F1 Engines

[jakesmith]

On the recent thread about the new Mercedes hypercar there was some talk about it having a F1 derived engine and debate about how close it was in fact, vs the Ferarri F50. Apparently the engines in F1 are ridiculously sophisticated, and only last 1/5th of a season
As a complete F1 novice, what are the key points of difference that make these engines so different to road car or even race derived road engines like the Metzgar lump in the old GT3s?

[//j17]

The Merc. supercar engine is limited to I think 11,000RPM but most (of the ones that actually get driven and don't go straight in to investor storage) will only get driven in the sub-6,000RPM range, so internal wear and stresses are going to be much lower. They certainly won't be nailed to the rev limiter their whole life life the version in an F1 car. They are also due to have something like twice the battery storage so probably spend a lot of time running electric-only when cruising around town.

I'd also expect a lot of internal components to be either beefed-up or replaced with slightly heavier, but cheaper and stronger versions. Sure we aren't talking replacing a carbon/aluminium block with a cast iron one, but rather than a block that's thinned to the point it will do 1/4 of a season + 1 lap you can add a couple of mm (and a 1kg) and have one that will last a (for a supercar) reasonable time.

I'd expect the packaging to be changed a bit too. In the F1 car the aero engineers would prefer it if the engine didn't exist so it has to be squeezed in to the smallest possible space to minimise the impact on rear body aero. In a road car that's not so much the case so you can space things out, get much better cooling and have everything running at a much lower, more wear-friendly temperature.

Edited by //j17 on Friday 15th September 09:39

[sparta6]

Also the pre-warming and start up procedure of around 45 mins won't apply to the road car.
By contrast the F50 engine was much closer to it's F1 brother.

The Merc F1 offering is a bit like a brunette dying her hair blonde. She looks blonde but...look closer.

[Vaud]

//j17 said:

The Merc. supercar engine is limited to I think 11,000RPM but most (of the ones that actually get driven and don't go straight in to investor storage) will only get driven in the sub-6,000RPM range, so internal wear and stresses are going to be much lower. They certainly won't be nailed to the rev limiter their whole life life the version in an F1 car. They are also due to have something like twice the battery storage so probably spend a lot of time running electric-only when cruising around town.

I'd also expect a lot of internal components to be either beefed-up or replaced with slightly heavier, but cheaper and stronger versions. Sure we aren't talking replacing a carbon/aluminium block with a cast iron one, but rather than a block that's thinned to the point it will do 1/4 of a season + 1 lap you can add a couple of mm (and a 1kg) and have one that will last a (for a supercar) reasonable time.

I'd expect the packaging to be changed a bit too. In the F1 car the aero engineers would prefer it if the engine didn't exist so it has to be squeezed in to the smallest possible space to minimise the impact on rear body aero. In a road car that's not so much the case so you can space things out, get much better cooling and have everything running at a much lower, more wear-friendly temperature.

Edited by //j17 on Friday 15th September 09:39

Having spoken to someone connected to the project, yes... more reliance on electric mode. Different cooling and ancillaries. Different mappings. Redesign of a lot of parts for higher duty cycles.

So a common core but with significant rework.

[rev-erend]

sparta6 said:

Also the pre-warming and start up procedure of around 45 mins won't apply to the road car.
By contrast the F50 engine was much closer to it's F1 brother.

The Merc F1 offering is a bit like a brunette dying her hair blonde. She looks blonde but...look closer.

Best check the collars and cuffs match

[CraigyMc]

jakesmith said:

On the recent thread about the new Mercedes hypercar there was some talk about it having a F1 derived engine and debate about how close it was in fact, vs the Ferarri F50. Apparently the engines in F1 are ridiculously sophisticated, and only last 1/5th of a season
As a complete F1 novice, what are the key points of difference that make these engines so different to road car or even race derived road engines like the Metzgar lump in the old GT3s?

1/4 of a season. The teams are allowed up to 4 engines per season, or they get grid penalties for the 5th and subsequent ones. The engines are divided into 6 units. A change to any of the 6 bits that make up an engine counts towards the grid penalties.

