F1technical.net

I was wondering something the other day. Mainly off the back of why Kimi seems to have less reliability than Vettel and why customer teams don't seem to have the same reliability as the manufacturer.

Will each engine component have a tolerance and all the best parts get added together to produce a 'golden sample' engine that then goes to the main team?

Maybe some parts use a longer testing procedure.

Everything, but everything, has a tolerance. When younger I spent far too much time going through sets of components to build the best engine, but I assume the computerised inspection system keeps a log, and probably someone is able to get the best combination of components in one engine, but I think engines are now allocated on a random basis?

At this level of engineering, the tolerances are so close, and the QA is so thorough, that performance differences are infinitesimal. The real differences are how well the engine fits into the overall concept of the car, and how much the teams know about the engine maps etc.

I will guess that a team is allowed 4 engines per car per season say, and a strategy for one prime driver get the remainder of the motors (obviously they both start season on 2 new) 6 motors in their 'honeymoon' phase of making horsepower.
As the motor ages, it gets shuffled on to the b grade driver to hold back other cars?

Maybe? Who could say?

I would expect that the engine assemblies are cherry-picked. I would assume they are put on a dyno pre-shipping to ensure power output.

I'd expect the more powerful/least vibration engines randomly get allocated to Ferrari.

Coating thickness is regulated now, but it used to be the case that big budget teams would build very thick layers diamond like coating on the valve train, also most likely they used pure synthetic oil rather than a blend, money trees.

Tolerances off the drawing board would be very tight. Each part is either perfect or in the bin. There are no "second rate parts" to give to the #2 driver.

Assembled PU's might be different. Slightly better one goes to #1 driver.

individual power unit components would not be ranked - there are two many tolerance combinations.
After dyno pass off the power units as a whole are probably ranked, with the highest ones becoming factory team prime units etc etc