Engine Unfreeze

[CHT]

I personally would like manufacturers to pump in more money to develop this new engine technology and I hope that this could entice more manufacturers to use F1 as a platform to showcase the engine technology. At the moment, we have Merc, Renault, Honda, Ferrari, it will be nice if BMW, Audi and Toyota could oneday join F! with each manufacturer supporting 2 teams.

[Juzh]

Auto Motor und sport has revealed information that the current Renault engine is still 85 hp down on Mercedes and 18 kg more heavy . And requires more space and cooling etc.....
http://www.auto-motor-und-sport.de/form ... 72712.html

So every merc team has an inherent advantage of 0.5s in packaging and weight alone. That's before we apply power advantage. Taffin said in the V8 era how 80bhp was equivalent to 2s of laptime round monza. That's why this freeze is different to the V8 freeze. Performance disparity is 4-5 times as much as it used to be.

V8 renaults really started to struggle only when rev limiters kicked in. In 2006 they were pretty much on par with everything other than ferrari. Ferrari and merc also exploited "reliability" upgrades much more in the early years.

But in the end.. how can anyone compare V8 freeze to V6turbo is utterly beyond reason. V8s were literally just a scaled down V10 with decades of development already done. Can't compare apples to oranges.

[turbof1]

Although I'm pro-in-season development, I'd like to point out that it isn't a complete freeze like the V8 era. They are allowed to bring developments once a year. So it isn't like Mercedes is going to keep a 85hp 18kg advantage automatically during the full era.

Again, I'm all for in season development, but do realise that in that case Mercedes will just build further on their advantage. Consider that in general they are the most reliable PU, and next year reliability will have to increase 25%. Shaving off 18kg in the first place will be very difficult even with full on development allowed.

Accept in either case that we might be forced to watch a Mercedes era until the next dramatic rule change, however the development cards will be dealt.

[lebesset]

I don't know where this 18Kg information has come from , but personally I don't believe it ; renault and ferrari may have got the design wrong and be well down on power , but for renault to be that much over the weight beggars belief ...I think they have made racing engines before !

[dans79]

Accept in either case that we might be forced to watch a Mercedes era until the next dramatic rule change, however the development cards will be dealt.

long may it reign, I've spent years watching the driver I follow suffer in a subpar or barely equal car.


I must say that in my opinion all this talk of equality, is why I have a love hate relationship with F1 and Europe for that matter. F1 is supposed to be a competition between drivers and teams. The entire point of a competition is to prove inequality, to prove that one team, driver, or in this case engine manufacture is superior to the others.

look at Mercedes budget, http://www.pitpass.com/52739/Mercedes-s ... ecord-325m

Mercedes didn't spend that kind of money to gain an advantage over the field, to have it ripped away because some teams/manufactures can't handle loosing. Look at their add campaign "The best or nothing" it's pretty obvious what the goal is.

I'd bet my next pay check this is why It seems so hard to get other manufactures to come back to F1. Whats the benefit to them? They spend hundreds of millions to get an advantage, only get it taken away from them by the other entitled teams/manufactures.

[Richard]

Debate about Mercedes funding http://www.f1technical.net/forum/viewto ... =1&t=20356

[langwadt]

I don't know where this 18Kg information has come from , but personally I don't believe it ; renault and ferrari may have got the design wrong and be well down on power , but for renault to be that much over the weight beggars belief ...I think they have made racing engines before !

they've only been the engine supplier for half the WCCs in the last 20 years

[xpensive]

...
I'd bet my next pay check this is why It seems so hard to get other manufactures to come back to F1. Whats the benefit to them? They spend hundreds of millions to get an advantage, only get it taken away from them by the other entitled teams/manufactures.

They are not coming back because they are not allowed to compete, what's the point of developing new engines with a freeze?

[toraabe]

I don't know where this 18Kg information has come from , but personally I don't believe it ; renault and ferrari may have got the design wrong and be well down on power , but for renault to be that much over the weight beggars belief ...I think they have made racing engines before !

If you take the exhaust system Mercedes uses log style. The other two are using longer pipes ( more weight ) .
And because of the split turbo much pipework is shorter and if also the coolers are smaller you will save a lot of weight

[SectorOne]

They are not coming back because they are not allowed to compete, what's the point of developing new engines with a freeze?

