gilgen wrote:Rob01 wrote:They are limted to 8 engines a year I believe. So they only have to produce 24 for the entire year. I would say they are handing out the best of the best to all their teams.
Each car has a limit of 8 engines, so as HPE are supplying six cars with engines, that makes 48. Factor in the fact that there may be a blow up or two in each team, that adds another 12 engines as spares. Again add an engine or two that is used for testing on the bench, and never fitted to a car. That makes a possible minimum of 70 engines.
Youll find that most engine manufacturers will produce close to 100 to 120 engines a season as there is generally one every week used for Dyno testing of new parts, as well as testing engines, and spares for each car.
Each engine manufacturer gives each car 8 for the season, and a couple of spares, make that nice round 12 total going on 2006 to 2009 data for race engines. As for testing engines, there is usually a engine per test, or in the case of Ferarri, a engine every 2 days for all their cars for testing. That makes 8 pre season per team. Post season they use a engine for those 4 days, and for Ferarri thats 2 generally. Each team also has a specified engine for shakedown purposes/TV days/Straightline days as well.
So take that, thats 12 per car for the season, 8 pre season and 2 post season, with the Shakedown engine thats, 35 per team roughly. So id recon that Mercedes will produce arround 95 a season, minimum.
Heres what each manufacturer had last season, for race engines:
Mercedes: 48 (3 Teams)
Renault: 32 (2 Teams)
Ferrari: 50 (3 Teams)
Cosworth: 64 (4 Teams)
TOTAL: 194 (12 Teams)
It was suggested once that BMW produced 2 new engines a week for Dyno Testing alone in 2007/2008, outwith their race/test allocations. Someone suggested they made arround 200 engines a year at their height of production in that period. But that figure, even today is still gaurded as the FIA would love to empose Dyno limits and the other manufacturers would also see how much development they could do to their engines to test them to destruction. There is also a myth surrounding one BMW engine that was Dyno tested that went for 12,000km before giving up the will to live.