Ringleheim wrote: ↑31 Mar 2020, 18:18
Isn't there an old story about BASF digging around in their filing cabinets and re-discovering materials lost since WWII. It was directions on making, literally, rocket fuel for the Vengeance weapon programs.
I suppose it amounted to getting more oxygen into the fuel once burned. They put that into the BMW turbos at the time and, especially for qualifying, and the rest is history. How much power they really made I don't think anyone knows. Every time you hear this story the power goes up. Now it seems to be somewhere around 1,450 bhp.
A last comment: folks talk about how remarkably reliable the engines are today. That's rubbish. These things are tuned way back to survive, and live nowhere close to the edge.
We used to have frequent engine blow-ups in F1 b/c everything was being pushed to the limit all the time.
But that was when F1 was still F1. Not what we have now.
It’s all about designed life. When they had an engine per race, during a 16 races championship they had 16 races with an engine coming close to end of life. Now with 3 PU’s they only have EOL for three races, or even two if they put PU on Friday practice before EOL.