How do we fix F1?

[Kubica]

mko9 said:

The cars get like 2-3mpg. Impose fuel restrictions that will force them to work on efficiency as well as power? Start with 5mpg and bump it 1mpg every couple years?

What is the Cd of an F1 car? Has to be pretty high with all the downforce generated. Put a cap on Cd?

IIRC they get about 4.5MPG currently in the dry and have the same drag as a typicall 40 tonne artic (about 1.0 cd?)

[skwdenyer]

Bagman said:

skwdenyer said:

Eric Mc said:

I think you are correct. F1 was better when the designers were working from a position of comparative ignorance. They just know and understand far too much these days. Short of performing lobotomies on the designers or ordering the scrapping of all the computer data held on race car performance, this lnowledge can never be "unlearned".

Here, here. In the same way that any old supermini will wipe the floor with many a sports car of yesteryear and comprehensively smash the speed limit, or that the nuclear genie cannot be put back in the bottle, technical progress is irrevocable. F1 increasingly resembles modern warfare - most battles are won or lost on the drawing board and at the budget stage - and F22 will shoot down anything in the sky, for instance.

However the big problem is that the barrier to entry or progress is just too high. Even in the 90s, Symtek (sp?) could get a couple of cars on the grid for (ISTR) £6m for the season. Now you need to put down a deposit just to race of (again ISTR) £30m or so. With little testing allowed, you have to have the banks of knowledge, computer models and testing data in order to be competitive, and it starts to become simply a battle of ability to buy computers and harness engineers.

Attempts to curb spending based on budget have proved impossible to police in other areas, so that's a non-starter. Every regulation change just increases the spending needed in order to catch up, so is self-defeating.

My own feeling is allow unlimited testing, and let the teams decide which is most beneficial - testing or simulation. Meanwhile add as many strategic elements as possible, since those are the only things that are likely to lead to snap-decisions by humans and hence open up the opportunity for on-the-day competitive advantage.

Cough * Customer cars available from 2008 * Cough

OK, but until we see the end result, what does that prove? Will customer cars have the same parts as the works cars? Unlikely. Will customer teams have access to all of the models, data, etc. to allow them to modify and improve these cars? Unlikely. Will customer teams be able to take a design and radically alter it to start their own development curve? Unlikely. Will customer teams even own the cars, rather than leasing them? Unlikely.

What Customer Cars really do, IMHO, is attempt to "sweep away the embarrassment" of, say, a Minardi or whatever low-budget team being obviously so badly off the pace. A challenging midfield is good, but how does that really help the future of the sport? Of course Sir Frank Williams started off running customer cars in the 70s and graduated to building his own cars, but does that look likely in the current climate? How could that "leap" be made? It isn't about a Gordon Murray with his sketchbook of good ideas and head full of intuitive insight any longer, it is about testing every possible permutation on a computer. OK, it would give a customer team valuable testing data (so long as the customer license doesn't restrict its use) but beyond that?

There would be quite a lot of mileage, IMHO, in introducing a new set of rules with a commitment not to change them for, say, 10 years. I would then provide that every team's data and technical information was available to every other team after a 2-year delay. So, in time, even those teams with poor engineering or financing would start to get a trickle-down effect in terms of technology in an environment where the rules hadn't changed to make the tech completely obsolete. Oh and I would still ditch or severely curtail rear wings...

That said, if the FIA want to commit to grids of 30 or 40 cars then customer teams may not be all bad news, but with 24 teams running 2 cars, half being customer teams, that's only 6 manufacturers controlling the future of the sport. Drop a couple one year and the field is decimated.

[skwdenyer]

Kubica said:

mko9 said:

The cars get like 2-3mpg. Impose fuel restrictions that will force them to work on efficiency as well as power? Start with 5mpg and bump it 1mpg every couple years?

What is the Cd of an F1 car? Has to be pretty high with all the downforce generated. Put a cap on Cd?

IIRC they get about 4.5MPG currently in the dry and have the same drag as a typicall 40 tonne artic (about 1.0 cd?)

OK, how about "bonus points" for fuel efficiency? Something similar to the Le Mans Index of Thermal Efficiency prize but more "valuable" to the teams. The FIA can meter the fuel put into the car and weigh the car at start and end of the race. The efficiency is measured in terms of fluids lost (so if the teams don't like the idea of being penalised for using oil or water, make sure nothing leaks...).

Actually this is starting to sound interesting. Points for qualifying, points for finishing (all teams get points), points for efficiency. The trouble is, this starts to encourage more (oh no...) strategy, which seems to be anathema to some but seems an inexorable part of the sport to me. Maybe the more complex points are for the manufacturers' trophy but not for the drivers?

[Conian]

Not to be taken seriously.....

