F-1 V-8 engine placement

[Shazzman]

Formula 1 has always been about the battle between with FIA to make the cars slower and the engineers to go even quicker. For alot of F1 fans around the world the technical side of the sport is as much of a turn on as the racing itself! But the reality is that we'd represent a minority of the entire global F1 audience. At the end of the day it all comes down to statistics. Simple to understand is never a bad thing.

[Eddie Martin]

When a company as big as Ford have around 400 people (Jaguar and Cosworth) with a $100 + million budget and the best they can do is pick up a few points here and there when other teams fail, then they pull out because of the huge cost needed to be at the front ($500 million) you know things are really bad and change needs to be made. Yes, they were in a pretty poor state most of jaguar's lifespan but for the last two years they went well just didn't have the budget to poor into huge amount of aero development.

F1 cars are more closely related to planes than cars these days. They make what ever compromise and break whatever engineering principle is needed to get more effective downforce. The cars are all so similar these days and the rules are so restrictive that new technologies that could help road cars are not allowed anyway. Is gaining 0.5% efficiency in a bargeboard going to help the NVH in a Honda Civic??? Shaking it up a lot will actually give the engineers some freedom to try new things and go in different areas, instead of just finding small bits of performance in tiny areas of the same package. Giving them 3 years to prepare will also keep costs down. The fia were pretty silly to change the rules at the last miunte.

Increasing mechanical grip and getting rid of aero will lengthen the braking areas and make it easier to overtake, where at the moment it is impossible unless you have a superior car. Braking from 300 km/h to 90 km/h in 90 metres gives no opportunity to dive down the inside. Look at moto gp the braking distances are longer and there is an opportunity to overtake. When they were at Mugello people were always diving down the inside into turn 1 and passing or out braking themselves and running a bit wide. Increasing the widths by 200 mm or so will make minimal difference to overtaking as the circuits they run on are pretty big. Adding starter motors is good so people can restart if they spin and adding clutches puts pressure back on the driver. There will be mistakes made and gear changes missed, this will add to whole spectacle.

F1 is more about entertainment than engineering these days. They are just very fast billboards for companies to flog their products. I like the technology that goes into the cars but the companies that put the money in just want exposure, they don't care about the technology and I think the neither do most of the fans that watch. Do you think all the extra people that watched the Indy 500 because of Danica Patrick (spelling) were really interested in whether she was driving a Dallara or Panoz?

I think the whole idea is that the best teams and drivers will be at the front, its just that you wont have to spend the gdp of a small country to be there. There will always be money in the sport it's just that you should be able to at the front because you have the best people and organisation rather than the size of your wallet. Pretty much like how fsae is. If you can't build a front running car with $50 million and 125 people something is wrong. They aren't solving world hunger and poverty just getting a car to go fast around a track. Do you honestly think capping the budgets would work? I'm sure they would have lots of creative accountants. Kind of like the cost report in fsae.

[syoung]

Jaguar did badly because of the bad structure of the team, which was massively over-managed by Ford. Just look at how many team principals, sporting directors and technical directors they got through in their few years in F1. But this year's Red Bull is largely a Jaguar design, and it seems to be doing pretty well (especially with the new Cosworth development this weekend - the Cosworth has been underpowered for years now).

Likewise, Toyota proved that it's possible to have the biggest budget in F1 in 2003 (or second-biggest, depending who you believe) and still finish around 14th-16th. Flavio Briatore estimates Renault's budget this year to be only 6th or 7th biggest on the grid. On the other hand, it's true that Sauber traditionally started strongly and then ran out of money for development, slipping back down the grid (this was true until last year), whereas Williams did, and still does, start badly and then throw money at the windtunnel to come out with a great car around midseason.

Overtaking in MotoGP isn't a function of longer braking distances so much as the width of the bikes. In a car, you have to go way offline and really compromise your corner to get alongside another driver; on a bike, you can be next to another guy and both of you still be pretty much on the racing line!

Somewhere like Melbourne is comfortably narrow enough that overtaking already needs cars to go a long way offline to overtake. And the reasoning behind introducing grooved tyres in 1998 was that it would produce bigger slip angles and longer braking zones; as it turned out, there was less overtaking and less visible sliding than before. As for starters, all the cars currently have anti-stall software, which works nearly all the time; cars only fail to restart from a simple spin if they're stuck in the gravel (and gravel traps are being phased out).

Capping budgets probably wouldn't work, but I agree with David that the teams will just throw similar money at different areas, or even the same areas - a small improvement in aero will be worth even more if there's not much aero performance to start with! Capped budgets would at least bring teams within +/-$50m of each other (hard to hide that kind of money!) as opposed to the $400m disparity between Ferrari and Minardi - but then how would you set a limit that the former would accept and the latter could reach?

At the end of the day, my biggest issue with these new regulations is that it takes away a lot of the engineering, the diversity and the speed. Aero restrictions on flick-ups etc. will come through more stringent dimensional specifications, so the cars will look even more similar than they do now (certainly after the first year or two). No scope to improve the brakes, anything in the driveline or the control of the engine. The whole lack of freedom is encapsulated by the requirement for a minimum chassis CofG - if you set a fundamental like that, what's the point in a car manufacturer owning its own team when somebody in a shed in Faenza can build the same car and make them look stupid on the track?

People don't care about the technology per se, but they would care if the new generation of F1 cars was slower than IRL, A1GP, ALMS, GP2(!) or other series - and so would the drivers.

[Eddie Martin]

Jaguar was badly managed but like i said they got themselves under control in the last two years and the hard work they put in has obviously helped red bull. We will never know how Jaguar would have gone this year but i guess it would be extremely similar to red bull.

A lot of the things are management and people related. Look at Toyota big budget no results. They get a couple of key people in, namely Mike Gascoyne, to change the direction and focus a bit and they are up the front, 95% the same people as when they were at the back of the grid so people/management are still the key. Renault are a good example of a smaller budget, reportedly $250 million compared to Ferrari with $450 million, but they still have a major auto manufacturer behind them and there budget is still very very big.

Overtaking is a complex subject. If you rely on mechanical rather than aero grip the cars can run close to each other easier, and without destroying their tyres. When they went narrow/grooved they just pushed the balance in aero's favour which made it harder to follow other cars. The rules should make it so that going off line isn't a penalty and you can dive down the inside in bigger braking zones. The fact that there is a tyre war is interesting but it means that one line on the circuit is clean and sticky and everywhere else is dirty and slippery, that's not good for overtaking.

Basically what i'm trying to say is you shouldn't have to have huge budgets to win but just the best people/team and the rules should be written so that you can throw as much money and time at something as you want but it is still not going to make much you faster than the guy spending a lot less, like with the new V8 engine rules with standard crankshaft heights etc. BTCC was an awesome series in the early 90's but it priced itself out of existence because the rules weren't tight enough.

I know F1 should be the pinnacle of engineering and development but it really lost it's relevance a while a go. Look at Sportscars and you can see teams trying CI instead of SI engines, teams trying alternative fuels, things that can actually influence road cars. If you look at WRC you can see that it effects the cars we drive on the road, F1 changes the marketing campaigns of the cars we drive on the road.

The point of a car manufacture owning a team is to get publicity like it was yesterday and will be tomorrow. It's entertainment. Most people think the touring cars they watch on Sunday have some relevance to the road cars they drive. I had a really good look at a V8 supercar one day and the only thing I could find that was straight from the road car was the dash pad (I maybe wrong on that). They may have no relevance to road cars but a touring car winning on Sunday does increase sales on Monday, that's marketing not engineering. It's not the best situation I'd prefer it to be more engineering based but that's the way it is, unfortunately.