f1316 wrote: ↑22 Dec 2025, 21:35
bananapeel23 wrote: ↑17 Dec 2025, 16:19
FNTC wrote: ↑12 Dec 2025, 20:45
Damn that sounds nice (for a 1.6l turbo V6)!
Wow!
The MGU-H must've been muffling the sound A LOT. This sounds a lot more raw.
Am I right that there is no battery weight limit, only a weight limit for the PU as a whole?
Still. Batteries are very dense and sit extremely far down in the car. If it's easy to hit the engine weight floor without solid state, the benefits of the battery being replaced by a solid-state one would only really be minor packaging implications, since you can't really ballast any further down than the battery already sits.
You could theoretically load the car up with lead or tungsten ballast as far down as possible and perhaps move it around a little during setup to change the overall weight distribution, and the smaller battery would perhaps allow slightly tighter packaging, but it probably isn't a massive upgrade.
Still, it would be amazing to see solid state batteries make their way out of labs at last. If the engine weight floor is difficult to hit while maximising performance, solid state would also be a really big deal and offer huge benefits.
Maybe a slight tangent but it’s a major flaw in the regs imho to have a minimum weight limit for the PU … at all tbh but certainly one that’s easily met. Given the objective is to reduce the overall car weight - and even the modest reduction for 2026 is apparently difficult to hit - incentivising the PU manufacturers to find weight reductions seems a particularly good way to drive this down.
Imho the biggest single weight increase problem we’ve seen (anything for safety is not a ‘problem’, since that’s necessary) is the introduction of the 2014 hybrids. Perhaps, if these rumours about solid state batteries are true, Honda would instead introduce ballast to meet the regs and have an optimal weight distribution, but - again, if true, which it may well not be - really the FIA should look into reducing the minimum weight of the PU (or, indeed, abolishing altogether in order to create a real incentive for weight reduction on the engine side).
The current rules of weight reduction for the PU are to reduce cost, since there use to be a very expensive race to exotic materials to reduce weight. I agree that that would lead to a significant reduction in overall weight, but it needs to be balances with cost.
Moreover, some of the reasons we will have several PU manufacturer next year are that (1) these engines are not going to be crazy expensive and (2) they can have technology to be used in road car. I doubt that we would have more than Ferrari, Mercedes and (maybe) a third one if they were to allow a race to weight reduction. They even had to get rid of the MGU-H to get there...
