fellowhoodlums wrote: β09 Apr 2018, 21:51
I just wish Honda were more open about updates and improvements.
It would be good to know before the F1 official Friday afternoon document whats been changed.
I know it's all about making sure your rivals know as little as possible but for the fans it's great when you hear some technical nuggets such as "yeah we've been able to get the MGU-H deployment to work better because of x". In the paddock there can't be that many secrets anyway.
That (or much more than that) is what they've been doing ever since 2015. For every updates, we know the rough details, for example about 2016, they started using PU more aggressively from Sochi, the TC upgrades for Canada which improved harvesting efficiency and made deployment roughly on par with others, if not totally on par nor superior, but sacrificed ICE power, inlet plenum and ICE upgrade for GB which recovered the aformentioned ICE power loss, TC and ICE upgrade for Spa which improved both ICE power and deployment, etc etc.
Either at the v end 2016 or v beginning of 2017, Hasegwa said that they gained roughly 0.5sec throughout 2016 season, and the same amount between 2015 and the beginning of 2016 as well, but rivals have achieved more gains than Honda
http://www.as-web.jp/f1/82011/2
In 2017 the initial spec had cliff in torque curve at lower rpm range which was the cause of oscillation/vibration, introduced the inlet plenum upgrade in Spain to resolve the issue, the persistent MGU-H issue was due to oil/water mist entering from intake damaging bearing, which was due to filling more oil, which was due to oil circulation issue, which was due to unconventional oil tank, which was due to compressor moved out of V, revised the entire oil system with Spa upgrade to address the specific issue, improved the situation but not yet fully resolved the issue as seen in MGU-H issue encountered again in the US.
http://f1sokuho.mopita.com/free/index.p ... 2522&tt=-1
http://f1sokuho.mopita.com/free/index.p ... 0977&tt=-1
of course elongated shaft was one of the cause as well
https://jp.motorsport.com/f1/news/%E3%8 ... 8A-984114/
Spa ICE upgrade improved the torque at lower rpm range, gaining power equivalent to one Kei car (Kei car is a compact car standard in Japan. Typically Kei cars have 60-90Nm of torque)
http://f1sokuho.mopita.com/pc/free/inde ... &no=112480
Spec3.8 gained 0.1-0.2sec from 3.7 and 0.3-0.4sec from 3.5
http://www.racer.com/f1/item/145573-hon ... ance-gains
Nakamura (ex-chief engineer) explained that at Mexico they would have to use TC at very high rpm in order to compensate the 20% air loss from higher altitude due to new blade config of TC, but the rpm range exceeded the safety range so couldnt use it, but they managed to figure out the usage that enabled them to circumvent and compensate the loss so that the actual loss was compressed to 1/3rd of the original estimation and that's why they were relatively competitive at Mexico
http://f1sokuho.mopita.com/free/index.p ... &no=115051
Also "extra harvest" fully introduced from Monza improved deployment significantly (see my post last month)
Almost all of them in "reveal as you go" style, and these examples are just offhand, very quick and crude one.