Imminent F1 shakeup?

[mertol]

F1 can't go away from ICE until it is clear what can replace them. So far nothing.

[alexx_88]

What F1 is now is basically an endurance championship disguised as sprint races. Requiring components (engines, gearboxes) to last multiple races is almost the same as having one 10h race every two months. I don't understand why this path was taken to be honest, as we already have WEC for endurance and Formula E for green technology. Why is it wrong to have a racing series which focuses purely on building the fastest car possible?

[Cold Fussion]

All the comments so far completely miss the point.
F1 can no longer attract sponsors in the real world because it promotes a technology of internal combustion engines the concept of which has been obsolete for decades.
Motor sport is in a period of major technical change as is road vehicle technology.
Vehicle manufacturers may still be able to sell the public internal combustion but this is only because of the huge marketing budgets they have and the pressure from the petro chemical industries and dated government policies.
F1 is living a huge illusion.
Bernie is the only thing keeping it going at the level it is today.
Montezemolo is simply trying to protect a car company that is based on inefficient multi cylinder 'super cars'.
Ferrari has always been a thorn in the technical development in F1 but has been tolerated because of its huge fan base.
That fan base will continue but it has been eclipsed by a much bigger world demand for energy efficiency and a change in the world public's moral values towards protecting our planet.
When Bernie retires, dies or goes to prison, those at the pinnacle of F1 will be forced to bite the bullet and accept a rapid move away from internal combustion engines in motor sport.
The alternative is a slow and very painful decline, the regulations will make no difference whatsoever.
Even this site ignores FE but this will be the future.

The ICE isn't going anywhere, unless there is a breakthrough in battery or capacitor technology to facilitate it's demise. Even then, unless we move to completely green energy production we are no better off.

[CHT]

What F1 is now is basically an endurance championship disguised as sprint races. Requiring components (engines, gearboxes) to last multiple races is almost the same as having one 10h race every two months. I don't understand why this path was taken to be honest, as we already have WEC for endurance and Formula E for green technology. Why is it wrong to have a racing series which focuses purely on building the fastest car possible?

F1 should never try to pretend that they are the pinnacle of green technology because in the real world with 100kg of fuel, a passenger car with 4 passengers will be able to travel 3 times the race distant. And even with the current formula, although fuel consumption has gone down but that doesnt mean they have managed to reduce their carbon footprint.

[alexx_88]

A lot of people don't understand the notion of carbon footprint. As a consequence, if next year they see a hybrid Mercedes driving down their street, they'll just think the pollution is lower and won't care that the pollution is probably greater, but moved elsewhere. Politicians and environmentalists love this kind of ignorance.

Anyway, it's more than obvious that the current F1 green concept is BS. How can you publicly say that you encourage powertrain innovation, but at the same time freeze any kind of improvement for 10 months / year? That's hypocrisy of the highest order.

[beelsebob]

A lot of people don't understand the notion of carbon footprint. As a consequence, if next year they see a hybrid Mercedes driving down their street, they'll just think the pollution is lower and won't care that the pollution is probably greater, but moved elsewhere. Politicians and environmentalists love this kind of ignorance.

A lot of people don't understand that by moving it elsewhere, we're still making progress. It's a lot easier to optimise the process of building batteries and the process of making electricity than it is to optimise the process of turning a crank shaft in a car.

You can trivially (though expensively) replace power plants with solar arrays, and wind turbines... You can't trivially make 1,000,000,000 cars run on something that doesn't involve burning.

[alexx_88]

In my opinion, the issue here is not if we are making progress towards a "greener" way to run cars, is whether this progress has anything to do with F1. And I still think that, in the current format, it doesn't. F1 right now is just a marketing machine that tries to put into people's heads the idea that hybrids can be cool. Why? Because it's used in F1. The average Joe will stop here. Please tell me how a platform that has innovation locked for the majority of time (10/12 months) can state that one of its purposes is to produce road-relevant technologies? That's a blatant lie used by car sellers to promote their products as having F1 technology in them, when in fact it's the other way around.

What you said is very true, but it also has nothing to do with what F1 does at the moment.

[xpensive]

In my opinion, the issue here is not if we are making progress towards a "greener" way to run cars, is whether this progress has anything to do with F1. And I still think that, in the current format, it doesn't. F1 right now is just a marketing machine that tries to put into people's heads the idea that hybrids can be cool. Why? Because it's used in F1. The average Joe will stop here. Please tell me how a platform that has innovation locked for the majority of time (10/12 months) can state that one of its purposes is to produce road-relevant technologies? That's a blatant lie used by car sellers to promote their products as having F1 technology in them, when in fact it's the other way around.

What you said is very true, but it also has nothing to do with what F1 does at the moment.

An xcellent description, my sentiments precisely.

[FW17]

In my opinion, the issue here is not if we are making progress towards a "greener" way to run cars,

The word "greener" needs to be defined correctly, i.e. it means less reliant on OPEC even if it means polluting the world by making batteries. F1 has sent the message across that they use 30% less oil than last year.

[Andres125sx]

The ICE isn't going anywhere, unless there is a breakthrough in battery or capacitor technology to facilitate it's demise.