• The road engine will not use HCCI or TJI - which are the funky engine modes that Mercedes have got very good at in F1. They are trick enough to need to be kept secret so there's no way they are going into a car that MB doesn't have control over 24/7 (put another way: if they were the "real deal" F1 bits, a rival team would get one of the hypercars and take it apart to figure out the technology).
• The road engine will not use pneumatic valve springs. These are run from a compressed bottle of nitrogen on the F1 cars, which obviously only has to last at most a race distance (190 miles) plus a small margin - the road car will have to be able to do more then 200 miles in one "sitting" so it'll use traditional metal springs to close the valves instead, and delete the need for the bottle totally. This is one of the bigger changes.
• The road engine will have to have emissions equipment on it - catalytic converters. It'll need to meet noise regs, so will have a proper exhaust. Neither of these exist on the F1 car motor. It'll need to pass type approval type testing to be road legal.
• The road engine won't be built so tight that it has to be warmed up before it can turn over, the tolerances will be much bigger to allow clearance for when the engine is cold. The F1 engine is never run cold - it's warmed by pumping (very) hot oil and water through it before it's run - before that, attempts to turn it over would damage the internals.
• The road engine will have more sturdy rods, pistons and especially more durable piston rings than the F1 items.
• The road engine will have air filters, fuel filters, and a proper oil filter, none of which are typically present on the F1 motor in race form. The air filter on the road car will have to cope with things like leaves (because it will be outside in autumn!). The F1 car engine only runs "proper" air filters at sandy events like Bahrain. There's no need for the F1 car engine to run a fuel filter at all, since the team is in total control of the systems that refuel it as well as the tanks that fuel comes from: it's extra, unneccessary weight on the car.
• The road engine will have off-the-shelf engine electronics, rather than a McLaren-TaG ECU (standard spec for all of F1). The Mclaren ECU isn't built for road work so it's likely that it'll be replaced with something more common like a motronic or similar.
• Unlike the F50 engine, the Merc road engine will at least use the same block dimensions and capacity (1.6l) as the F1 motor - probably the castings will be thicker for longevity, but that's all (for all the talk of the F50 motor being F1 spec, it was 4.7 litres, so was 1.2 litres bigger than contemporary F1 engines).

This isn't an exhaustive list. The main things are legal requirements (emissions, noise), durability (will need to do sensible distances between rebuilds), and environmentals (F1 cars don't run in cold climates, road cars do - so the engine will need to cope with freezing conditions, for example).

Edited by CraigyMc on Friday 15th September 12:40

[sgtBerbatov]

sparta6 said:

Also the pre-warming and start up procedure of around 45 mins won't apply to the road car.
By contrast the F50 engine was much closer to it's F1 brother.

The Merc F1 offering is a bit like a brunette dying her hair blonde. She looks blonde but...look closer.

I like the way the blonde dyed her roots brown.

[rdjohn]

IT will have better oil an fuel consumption, despite them not being the special brews used in F1.

I think it's safe to say that the architecture will be the same, but the bricks and mortar will be very different.

BTW - I believe the current PUs use unique ECUs, unlike the previous V8s that used the standard McLaren kit. There are so many different parameters that need to be controlled metre by metre round a race circuit that the mapping is massively different circuit to circuit.
Whereas the focus of the road car will be to meet emission standards - just like every other road car.

[CraigyMc]

rdjohn said:

BTW - I believe the current PUs use unique ECUs, unlike the previous V8s that used the standard McLaren kit. There are so many different parameters that need to be controlled metre by metre round a race circuit that the mapping is massively different circuit to circuit.

Believe what you like. Every car on the grid uses a McLaren TAG320 ECU.
It's mandated by the FIA.

[Vaud]

CraigyMc said:

rdjohn said:

BTW - I believe the current PUs use unique ECUs, unlike the previous V8s that used the standard McLaren kit. There are so many different parameters that need to be controlled metre by metre round a race circuit that the mapping is massively different circuit to circuit.

Believe what you like. Every car on the grid uses a McLaren TAG320 ECU.
It's mandated by the FIA.

The second part is right though - how they map for individual circuits?

[E-bmw]

sparta6 said:

By contrast the F50 engine was much closer to it's F1 brother.

5-year older brother & not that close, as it put on nearly 30% volume.

[//j17]

Will be interesting to see how close the road car version of the engine gets to the F1 car's 40% thermal efficiency...and to see how much oil it uses

[sparta6]

E-bmw said:

5-year older brother & not that close, as it put on nearly 30% volume.

