According to the FIA and the majority of team and engine manufactures, Formula One ‘needed’ to go green in order to stay relevant for the car industry which is on a continuing trend towards downsized, more efficient engines with energy recovery systems. But does F1 really need to follow suit, or as some suggest, lead the way with developments that are ‘relevant’ to road cars? I think the underlying question we should ask is what Formula One exactly is. And judging from reactions to the Australian GP, a lot of fans seem to have a different view to those who came up with the latest rulebook.
F1 is beyond road cars, that’s why we watch
Let’s not beat about the bush, Formula 1 has nothing to do with road cars. Even the 2014 cars with the V6 turbo engines and energy recovery have no meaningful common ground with the cars we drive every day. Want to make racing relevant to road cars? Pop on a roof, add room for three extra seats and use an engine which is even remotely similar to what we drive every day. What do you say?… that already exists?
Indeed, it’s called touring car racing, fronted by the WTCC. And who cares about WTCC? Bluntly put: nobody but the manufactures involved. No one pays in excess of 300 euros to visit a WTCC event. Nobody gets up in the middle of the night to watch WTCC races live on TV. People do to watch F1.
Pinnacle of motorsport
People watch Formula 1 because it is the pinnacle of motorsport. The fastest cars driven by the best drivers. People watch because F1 is far out of reach - a dream if you wish – a different planet from the cars we drive every day. Formula One is giving itself an increasingly hard time being just that. During the race in Australia, the new V6 cars were lapping the Albert Park circuit about ten seconds per lap slower than their V10 predecessors ten years ago. Should the fans care? Opinions differ. If the racing is good and you don’t go on Youtube to watch how much faster cars were a decade ago, it’s OK for most people I guess. What’s less OK is seeing races where drivers are over five seconds a lap slower than their ultimate pace, lifting and coasting into corners to save fuel and tires. That's not racing.
Sound is key
But nothing is a bad as the new muffled sound of the V6 turbo F1 cars with their whirring ERS motors. I’ve been fortunate enough to attend grand prix events both in the V10 and the more recent V8 era, and in my perception sound is a very important part to the overall experience. In fact, for my it’s THE reason to go to a race, which can otherwise be watched much better on TV.
The first time I ever visited a race was the 2005 Belgian Grand Prix at Spa, the last year of the V10 engines. Due to the horrendous traffic we arrived late and as we got close to the track, practice had already begun. I can still vividly remember the experience of sitting in the bus a few kilometers away from the track, hearing the screaming V10 engine sound come up from between the Belgian hillsides. It literally put chills down my spine. Even the recent V8 engines, which arguably didn't sound a nice as the V10’s, were mighty impressive. Watching the field come towards the grandstand were a sat at the La Source hairpin in 2012 (watching Grosjean take out Alsonso and Hamilton in the first corner https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUSHjcFLd2I) was simply amazing, in no small part due to the sound that went all the way down to your core.
I’ve also attended several ‘City Racing’ events in my hometown of Rotterdam. During these events all kinds of race cars drive on a makeshift downtown racetrack, ranging from go-cars to GT racers and formula cars. I’ve seen Indycars, Formula 3 cars, A1GP and Super League Formula cars during these events. None of them put nearly as much excitement into the crow as the moment when a Formula 1 car is started and emerges on track. Not because the F1 cars drive much faster – the track at City Racing is narrow and bumpy – but because of the V8 engine revving up to 18.000 rpm, with its amazing sound bouncing of the downtown skyscrapers. Simply put, it is the sound of power. That sound is now gone and that’s a big shame. I had hoped that the new V6 turbo’s would at least sound as throaty as the turbo cars of the late eighties. They don’t.