What freeze? They get to modify the engines on a yearly basis up to 2018 or whatever the number is.

So far Honda has signed up to these non-freezed regulations, they left when the engines actually were freezed.

[toraabe]

They are not coming back because they are not allowed to compete, what's the point of developing new engines with a freeze?

What freeze? They get to modify the engines on a yearly basis up to 2018 or whatever the number is.

So far Honda has signed up to these non-freezed regulations, they left when the engines actually were freezed.

Another picture of the Mercedes engine from the front . Notice the size of the compressor. http://www.auto-motor-und-sport.de/bild ... 12875.html

[ringo]

Mercedes engine is air to air intercooling. This is not the case with ferrari or lotus' renault. That's easily where most of the 18kg weight difference is. Structurally i don't think there is much between the engines.
The disparity is in the ancillaries and the different philosophies used in their design. The need to use 5 units a season may have made the teams conservative with the wieght of the components as well. So i do believe the engines will be quite equal very soon.
The merc is not made with pixie dust or any magical metal. It's the same engineering being used across the board with all teams. In fact their power advantage is really a trick that the others will soon discover, and all evidence points to it being in the Energy unit and not the combustion engine. This is not to say advances werent made compared to the others in the CI though.

Looking at it right now, i would say ferrari would have to make the biggest turnaround in terms of the engine design for next year. They might as well build a completely new engine. I am not sure if that is permitted. But it is clear that their water intercooler position compromised their cylinder head design and fuel system and whatever it is you would normally put in that space between the V.

[SectorOne]

Taffin said in the V8 era how 80bhp was equivalent to 2s of laptime round monza.

it can´t be the same in the V6 era. Or the 80hp figure people throw around is utter BS.

1:24.109 - HAM
1:26:109 - HAM Renault engine.

That would have put him on 12th or 13th place, just behind Kvyat in an STR, also with a Renault engine.
Force India would be fighting Marussia´s and Caterham´s with a Renault or Ferrari engine.
Williams would be fighting the Lotus boys.

Now i think we can safely conclude that the Mercedes has downforce on similar levels of the Red Bull,
Force India has a much better car then a Caterham,
Williams has more downforce then what is possibly the worst F1 car in history.

[Sevach]

I remember reading something in the early 2000s saying that 80hp was worth 1.2 seconds around Barcelona (the default test track for a long time), i believe Gascoine was the guy quoted.

With that said n i doubt it's 85 horses like AMUS quoted, no way STR would be that fast on a straight line with this huge power deficit(and they still put respectable times), the difference might be bigger on race mode in comparison to Q when you have the luxury of starting the lap with a fully charged battery.

[Edax]

<snip>The merc is not made with pixie dust or any magical metal. It's the same engineering being used across the board with all teams. In fact their power advantage is really a trick that the others will soon discover, and all evidence points to it being in the Energy unit and not the combustion engine. <snip>

I'm not so sure about that.

For one the engineering is the same however I got the feeling it is quite a bit better excecuted at Mercedes. In the other engines you tend to see little imperfections. For instance a bundle of cables which apparently was rerouted from the original design concept, because one of the components ran over its volume budged and got in the way.

The Mercedes engine bay arguably is very clean, and you see little evidence that they had to compromise. That can ony be achieved by strict adherence to system engineering and design practices. You can hire the most brilliant engineers and designers, but if you don't provide a good framework to merge their work together they will only get into each other's way. That framework is a combination of culture and way of working and not something you can copy and implement instantly.

Secondly, while I haven't spotted any pixie dust yet, I do see some different material solutions in the Merc than in other engines. Especially when it comes to thermal management they seem quite a few steps ahead of the competition. The log exhaust and the way it is executed (materials wise) is quite a bold statement, made by a team wich is absolutely confident in their thermal calculations.

In short, I doubt that the Mercedes or even the Mercedes engine is a one trick pony, but more importantly I think that it is driven by an extremely capable engineering team. That makes it hard to catch up, as they are developing new tricks while you're trying to figure out their current ones.