Mansell's FW14B 'Red Five' to be auctioned

[poppopbangbang]

carl_w said:

Hmmm, didn't Honda have a 21,000 rpm engine ready to go in 2006 -- before the 19,000 rpm limit was introduced in 2007? Hard to believe they were hitting 22,000 rpm in 1992.

RS4 was 14.5K limit on "quali revs", RS3C was a bit less than that. An RS4 on a 12K limit will still make 670bhp on Atmomax, that's bloody good and for comparison about 55bhp up on what a HB3 would do with 2K off it's rev limit on the same fuel.

Nothing in 1992 was getting over 15K (and surviving) and it didn't really need to as there was still 3500CC to play with then, the revs started to become more critical as the engine sizes went down in 1995 where more revs was a solution to having 500CC less, as technology developed and the requirements for sustained high revs became more understood you ended in 02 with BMW doing 19K rpm in quali and nearly everyone doing those figures plus a bit, some during the race in PTP by 05. 20K RPM wasn't really a thing until 06 with the V8s.

[Thundersports]

poppopbangbang said:

RS4 was 14.5K limit on "quali revs", RS3C was a bit less than that. An RS4 on a 12K limit will still make 670bhp on Atmomax, that's bloody good and for comparison about 55bhp up on what a HB3 would do with 2K off it's rev limit on the same fuel.

Nothing in 1992 was getting over 15K (and surviving) and it didn't really need to as there was still 3500CC to play with then, the revs started to become more critical as the engine sizes went down in 1995 where more revs was a solution to having 500CC less, as technology developed and the requirements for sustained high revs became more understood you ended in 02 with BMW doing 19K rpm in quali and nearly everyone doing those figures plus a bit, some during the race in PTP by 05. 20K RPM wasn't really a thing until 06 with the V8s.

This ^
The car in question isn't the North car but the other one that was sold at the time. Asu the original poster doesn't want him named I won't either.

Edited by Thundersports on Thursday 7th February 23:44

Edited by Thundersports on Thursday 7th February 23:45

[JoeDix]

Corrections:

10 house points to each of you that have identified the RPM misinformation, I was clearly thinking of a different engine... from a different car... from a different era...

Furthermore, it has been brought to my attention that the chassis being auctioned here is not the one I worked on. So my anecdotes and information, whilst vaguely relevant, are not directly related to the chassis being auctioned.

Feeling rather foolish, I shall revert back to reading posts rather than writing them.

[enjo]

JoeDix said:

Corrections:

10 house points to each of you that have identified the RPM misinformation, I was clearly thinking of a different engine... from a different car... from a different era...

Furthermore, it has been brought to my attention that the chassis being auctioned here is not the one I worked on. So my anecdotes and information, whilst vaguely relevant, are not directly related to the chassis being auctioned.

Feeling rather foolish, I shall revert back to reading posts rather than writing them.

If not relevant to this particular chassis the insights you've given have been really interesting. Please don't stop.

[SpudLink]

I just want to add my voice to those saying thank you to JoeDix for his fascinating insights into the world F1 engineering.

[williamp]

Yes I agree, thanks Joe.

A few posts up you mentionned poping over to see. Is that...er... you know...still on??

Also, I toured Zytek a few years back they wee of the opinion that beyond a certain rpm, the engine just becomes an air pump with no net gain in power. The posts above would seem to contradict that?

[markcoznottz]

6.40 in for a good idea of the Renault sound. I'm pretty sure the cars running for demo's are rpm limited compared to back in the day

https://youtu.be/QQL1VjeXuqE

[Car-Matt]

JoeDix said:

https://photos.app.goo.gl/YokGJ95GVXjS8Vi1A

How cool does that look when its starts and the active suspension raises the car then squats again.........still gives me goosebumps compared to modern f1 cars.

Also re people complaining about the spluttering of the engine, surely that's normal for some lift of at pitlane/ pitlane exit/first corner. Its hardly WOT at 200mph is it

[JoeDix]

williamp said:

Yes I agree, thanks Joe.

A few posts up you mentionned poping over to see. Is that...er... you know...still on??

Also, I toured Zytek a few years back they wee of the opinion that beyond a certain rpm, the engine just becomes an air pump with no net gain in power. The posts above would seem to contradict that?

If / when the (other) car runs in public I will let you know.

Now I will have to work hard to redeem myself on an RPM related question! This would take a long time to answer properly so I shall try and condense:

- Power (HP) is a function of torque and engine RPM. Hopefully this does not come as a surprise to anyone.
- An engine is obviously a series of controlled explosions, so we can look at the fire triangle for our key ingredients: Oxygen, fuel and ignition (or heat, as it is sometimes referred to).

- Ignition: reasonably easy to "increase" with bigger / more powerful / fancier plugs.
- Fuel: as someone else mentioned, you can use some horrendous ingredients to make your fuel more potent and / or you can just pump more of it into the engine with relative ease (bigger / more injectors, higher flow / pressure pumps). Or be American and run the car on Ethanol.
- Oxygen: Air has some Oxygen in it, so we just need more air. Easily achieved with an enormous turbo.
- All of the above: make the engine bigger and / or have more explosions.