Teams should run 2 cars, 1 driven by a WWF wrestler, the other driven by a bikini clad babe. Lots of pit stops, allowing wrestlers to jump out of their car, drag another driver out of his car, fight, and the winner decides which car they want to leave the pits in.

Similar fights for the ladies but pit-crews must race to assemble a small paddling pool and fill it with jelly.

One car must be black and carry the number 00, it must be significantly faster than the others, but must stop once a lap to set up some kind of trap such as fake road signs and digging holes etc.

Bernie Ecclestone will appear on track randomly, dressed in Top Hat & Tails, the leading driver must pull over and bow/curtsey to him. Bonus points awarded if they kiss his bare anus.

A Scamera Van will be hidden somewhere in the arena, it can drive onto the track at any point and issue tickets to anyone speeding who can't jam their brakes on very quickly.

Finally... Lentilists will be allowed to demonstrate on the track, each team will be allocated fuel with equal combustion properties, but each carry compounds able to identify which team used it. Any hippies run over in the race will be subject to a post-mortem, and the team who got the most fumes into the hippie's lungs gets bonus points.

Fixed, now who wants me to fix world wars?

[chrisbr68]

Has anyone heard about the ideas of bringing back turbo chargers? I noticed this in a couple of articles I read which lead me on to:

http://www.grandprix.com/ns/ns19163.html

Essentially, it would move F1 to 2.2 turbo v6 biodiesel engines, I guess that this kind of move will be inevitable eventually... dont know if it will spice it up, but as the article mentions, this will be good for commercial use and bringing in more companies which would not be a terrible thing.

I like to think of racing as a test bed for technology for road and mass use, which this would be good for... surely!

Not sure it would sound so good though :S

[chrisbr68]

I just read back thorugh some of the posts, and yeah it seems aerodynamics are a problem. I saw some old videos of Villeneuve (G) on youtube and his car drifted and looked good fun. Of course the modern cars cant do this.

As an idea, couldnt they say your car cannot produce any more downforce than that which would make the car weigh twice its standing weight. I dont know how you would police that (what with head winds, hills on tracks etc) but surely that could be a step in the right direction? Or limit the amount of lateral G?

[skwdenyer]

chrisbr68 said:

Has anyone heard about the ideas of bringing back turbo chargers? I noticed this in a couple of articles I read which lead me on to:

http://www.grandprix.com/ns/ns19163.html

Essentially, it would move F1 to 2.2 turbo v6 biodiesel engines, I guess that this kind of move will be inevitable eventually... dont know if it will spice it up, but as the article mentions, this will be good for commercial use and bringing in more companies which would not be a terrible thing.

I like to think of racing as a test bed for technology for road and mass use, which this would be good for... surely!

Not sure it would sound so good though :S

As others have articulated, I rather like turbo cars - it gives the smaller teams an opportunity to "grandstand" if they like by winding up the boost at the risk of poor reliability. However that's only relevant when they know they won't score points anyhow, so why not give points to all finishers?

The trouble is, yet more change means yet more expense and yet more opportunity for the large teams to outgun the smaller teams. What we need is stability of rules for, say, a decade.

And why is greater road car manufacturer involvement a good thing? Time and again we see that large companies don't know how to run F1 teams - recently look at Honda, Toyota, Jaguar, et al. Ferrari are different because they're small and agile to start with - you can't somehow imagine that the Fiat works F1 team would do as well. Unfortunately, with manufacturers now owning teams rather than partnering with them, when they inevitably withdraw from the sport those teams risk being decimated, not least because of politics (would, say, Honda want to sell their team and all the hard-won developments to, say, Nissan to build upon?). So the sports loses more than it gains.

To be honest, jet fighter development bears as much relationship to much of F1 as road cars do - what about the Boeing F1 team or the BAE squad, and a wildcard from, say, Sukhoi? At least the technology transfer would be real rather than illusory (aerospace and F1 share suppliers and technology already). Or specialist consultancies - I can see how a Ricardo team could be good news, and I can't understand what Prodrive hope to get out of "just" being a customer team.

At the end of the day, I believe F1 will only really prosper with small expert teams backed by large budgets and works engines coupled with other experts in PR, marketing, corporate hospitality, etc. Engine development is great tech transfer ground for road car manufacturers, and they're demonstrably good at it, but we need stability for the future. Oh and I'd like to see the F1 teams being able to compete in other formulae, too, not least to make sure that they continue to have a business if the sponsorship money gets a little scarce again!

[skwdenyer]

chrisbr68 said:

I just read back thorugh some of the posts, and yeah it seems aerodynamics are a problem. I saw some old videos of Villeneuve (G) on youtube and his car drifted and looked good fun. Of course the modern cars cant do this.

It was widely said at the time that, since GV's car was a "wing car", driving it sideways should have slowed him down (airflow in the wrong direction relative to the wings). Instead, so it is said, the Ferrari in question was such a dog that "wringing its neck" in this way was the only way to do well. Oh and he was a bit of a genius according to many...