Closer to its brother than the proposed Merc brother

[red_slr]

I seem to recall the Porsche CGT has the closest thing to an actual F1 engine in a road car?

I think the story goes it was developed for F1 but the project was cancelled (possibly down to issues with V12 the unit cant remember exactly). So then Porsche ended up with a load of engines in storage. They went GT racing with them with standard valve trains. I think there were some minor internal changes but nothing major.

When that went pointy side up they plonked them in road cars.

I am sure the experts will be along in a moment..

[E-bmw]

sparta6 said:

E-bmw said:

5-year older brother & not that close, as it put on nearly 30% volume.

Closer to its brother than the proposed Merc brother

I don't want to sound picky but lets get to the headline figures shall we:

1.6 litre V6 turbo with 850 bhp current engine VERSUS 1.6 litre V6 turbo with around 1000 bhp based on a current engine

OR

3.5 litre V12 with 690 bhp current engine VERSUS 4.7 litre V12 with 720 bhp based on a 5 year old engine

In what way is the bottom comparison closer than the top?

[F1GTRUeno]

red_slr said:

I seem to recall the Porsche CGT has the closest thing to an actual F1 engine in a road car?

I think the story goes it was developed for F1 but the project was cancelled (possibly down to issues with V12 the unit cant remember exactly). So then Porsche ended up with a load of engines in storage. They went GT racing with them with standard valve trains. I think there were some minor internal changes but nothing major.

When that went pointy side up they plonked them in road cars.

I am sure the experts will be along in a moment..

They screwed up the first V12 they gave to Arrows/Footwork because they just linked two of the former TAG turbo engines together and it was a primitive thing.

Once they quickly realised that was a bad idea they started developing the V10.

They withdrew once Footwork rejected the original V12 instead of carrying on with the new engine.

That engine was enlarged for Le Mans but it never raced, only being tested in the LMP1 that was supposed to follow after the GT1 ended it's racing career.

They simply had LMP1 engines left over hence it went into the CGT.

It's related sure, but it's not too much like the original F1 engine was gonna be.

[wibble cb]

//j17 said:

The Merc. supercar engine is limited to I think 11,000RPM but most (of the ones that actually get driven and don't go straight in to investor storage) will only get driven in the sub-6,000RPM range, so internal wear and stresses are going to be much lower. They certainly won't be nailed to the rev limiter their whole life life the version in an F1 car. They are also due to have something like twice the battery storage so probably spend a lot of time running electric-only when cruising around town.

I'd also expect a lot of internal components to be either beefed-up or replaced with slightly heavier, but cheaper and stronger versions. Sure we aren't talking replacing a carbon/aluminium block with a cast iron one, but rather than a block that's thinned to the point it will do 1/4 of a season + 1 lap you can add a couple of mm (and a 1kg) and have one that will last a (for a supercar) reasonable time.

I'd expect the packaging to be changed a bit too. In the F1 car the aero engineers would prefer it if the engine didn't exist so it has to be squeezed in to the smallest possible space to minimise the impact on rear body aero. In a road car that's not so much the case so you can space things out, get much better cooling and have everything running at a much lower, more wear-friendly temperature.

Edited by //j17 on Friday 15th September 09:39

Sounds like pure speculation, you clearly know nothing (a la Jon Snow)

[George29]

//j17 said:

Will be interesting to see how close the road car version of the engine gets to the F1 car's 40% thermal efficiency...and to see how much oil it uses

The latest F1 engine actually made over 50% thermal efficiency recently on the dyno. Pretty amazing really.

[F1GTRUeno]

Perhaps worth mentioning the Yamaha OX99-11 (using their detuned F1 engine)



Sounds incredible

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4DZts0si2c
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTxYOcqWuS8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qs6cOcSSXRo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WC1D0CW79sc

The Jiotto Caspita (Motori Moderni/Subaru then Judd F1 engines)




Heard here sounding amazing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1du_jLfrfuw

And finally the Monterverdi Hai 650 F1 (Cosworth DFR F1 engine)

Edited by F1GTRUeno on Tuesday 19th September 19:57

[E-bmw]

Amazing how similar those 2 look to each other & then throw in a pic of the XJ220 & they are virtually triplets to look at!