Going back to your question, we can begin to rule some bits out (or, at least, understand the technical challenges). Someone else will know what the rules were back in 1992 but let's just rule some stuff out:

Can't make the engine bigger, as it's either limited by the rules or limited by the weight or it's big enough.
Could add more cylinders, unless we've maximised that already (10 is quite a lot).
Can't add a turbo, because we're not allowed or we just don't want to.
We're already throwing fuel at the engine, and we need to be mindful of the penalties of using too much (either it's stipulated in the rules or just foolish because we have to keep stopping for more).

So, if we want more power we need more explosions. That means we need to rev the engine more. We need to ensure we have appropriate flame propagation and a bunch of other things related to piston speed, which is why these engines are oversquare (the cylinder is fatter than it is long). If the stroke of the piston is shorter, then it's not travelling as fast for a given RPM (hard to describe in words) which means we can rev it higher. This also gives us more real-estate for valves etc. The higher it revs, the more power it produces. In this engine, the top 1,000 rpm contains around 100 HP....

However, now we have a high reving engine with big valves we have something of a challenge for conventional springs to keep them doing what we want. Hence why pneumatic springs are used, and great lengths will be gone to in order to reduce the mass of the valvetrain (exotic materials and highly complex machining).

As with everything, there are limits (obviously). One of the main challenges are that things like heat / friction don't increase in a linear relationship to speed (some are squared or even cubed). And cooling infrastructure adds penalties (weight of fluid and radiators, drag of extra rads etc). So it's all a balance.

TLDR: Yes, there's power at high RPM (for this engine). Yes, running an engine (especially with conventional valve springs) would result in it either becoming an air pump or the pistons smashing into the valves.

[garythesign]

SpudLink said:

I just want to add my voice to those saying thank you to JoeDix for his fascinating insights into the world F1 engineering.

And mine.

Joe obviously has a huge amount of knowledge and I am glad he keeps sharing it.

His latest, about increases revs, is fascinating.

[Turn7]

enjo said:

JoeDix said:

Corrections:

10 house points to each of you that have identified the RPM misinformation, I was clearly thinking of a different engine... from a different car... from a different era...

Furthermore, it has been brought to my attention that the chassis being auctioned here is not the one I worked on. So my anecdotes and information, whilst vaguely relevant, are not directly related to the chassis being auctioned.

Feeling rather foolish, I shall revert back to reading posts rather than writing them.

If not relevant to this particular chassis the insights you've given have been really interesting. Please don't stop.

Plus one.....

[jim-k0nxx]

JoeDix said:

I was fortunate enough to work on the restoration of this particular car, and would consider it a bargain at twice the price as I am incredibly biased.

On a related note, valuing cars of this nature is a notorious dark art - not least because they tend to pass from owner to owner in a dismantled form, getting re-assembled by "mechanics" from a range of skillsets and backgrounds. I recently went to assess a Jaguar R5 which was described as being in complete condition.... which it was, as a result of a number of Jaguar R4 bits (including the steering wheel!).

But this example is perfect in every way - retired from competition into Williams Heritage storage facility, brought back to life under the supervision of people like Paddy Lowe, test driven by Karun Chandhok and then supported at events by the current Williams F1 crew. Literally, what more could you ask for?

Is this in fact the same one that nearly died in a fire in the semi-secret location near Membury airfield about 4yrs ago? if so I have the dubious honour of being one of the guys that saved it.... I'll take a paltry 5% cut please, that will suffice.

[F1GTRUeno]

thegreenhell said:

Bradgate said:

Perhaps the vendor is a Mr Mansell?

That's far too logical...

Fresh from the recently-closed Mansell Collection in Jersey?

That's an FW14, not the B-spec. Can tell from the front end without the active suspension lumps, plus it's slightly shorter and stubbier at the front because of it too.

I know they made 11 FW14's altogether and the B-spec cars were 06-11 IIRC.

6 was ran up the hill by Chandhok at GFOS in 2017.

10 was for sale with Cars International a few years back.

So that leaves two others that were B-spec after this one being for sale too. From what I know one of them is in the museum at Williams' factory and I presume isn't one of the three mentioned above and one of them was on display at the Autosport show in 2017. They displayed one at Thruxton for its 50th anniversary celebration last year too but any guesses to the one on display at any given time is up for suggestions.

Dickie Stanford's Twitter is a good source of pics for what's going on in the heritage workshops.

https://twitter.com/dickiestanford?lang=en

[TobyTR]

JoeDix said:

Whilst I agree with you in some respects i.e the F14B is both beautifully styled and was / is incredibly competitive - the absolute weapon of recent history is the Jaguar R5. The level of technology on it (active diff, active throttle, active brakes, active steering etc etc) means it is still devastatingly fast even without a skilled driver and the fact that it came from an era where safety hadn't quite taken over means it's still also frighteningly light

The F14B was the first competitive iteration of active suspension, imagine how advanced it could have got if it wasn't banned so soon!

