Hi, I'm very suprised to see engine manufacturers like Ferrari and Mercedes seems to struggle to find pace or reliability with V8 engines, while they have a great knowlege about this architecture. The RS26 is doing well, and as far as I know, Renault never had to deal with V8 in the past. On the other hand, cosworth V8 is looking very good, and they do have a great experience of V8... So the question is: does it not matters how much you have experienced with an engine architecture in F1? perhaps the gap between "normal" V8 and F1 specs V8 is too great to adapt your experience to the competition...
I think knowledge of 'regular' V8 engines is useless because they revv at much lower RPM. So the vibrations you get with an F1 engine and therefore reliability issues are entirely different.
BTW, Renault does have experience with race v8's, GP2 cars have a Renault V8 engine...
A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.
Hello
I belive this topic has been covered before to some extent. I am sure someone will find the post and link it from here. I will say though in its simplest form.
Think of a circle . All circles are 360 degrees. Devide that circle by 10 spaces and then by 8 spaces. With a V10 engine the resolution is much greater thus making it smoother. Much like your computer moniter. With a V8 engine I imaging that the company that did the best job with the counter weights and in particular the size of them will have the best performance as far as revs go. I am sure the counter weights on a V8 are much larger than a V10. The counter weights job is mainly to absorb engine harmonics. This is why when knife edging a crank it must be done by someone who has knows what he is doing. In 90% of engines its better to keep the crank weight up and lower the weight of everything else. My opinions only.
Designing an engine, and in fact, just plain engineering is about applying what works, avoiding mistakes, and using novel approaches to solve problems. Naturally, experience and knowledge is important.
But the difference between a full out racing engine for F1 and a powerplant for a road going, street legal car are very different. Huge. There are factors that influence each design, and although they may appear close in specifications, every component is different. For example, a road legal car in the US is mandated to go 100,000 miles without a major tuneup, and still meet emissions laws. So the cylinder walls have to be thicker to minimize flex, which promotes better ring seal, which keep them sealing into that magic 100,000 mile mark. And of course, in F1, ring seal and cylinder wall thickness are determined by totally different parameters, like weight, mechanical strength, and so on. Naturally, no one in F1 engine design thinks about 100,000 miles. More like 10 hours.
Every component in racing faces totally different requirements, stresses, and levels of forces totally different than a street legal engine, thus each individual component is quite different. In racing, each and every component is designed just too survive only as long as it has to, with little regard to cost, ease of manufacture, or much else. And what happens inside a racing engine can only be described as pure Heck. Exhaust valves live in a white hot furnace, crankshafts whip and flex like soft licorice, pistons travel up and down in a cycle that just plain destroys them. It is as severe an environment as can be imagined. If any component has the slightest manufacturing or deisgn flaw, it will definitely fail. To make matters worse, if a component can actually survive, the engineers quickly try to redesign it to be lighter than before. It is a vicious circle.
If it breaks, make it stronger so it will. If it doesn't break, make it lighter.
That being said, the laws and rules of engineering apply to everything, and are consistent. So what you learn about a street engine may apply to a road engine, you just have to design the components differently. And what you learn, especially mistakes, are very valuable. It's not that Cosworth dusted off the blueprints of the DFV and used it as the base model. But even the lessons and mistakes they learned back then could still be applied to today's modern engine.
And we have no way of knowing how much time and effort each team have spent on their engine designs. Maybe Cosworth have been working on this engine for two, maybe three years, while teams like Mercedes haven't done any serious work until just a year ago.
