gearboxtrouble wrote: ↑09 Mar 2026, 02:11
The driver has no input into that decision to slow the car down in the fast corners. We're going to see cars slow similarly in Eau Rouge and Copse and it will be awful. The rules need to be adjusted to effectively end super clipping on any track.
The adjustment we need is a reduction in peak output large enough to remove the incentive to clip through fast corners or at the end of straights.
We still want super clipping. It works great in constant speed or gradually slowing turns like hairpins or tightening esses or the turns 1-4 complex in Shanghai.
The way to do that is by making the cars rocket out of corners slightly slower. In other words by reducing peak deployment. If you can’t get back ip to top speed as quickly, the incentive to clip in Eau Rouge or the chicane in Melbourne disappears.
The drivers might still lift and coast a bit into braking zones, but they won’t be super clipping for several seconds.
This will make the cars significantly slower, but it would be a decent bandaid fix for now, until they can work out a long term solution. That long term solution could be more fuel and/or maybe loosening some of the cost-cutting engine restrictions like 16:1 compression ratio, low boost pressure and variable trumpets ban. An unrealistic option could be an anti-lag system in the form of an electric turbo (but not MGU-H because it would be prevented from harvesting and would resort to the wastegate for overpressure)
Realistically though, politics made these regs a mess because Mercedes was afraid of Audi and Audi was afraid of the MGU-H. As a result we got a compromise that resulted in lower efficiency engines with super clipping as a bandaid fix. In reality the cars could probably have 3600 MJ/h of fuel flow on the same amount of race fuel if super clipping was banned. Combine that with front axle regen and an MGU-H that caps harvesting at a level achievable by Audi. The resulting cars would be much less energy starved while burning the same amount of fuel and putting out some 1100 peak horsepower without turbo lag. The lack of turbo lag would make deploying the full 350kW in traction zones impossible, which would extend the effective life of the battery and make overtake less wasteful. Combined with active aero these cars would be the fastest ever while burning much less fuel and making fewer compromises. They would also look really twitchy and be super fun to watch due to the extreme torque. With less power starved cars the aero regs could also be loosened a bit to make them corner better and turn them into monsters that lap faster than the W11.
If Audi were so concerned about the MGU-H being an advantage for estabmished teams, give them additional budget allowance for it and give the non-WEC teams some extra budget for the front MGU. The only downside would be that the cars would come in at maybe 780-790kg instead of 768, which would be a small price to pay.