Fascinating, Joe. Thank you for the insight keep it coming please

In your opinion, how do you think a Jaguar R5 on today's Pirelli ultra-soft slick tyres would run against last year's F1 cars on a fast circuit, ie Monza, Spa, Silverstone?

The 2004 F1 cars still hold the majority of un-changed race lap records and their total race time is still considerably ahead of last year's cars

[poppopbangbang]

JoeDix said:

Whilst I agree with you in some respects i.e the F14B is both beautifully styled and was / is incredibly competitive - the absolute weapon of recent history is the Jaguar R5. The level of technology on it (active diff, active throttle, active brakes, active steering etc etc) means it is still devastatingly fast even without a skilled driver and the fact that it came from an era where safety hadn't quite taken over means it's still also frighteningly light

For me the R5 was behind in so many areas it was embarrassing when compared to the Ferrari, Sauber, Renault and BAR efforts of the same year given the budget involved, even the Minardi had smarter bits on it than the R5 (their active diff code was an example in efficiency and functionality and was done on hardware that was three years old at that point). The R5 had coil overs sat on top of the box whilst pretty much everyone else was on torsion bars and in box dampers which reduced the bodywork height over the top of the gearbox and the required stiffness in the top of the box as the load paths were all mostly vertical:

R5 box:


BAR 006 box:


The difference is even more profound when seen in the real world!

Even Minardi in 2000 had nailed rapid cast Ti gearboxes with internal rear dampers on the M02:

A design ethos which is still pretty much current today.

The R5s active diff was no better in operation than the BAR implementation in their awesome carbon/ti hybrid gearbox casing. Here's the R5 diff demand calculation FC for example:

There's no doubt it works but compared to what those further up the front were running it doesn't come close.

The throttle was just a hydraulically driven throttle with a rotary actuator and a moog and was pretty much identical to what was on the Minardi the following year (to the point the Minardi one fits the Jag spec TJ), even the much hailed "traction optimisation" system was overly complicated compared to most and the PAS with its fairly unique poppet relief valve thing was just drama to look after and made the worst noise as soon as it had a tiny bit of wear in it...... that's all before you had to run the thing on circuit with the assortment of Pi boxes that were pretty clunky (especially the testing only per cyl UEGO kit) compared to Marelli STEP10/11 stuff which just worked. The one thing the R5 did have right was the hyds in the bell housing approach which got rid of some weight and a lot of failure points and has remained a design ethos since amongst most but the R5 still remains the worst F1 car I've ever been involved in running and P7 in the constructors on that much budget was not a good result!

It's not a bad looking car, in fact from some angles it's quite pretty but absolute weapon it was not. It did okay in BOSS a few years later though.

[markcoznottz]

I went for a job interview at Stewart as it was then known, in 1999, guy who interviewed me proudly showed the carbon gearbox casing being layed up. Wasn't a success apparently. Was that really 20 years ago?.

[poppopbangbang]

markcoznottz said:

I went for a job interview at Stewart as it was then known, in 1999, guy who interviewed me proudly showed the carbon gearbox casing being layed up. Wasn't a success apparently. Was that really 20 years ago?.

Yep! Arrows found similar with theirs. The clever bit in the BAR version was the Ti bulkheads and ties which added the required rigidity to make it work succesfully, although this didn't yield the weight saving it was hoped in the end. Current thinking is thin wall rapid cast Ti casings with bonded stressed carbon fibre to add rigiditiy in highly loaded areas with a "cartridge" type gearbox taking up very little room in the overall "gearbox" with its dimensions set by the required wishbone seperation and damper packaging etc.

[dr_gn]

markcoznottz said:

6.40 in for a good idea of the Renault sound. I'm pretty sure the cars running for demo's are rpm limited compared to back in the day

https://youtu.be/QQL1VjeXuqE

I was there for those tests in the late '80's and early '90's - it was a completely awesome experience.

[SpudLink]

dr_gn said:

markcoznottz said:

6.40 in for a good idea of the Renault sound. I'm pretty sure the cars running for demo's are rpm limited compared to back in the day

https://youtu.be/QQL1VjeXuqE

I was there for those tests in the late '80's and early '90's - it was a completely awesome experience.

I think it was the summer of ’91 I was working in the same industrial estate where the Honda F1 engine was built. The Tuesday before most races you could hear the engines being run at full revs. You could also feel it vibrating through the floor and desk.

[bakerstreet]

Car-Matt said:

This car is in fully working driveable condition. Its not the only one in existence, there are at least 3 others.

For those thinking Nigel was a bit of a porker he was a third dan blackbelt during his time in F1 and for 1992 weighed in less than (not a well known porker) Riccardo Patrese

I'd buy it in a heartbeat.

You have clearly watched that 1992 Mansell and Williams Video

He was far from a porker, but MS brought in a new level of fitness compared to the other drivers of that era.

I watched every race in 1992 (TV of course) and watching him cross that line at 1992 at Silverstone was pretty special. Stand out memory of my youth. Same for Hill winning the championship in 96.

If I won the Euro Millions, I would buy it for a million

My parents met Nigel and his wife at a dinner several years later. Said they were both very nice people. His wife especially.