Super-efficient engine management means that no fuel is burnt in the exhaust, and the large turbo compressors muffle sounds to the extend where F1 is not even a shadow of its former self. And as predicted, the fuel flow restrictions have imposed a practical rev limit of about 12.000 rpm, instead of the theoretical 15.000 rpm which is allowed by the regulations. During qualifying the Force India cars revved the highest, occasionally hitting the 13.000 mark where the sound became quite nice, only to immediately shift up into lower rpm’s. Moreover the electric motors of the ERS systems and the turbo can clearly be heard over the exhaust note of the engines, both track side and from the onboard camera’s. From what’s I’ve seen so far the onboard sounds from the Mercedes are the nicest, whereas the Ferrari is just plain horrible to listen to with its high pitched hissing sounds from the electrical systems and/or turbo.
Will it grow on us?
Leading up to the first race I’ve heard various tv pundits talk about the sound ‘growing’ on them and it actually being ‘quite nice’ to hear other mechanical noises and tyre squeal. That’s rubbish and comments after the race proved that: no one was happy with the sound, although most involved in the sport won’t say it too explicitly because F1 is what puts money on their tables. From what I’ve read, people sitting in the grandstands at the end of the straight couldn’t hear the cars accelerating down the straight, which is nothing short of a joke. It’s also quite sad that more than a few people thought that the highlight of the weekend was a demo with one of Paul Stoddard’s old F1 V10 duo-seaters.
I personally don’t think the new sound will grow on F1 fans. Youtube is too full of clips that remember us of the V10 en V8 cars. And F1 demo’s given with older cars will be more exciting than seeing the new ones. Moreover, I’m quite sure that the GP2 support races during the European part of the season will be more spectacular to watch than the F1 main events. Time will tell.
F1 has gone down this road and there’s obviously no way back, at least not in the near future. Calls after the Australian GP that the sound should be changed are not to be taken seriously. This can’t be done overnight and as long as fuel efficiency is as prominent as it is today, teams will use every drop of fuel to drive their cars, not to 'waste' it on generating more noise.
Fact is, we’re stuck with the new engines for the foreseeable future. Noting will change that. Too much money has been invested, too much prestige is on the line. Hopefully the focus on fuel efficiency and it’s resulting lift-and-coast-style racing will become somewhat less, but even that’s not likely. The best we can realistically hope for is that something will be done about the sound for next year, perhaps by using mandatory megaphone-style exhausts.We’ll see.
Could F1 exist without car companies?
But could F1 have resisted the ‘green’ push of the car companies? Yes, and I think it should have. Not only because of the arguments already given above about what F1 should be in my opinion, but also because we all know that car companies come and go as they please anyway. F1 had a lot of involvement from car companies in the early 2000’s, but by the end of the decade Toyota, BMW and Honda had left as quick as that had come. Officially due to the global economic crisis, although that might very well have been a welcome excuse, and changes in management and lackluster results likely also played a key part with more than one of them.
Today we have Mercedes, Renault and Ferrari. If F1 wouldn't have gone down the turbo path, Renault would reportedly have left. So what? Ferrari would have stayed, Mercedes would likely have stayed and so would Cossworth, which has now been forced out. With the move towards the ultra-complex turbo engines, F1 has dived right into the arms of the car manufacturers, who have shown in the past to be the most opportunistic and least reliable partners of the sport. How ironic.
But for the sake of argument, let’s say that all car companies would have left F1 eventually, would that have meant the end of F1? Of course not. There are quite a few engine manufactures that can build proper race car engines and would be more than happy to sell them to F1 teams. Cossworth is the most obvious example, but others like Judd and Zytec are also more than capable of building proper engines, probably at the fraction of the cost for the current V6 power units. Maybe F1 would have gone down a slightly less sophisticated road in terms of engine technology, but F1 would still have been there, and the general audience wouldn’t have noticed a lot of difference in performance and sound.
For now, I’m still a fan of the sport and I’ll probably watch all of the races on TV as I've done for decades. I won’t be visiting a F1 race this year though, as I’m quite sure the experience won’t be worth the ticket price to me. Perhaps I’ll step by a Boss GP event, to hear some F1 cars of the past scream by with their V10 and V8 engines…
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