Andres125sx wrote:I love that dilemma

. I hated the trusty V8s that never caused any problem because they were tested for 7 years and any reliability problem had been solved. To me motorsports should always include some engineering battle, and F1 had become a motorsport with no engine prominence at all, nosense. Engineering battles means not only drivers go to the limit, but also engineers, and that causes reliability problems, something we didn´t enjoy in the frozen engines era . That´s how F1 is today, Mercedes did the better job, and all the rest need to catch up, what include some manufacturers trying to push the limits, test new solutions, and making mistakes (Honda)
I like it a lot more than frozen engines, it´s another battle inside same championship
I never particularly liked the V8s, either, especially after an eight-year span (!) that included multiple downgrades. From a technical perspective, that was boring as hell. And from a sporting point of view, I never understood F1's willingness to elevate the role of aerodynamics to a position of supreme importance by default, when it's highly likely aerodynamics is the least popular aspect of the sport. ---, I
looooooooove aerodynamics, and even I thought it went too far.
My issue with the new power units isn't so much the hardware, because there's no reason in the world why a V6t can't be incredibly compelling...
The devil, as they say, is in the details, and my problem is F1's tendency to shoot itself in the foot with rules that don't make sense and its willingness to sacrifice "the show" for the sake of the manufacturers' marketing interests.
I don't care if Mercedes, Ferrari, Renault, or Honda are able to profit from their participation in F1. Hell, I don't even care if they're involved
at all. But, I do care when F1 allows itself to be held hostage by the demands of automakers, and I can't believe how easily these people cave in to that pressure.
ESPN wrote:"The initial decision from the engine working group was for a four-cylinder turbo to be introduced for 2013," said [Adrian] Newey. "The big driver behind that was Audi. They said they would come into the sport if there was a four-cylinder turbo, and that's what everyone agreed in order to get Audi in. They subsequently decided that they won't bother after all, thank you very much, and we were lumbered with a four-cylinder turbo."
Look at what this whole thing has become. On what planet is "ritualized fuel-saving" congruent with "the pinnacle of motorsport"? Yet, this is the way it had to be to make the money happy.
There was a time when a company could make a name for itself by virtue of its participation in F1. Nowadays, it seems like F1 is trying to make a name for itself by virtue of the company it keeps, and that's just weird to me, because I think it's totally unnecessary.
EDIT: Completely unrelated to the above,
here's a decent writeup for anyone who'd like to learn more about the relationship between torque, horsepower, and gearing. We can't talk about it here, and rightfully so. But, there it is.