What do you think about it? Could that bangs be something like that? Or it's only a clickbait...
What do Red Bull and Newey plot with the Honda engine?
The Red Bull team caught the attention of those who stopped to listen to the engines during the F1 preseason tests. What does Newey plan with the Honda?
Anyone with a fine ear would hear it immediately. You didn't have to be an F1 expert to realize that the sound of the Honda power unit in the Red Bull RB16 was completely different from everyone else in curve 10 of the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya .
So we went to that curve to see what a professional GT driver and a former F1 technical director had told us. Adrian Newey, along with Honda engineers, could have done his thing.
While the rest of the cars, after finishing the braking of the opposite straight line leading to curve 10, went with the 6-cylinder engine in full release, the Red Bull with Max Verstappen at the wheel managed to turn starting that sector 3 going perfectly in line, but emitting a murmur-like engine sound, as if the one- or two-cylinder butterflies remained open and the unit continued to deliver torque at the entrance of the slowest curve of the Catalan circuit.
The mind immediately leads to remembering the blown exhausts that Red Bull used with Sebastian Vettel in 2011 and 2012, achieving the exhaust more or less a second more performance, increasing the load on the rear diffuser with hot gases.
But those years the cars had an 8-cylinder aspirated 2.4-liter engine with considerable gas flow, so much so that with a proper calibration of the exhaust valves it was possible to produce a blowing effect with the Renault engine . Basically these were always open, even if minimally, as to allow the combustion of air + gasoline in some cylinders and allow the blown exhaust effect.
Now the situation is very different because the adoption of the turbo removes a lot of energy from the gases and the unique exhaust pipe from the beginning of the hybrid era has moved up, away from the ground to prevent it from feeding the diffuser .
So what has Honda been experimenting with? In the past, Ferrari and Renault took on the challenge of opening the turbo exhaust valve with specific strategies to blow at low speeds with the two additional small leaks (adopted in 2016 to improve noise), in order to improve efficiency by influencing in the lower part of the main profile of the rear wing and helping to extract the flow from the central part of the diffuser.
The effect is obviously not comparable with that produced by the 8-cylinder aspirate, but in F1 there is nothing that cannot give a performance advantage. The blowing, in fact, could be generated by the thrust of the compressor which in the release phase of the 6 cylinders is activated by the MGU-H , the electric motor that recovers turbo energy.
Basically, there would be an extra compression of air in the combustion chamber that would be "fired" to the leaks without fuel injection to generate the explosion. Combustion without fuel.
The turbine, therefore, would work as if it were preloaded, and the extra blown air (that is, without residual combustion gas) would be released by the discharge valve that would remain open, blowing a more energetic flow towards the rear wing. This would produce an aerodynamic advantage in slow corners and every time the throttle is closed.
This solution would lead to determine a different gas flow rate in the two leaks to exploit the blow with increasingly complex and effective strategies. But in the case of the Red Bull RB16, it seems that the 'explosion' does occur. What has Newey invented this time? The RB16 is a laboratory of interesting solutions and Honda seems to have participated in the innovation.
https://es.motorsport.com/f1/news/truco ... 0/4707158/
