's its as much the same as you are going to get.

Still waiting for some facts regarding this. 50hp just like that..

HampusA wrote:Still waiting for some facts regarding this. 50hp just like that..

Read the article I posted above as I suggested, it will answer your question and likely many more.

Good article.

Giblet wrote:Read the article I posted above as I suggested, it will answer your question and likely many more.

Can´t find anything that says that during the process of building 50+ engines, the performance between the engines can differ as much as 50hp.

Frankly, it´s BS. Maybe that´s why we don´t see the person who started all this in this thread..

well still we don´t know if all the horses are alive when the lump is installed in the car ,do we?
So maybe we are beating a dead horse here .

Ive always been told that F1 engines have as much as 3% differencial between them from the same manufacturer.

So if there is a 750hp engine, the next engine may be a 22.5HP differencial between the next one and the one previous to it.

Generally the engine manufacturers give all engines a 100km dyno burn in to get what power the engine pumps out. What usually happens is that each engine manufacturer provides 8 engines per car for the season, so thats 6 cars per manufacturer, whitch is 48 per season.

Pre Season usually sees each team getting 5 or 6 engines and post season each team usually gets an aditional one, Ferrari teams use 2 seeingly post season. Thats up to a maximum of 18 more they have to manufacture.

Thats arround 66 eangine per season that see action on track. If we make it 70 per season if one or two pop their clogs.

Toyota and BMW used to produce at least one engine a week for dyno testing as well, thats another 52 per year. The Toyota engine plant used to have 5 engine build crews as it took 10 days to produce one engine. At the time Toyota provided the works team and Williams as well, they produced their engines in 10 blocks of 12 each year, the 4 best going to races, the next 4 to testing and the others to Dyno testing, once they knew their total peak power from the 100km dyno testing. To think the best RVX-06 to RVX-09 engine that was produced was a rumored 757hp, with the average being 748HP, as Toyota had the most consistant average of all engines, arround 1.2% distrubution between all engines.

I remember there was a Toyota docu-soap on the Discovery Channel arround 2006/2007 and one of the engine guys was talking about their engine and their engine power band. If i remember there was about 5 diffrent episodes, all concentrated on 5 diffrent areas of the cars development and all about the Toyota - One Aim ideal.

I've dug up some stats from various technical papers, firstly the only reference I've got to power variance between engines is Axel Plasse of RenaultF1 talking about the 2005 engines. He states an approx 10hp difference between engines of the same spec which costs around 0.12s per lap.
If we all recall 2005 was the first year of 2 race (~1400km) engines, the engines being 3.0l V10s. BMW Motorsport stated 950hp for their engine, so with Renaults 72-degree engine in its second year they weren't that far behind on outright power. So Percentage wise the 10hp loss from 950hp is just over 1%. Since then teams have had 6 years to improve their engine design and quality control, I'd be surprised if any team suffered more than 1% loss on power between engines and over the engines life (quoted as 15hp by Plasse in 2005).

ESPImperium wrote:Ive always been told that F1 engines have as much as 3% differencial between them from the same manufacturer.

So if there is a 750hp engine, the next engine may be a 22.5HP differencial between the next one and the one previous to it.

Generally the engine manufacturers give all engines a 100km dyno burn in to get what power the engine pumps out. What usually happens is that each engine manufacturer provides 8 engines per car for the season, so thats 6 cars per manufacturer, whitch is 48 per season.

Pre Season usually sees each team getting 5 or 6 engines and post season each team usually gets an aditional one, Ferrari teams use 2 seeingly post season. Thats up to a maximum of 18 more they have to manufacture.

Thats arround 66 eangine per season that see action on track. If we make it 70 per season if one or two pop their clogs.

Toyota and BMW used to produce at least one engine a week for dyno testing as well, thats another 52 per year. The Toyota engine plant used to have 5 engine build crews as it took 10 days to produce one engine. At the time Toyota provided the works team and Williams as well, they produced their engines in 10 blocks of 12 each year, the 4 best going to races, the next 4 to testing and the others to Dyno testing, once they knew their total peak power from the 100km dyno testing. To think the best RVX-06 to RVX-09 engine that was produced was a rumored 757hp, with the average being 748HP, as Toyota had the most consistant average of all engines, arround 1.2% distrubution between all engines.

I remember there was a Toyota docu-soap on the Discovery Channel arround 2006/2007 and one of the engine guys was talking about their engine and their engine power band. If i remember there was about 5 diffrent episodes, all concentrated on 5 diffrent areas of the cars development and all about the Toyota - One Aim ideal.

One engine a week... that sounds fishy...

So you are effectively claiming your testequipment and bench testing is considerably more exact and repeatable than 1%? wow...I would like to learn more about reproduceability of power runs on a dyno and how this is handled in real world.
Maybe the figures are simply a matter of what and how its done-for example are all engines optimised for individual engine specific fuel and ignition maps or is it considered not being worthwhile to try this in the light of them being one like another?
I think we should all step back and reconsider what is achievable in a world full of unavoidable variables and tolerances and to claim something like a .5% of deviation when you cannot even measure with this precision is quite a statement.... at least when not aired by Lewis Hamilton or Norbert Haug....no offense ther but I consider these as non technical but enthusiastic guys .

marcush. wrote:So you are effectively claiming your testequipment and bench testing is considerably more exact and repeatable than 1%? wow...I would like to learn more about reproduceability of power runs on a dyno and how this is handled in real world.
Maybe the figures are simply a matter of what and how its done-for example are all engines optimised for individual engine specific fuel and ignition maps or is it considered not being worthwhile to try this in the light of them being one like another?
I think we should all step back and reconsider what is achievable in a world full of unavoidable variables and tolerances and to claim something like a .5% of deviation when you cannot even measure with this precision is quite a statement.... at least when not aired by Lewis Hamilton or Norbert Haug....no offense ther but I consider these as non technical but enthusiastic guys .

The good dynos offer an accuracy of down to 0.1% of full scale torque, so measuing a deviation of 0.5% certainly isn't impossible.

.5% is the norm for most high $ commercially available dynos. It is hard to fine a strain gage that is .1% and that is just the starting point for all the other tolerances that you will run into with the sub systems. I don't know why exactly, but I believe .1% would be good for electronic processing equipment.

Brian