These days the problem is the same, only worse - off-axis wing performance is likely to be very poor since millions of hours of computer processing have optimised the on-axis performance.

chrisbr68 said:

As an idea, couldnt they say your car cannot produce any more downforce than that which would make the car weigh twice its standing weight. I dont know how you would police that (what with head winds, hills on tracks etc) but surely that could be a step in the right direction? Or limit the amount of lateral G?

The main problem is not IMHO downforce per se (that just increases cornering speeds, and so places a higher premium on driver reactions and skill), but the "wash" from the aerodynamic aids that produce the downforce in the first place. A front wing on an F1 car needs pretty "clean" air to drive through in order to generate meaningful downforce, whilst the radiators need the same to cool the engine sufficiently. With modern rear wings aggressively optimised at the expense of what happens behind the car (and with many accusations of wings being deliberately designed to make the air behind them as "dirty" as possible), a following car cannot get too close for too long - the engine may overheat, the wings generate less downforce, etc.

One option would be to remove rear wings all together, replacing them with more sculpted bodywork and more effective undertrays. Another option is to reduce rear wings to a single element (as opposed to the multi-plane efforts we see today), which would help.

[Bagman]

Conian said:

Not to be taken seriously.....

Teams should run 2 cars, 1 driven by a WWF wrestler, the other driven by a bikini clad babe. Lots of pit stops, allowing wrestlers to jump out of their car, drag another driver out of his car, fight, and the winner decides which car they want to leave the pits in.

Similar fights for the ladies but pit-crews must race to assemble a small paddling pool and fill it with jelly.

One car must be black and carry the number 00, it must be significantly faster than the others, but must stop once a lap to set up some kind of trap such as fake road signs and digging holes etc.

Bernie Ecclestone will appear on track randomly, dressed in Top Hat & Tails, the leading driver must pull over and bow/curtsey to him. Bonus points awarded if they kiss his bare anus.

A Scamera Van will be hidden somewhere in the arena, it can drive onto the track at any point and issue tickets to anyone speeding who can't jam their brakes on very quickly.

Finally... Lentilists will be allowed to demonstrate on the track, each team will be allocated fuel with equal combustion properties, but each carry compounds able to identify which team used it. Any hippies run over in the race will be subject to a post-mortem, and the team who got the most fumes into the hippie's lungs gets bonus points.

Fixed, now who wants me to fix world wars?

Sounds like the Britcar 24 hours to me.........

[skinny]

i just don't see why they are trying to make F1 road-relevant. it's not. leave road relevant developments to touring cars.

[simba1]

Conian said:

Not to be taken seriously.....

Teams should run 2 cars, 1 driven by a WWF wrestler, the other driven by a bikini clad babe. Lots of pit stops, allowing wrestlers to jump out of their car, drag another driver out of his car, fight, and the winner decides which car they want to leave the pits in.

Similar fights for the ladies but pit-crews must race to assemble a small paddling pool and fill it with jelly.

One car must be black and carry the number 00, it must be significantly faster than the others, but must stop once a lap to set up some kind of trap such as fake road signs and digging holes etc.

Bernie Ecclestone will appear on track randomly, dressed in Top Hat & Tails, the leading driver must pull over and bow/curtsey to him. Bonus points awarded if they kiss his bare anus.

A Scamera Van will be hidden somewhere in the arena, it can drive onto the track at any point and issue tickets to anyone speeding who can't jam their brakes on very quickly.

Finally... Lentilists will be allowed to demonstrate on the track, each team will be allocated fuel with equal combustion properties, but each carry compounds able to identify which team used it. Any hippies run over in the race will be subject to a post-mortem, and the team who got the most fumes into the hippie's lungs gets bonus points.

Fixed, now who wants me to fix world wars?

Dude you are a genius.

[thunderbelmont]

All this talk of limits for springs, etc.. it's all balls.

The only limit they really need is fuel. That is the great leveller, since horsepower is related to fuel flow-rate, max downforce is related to available horsepower, that's related to fuel flow-rate. Spring rates are related to downforce. And so on. Therefore - fuel restriction (total quantity) is the answer.

You limit the physical size of the cars to stop stupidly wide contraptions from taking up the whole track!.

Let's see V16's, supercharged screamers, flame spitting turbo's, naturally aspirated flyers, all limited by one thing only. Just enough fuel to do 200 miles. 4 wheel drive's, 6 wheelers, heck, 8 wheelers (tippers always seem to go fast!).

The idea of WWF drivers, and jelly wrestling is wonderful. They could phase that in right now.

I also had to laugh when I read reports that some teams have declared their cars "unsafe" when running with the new non-traction control ECU's from the FIA. That makes those chassis' complete dogs. Traction control is an aid to the driver, not a fix to crap design, though it seems to have gone that way.

Rob.