Maybe you´re talking about this....
http://ei.haas.berkeley.edu/c2m/Present ... attery.pdf

Not yet for automotive use, but LiS are present, not a far future

Even then, unless we move to completely green energy production we are no better off.

So if they improve the emissions but not erradicate them completely, they´re not good

There are tons of biased articles stating electricity pollutes as much as petrol.... but they "curiously" ignore that´s only when comparing electricity from coal plants. Reality is electriciy comes from different plants, coal (most polluting), nuclear (no emissions but harmful wastes), hydroelectric (no emissions), windmills (no emissions), solar plants (no emissions)... so actually electricity pollutes just a fraction of ICEs today, and the difference is higher each year

[NTS]

Discussing "green or not" makes no sense at all. The majority of the F1 viewers don't care at all about the environmental impact of Formula 1. The small part of the fans that does care should be informed that the driving part of F1 is by far the smallest factor in the carbon footprint. Moving all the stuff required for a race three times around the globe every season is much worse than the bit of fuel used at the races. We're talking about saving 60kg of fuel per race. For all 22 cars combined that fits in a single tanker truck

What F1 needs is enough income and a healthy distribution of that income.

Income
Basically there is only a single source of income for the sport: Viewers. Those viewers have a few ways of generating income for F1:
1. Tickets
2. Advertisers which pay for TV rights (which allows F1 to ask more from the TV networks)
3. Advertisers who sponsor tracks and teams

So in the end everything is about making the advertisers and the viewers happy. You either need happy advertisers who spend more per viewer or you need more happy viewers to get a larger total audience to sell to advertisers. Which boils down to making things exciting to watch for the viewers while getting a lot of exposure for advertisers

Distribution of income
To make sure things are exciting and you have a lot of people happily watching races (= more viewers, see above) you need a healthy number of competitors that fight an interesting battle. To do that they'll need enough money.

Some of the income directly flows to the teams through sponsors (advertisers) spending it on the team, and some money goes to the F1 rights holders and is then distributed to the teams. Both routes could be considered under control of the F1 rights holders and the FIA, since they control the exposure of the teams as well as the distribution of the shared TV income.

Conclusion
To fix the sport we thus need:
1. A set of rules that create an interesting competition to watch (which could just as well be based on the current V6)
2. A set of rules that allows all teams enough exposure to make some money
3. A system that provide the smaller teams with a big enough part of the pie to stay and be competitive

So looking at the current situation my personal "quick fix" would be:
- Allow more development in-season to make sure a season is not dominated by 1 team, only freeze parts on which teams are very equal
- Listen to the viewers and set rules that allow more close fighting (for example DRS was a good idea, even tough it's not liked by the purist audience it is liked by normal viewers)
- Equalize the payout system to give a bigger part of the money to the lower positions. The top teams already benefit from more exposure so they can compensate with sponsors on their own

[hollus]

Since this is moving to whether green is worth it or not (green in F1 is IMHO, a marketing exercise, but I like its results):
Problem number one with alternative (non-coal non-oil non-nuclear) is that it is "known" that there are no practical means of energy storage, not at a large scale. If there were, the amount of sources would probably soar and we would start to see coal power plants shut down. Well, on top of those LiS batteries that are almost here, we have the technology to do large scale energy storage here and now, using mostly the existing infrastructure:
http://www.f1technical.net/forum/viewto ... 25#p486125
Sure, stored energy would cost twice as much as producing it, meaning 2.x times more than current oil based energy costs. But wait, wasn't producing energy from alternative sources about twice as expensive about five years ago?
The technology to go full green is here. The cost economy is not, but sit and watch (and maybe not for too long). The political will, well,

[FoxHound]

Here's a question:

Would F1 be greener if downforce was reduced and a maximum drag coefficient was introduced?
You could offset it with I dunno, something crazy like mechanical grip and tyres.

[Cam]

A lot of people don't understand the notion of carbon footprint. As a consequence, if next year they see a hybrid Mercedes driving down their street, they'll just think the pollution is lower and won't care that the pollution is probably greater, but moved elsewhere. Politicians and environmentalists love this kind of ignorance.

A lot of people don't understand that by moving it elsewhere, we're still making progress. It's a lot easier to optimise the process of building batteries and the process of making electricity than it is to optimise the process of turning a crank shaft in a car.

You can trivially (though expensively) replace power plants with solar arrays, and wind turbines... You can't trivially make 1,000,000,000 cars run on something that doesn't involve burning.

I would go a step further and I present and excellent exmaple of how F1 could have solved some of their whoas.

In Lieu of Money, Toyota Donates Efficiency to New York Charity

The Food Bank for New York City is the country’s largest anti-hunger charity, feeding about 1.5 million people every year. It leans heavily, as other charities do, on the generosity of businesses, including Target, Bank of America, Delta Air Lines and the New York Yankees. Toyota was also a donor. But then Toyota had a different idea.

Instead of a check, it offered kaizen.

A Japanese word meaning “continuous improvement,”

Toyota did more for this charity than any cheque could have done. Amazing thinking. Perhaps some of F1's troubles can be answered in here?

[mertol]

This LiS is pathetic. From the graph on the link, in 2050 it will be 15 times worse than gasoline. This is not an alternative for F1.