Red Bull exceed fuel flow limit, Ricciardo DSQ at Australian GP

[basti313]

First of all, I base my opinions solely on what I read in official statements.

Have you other official statements than you linked above to "It looks like the fia wants to defend its case based on safety grounds"?
Because the link just states "The FIA has rejected on safety grounds the idea of scrapping Formula 1's fuel-flow limit to avoid a repeat of the Red Bull controversy."
And this is just what I said: Safety concerns on removing the fuel limit. Not more.

Are you thinking that they will argue that if Redbull wins the fuel limit has to be removed completely?

As you might have noticed I actually have taken quite a neutral stance, while most here have taken sides.

I do not doubt that.

I'm perfectly able to have an opinion myself, thank you.

In an open forum we all have the burden that if we put our opinion into a discussion there may be someone who discusses our opinion.

Second, I previously said the argument could be valid. I'm merely doubting the intentions behind it. You don't give a full-on presentation to all the teams just because one team asked for the removal of the fuel limit.

Well, the presentation was on much more than the point of the removal as we could see on twitter. This was just a reply on the Horner idea. I really do not know why autosport is writing a whole article about it while they for example completely neglect the point on the second fuel sensor...
As stated by Pup there will hopefully more info coming.

During the case a lot more will be argued then just measurements. I would be glad infact if the case was limited to that.
But unfortunaly, we have technical directives questioned in legality

This is not the first time that opinion of the technical directive, the meaning of the rules or the opinion of the stewards is questioned in Paris. Few years ago the result of the whole championship was questioned in Paris, now we are just talking about some points. I think this is no problem at all as every contender is free to go to Paris if he thinks he is not treated in a fair way.

and we have a technical infringement tried to be bent into a sporting matter.

I do not get this. Can you explain this?

The court's decisions on those issues will be hugely important, as they will act as precedents.

I doubt that. If RB wins the fuel flow will be measured over the ECU. This will hold for every team and modifications are very limited due to homologation. Next year we will have a new, clear rule and the fuel flow will be measured by the sensor again.
When it comes to the tech. dir. there may be cases like if holes are holes or slits (Monaco last year...) in Paris, but I think this is also no problem if court is fast enough.
Do you see any other importance?

For the record, I do hope the fia wins this, but only if the technical directives are declared to have legal value. Else we'll have anarchy.

Why? If you break a technical directive you still will be DSQ and go to court...that is how it is now and that is how it is in the future. With future I mean this season, because next season FIA will clarify this thing in the rules

[atanatizante]

Sorry for not reading these 55 pages but there is a mandatory FIA backup fuel flow meter or just some teams are doing that with an in-house-made equipment in order to have an accurate and reliable source?

[Blanchimont]

Sorry for not reading these 55 pages but there is a mandatory FIA backup fuel flow meter or just some teams are doing that with an in-house-made equipment in order to have an accurate and reliable source?

Every modern road car measures/estimates the current fuel flow through the injectors. When you know the current engine rpm, the fuel pressure at the injector, the injector geometry and the injection time, you're able to calculate the current fuel flow. Now you might know from personal experience that in road cars this calculation isn't always correct when you compare the fuel consumption from your onboard display with the display at the gas station, but F1 teams have done this in the past years and probably have perfected this way of measuring the fuel flow.

I think that's the way it's done in addition to the FIA Gill sensor.

[atanatizante]

Sorry for not reading these 55 pages but there is a mandatory FIA backup fuel flow meter or just some teams are doing that with an in-house-made equipment in order to have an accurate and reliable source?

Every modern road car measures/estimates the current fuel flow through the injectors. When you know the current engine rpm, the fuel pressure at the injector, the injector geometry and the injection time, you're able to calculate the current fuel flow. Now you might know from personal experience that in road cars this calculation isn't always correct when you compare the fuel consumption from your onboard display with the display at the gas station, but F1 teams have done this in the past years and probably have perfected this way of measuring the fuel flow.

I think that's the way it's done in addition to the FIA Gill sensor.

Thanx a lot Blanchimont!
Now even if it`s an off topic matter (sorry mods but couldn`t find the appropriate thread) could you also enlighten me with the info regarding what backup equipments they are allowed to carry in an F1 car?
Thanx in advance!

[Dragonfly]

Now you might know from personal experience that in road cars this calculation isn't always correct when you compare the fuel consumption from your onboard display with the display at the gas station, but F1 teams have done this in the past years and probably have perfected this way of measuring the fuel flow.

This does not necessarily imply that the fault is with your board computer but not with station fuel pump

[beelsebob]

Now you might know from personal experience that in road cars this calculation isn't always correct when you compare the fuel consumption from your onboard display with the display at the gas station, but F1 teams have done this in the past years and probably have perfected this way of measuring the fuel flow.

This does not necessarily imply that the fault is with your board computer but not with station fuel pump

It's far more likely to be with your onboard computer - the station fuel pumps are heavily regulated, and rigerously checked.

[dans79]

Just googling for 30sec (I do not want to waste more time with this ridiculous question) gave me Ferrari, Merc and Sauber and I would say Ferrari and Sauber clearly had bigger problems than Lotus with failing sensors for parts of the race or even the whole race...

I've Googled as well, I don't see anything even remotely official from teams saying the senors don't work. The only thing i have seen and I will repeat this again are sound bites, and quotes from anonymous inside sources. as far as I'm concerned until someone provides some hard numbers that show the sensors are wrong, it's just a bunch of BS being spread by RBR and the press are feeding off it.

The best theory I have heard to date was what Steve Matchett said during fp2. RBR will lose because they tried to work around the obvious, but RIC will get his WDC points back, because it's not his fault, nor did he have any knowledge of the issue.

[jz11]

an amazing thought right there - lets make illegal car and win WDC, just don't tell the driver about it!

[Cam]

Actually, the presentation was for the press. Red Bull have waged a little PR campaign against the FIA for the past week - several interviews with Horner and a couple from Mateschitz - so you can't really blame them for wanting to respond. And it's a complicated issue for most people to grasp, so a press release probably wouldn't have done it - one of the attendants tweeted that the presentation was like being back in school.

Given that, I guess it's not surprising that all Autosport took from the presentation was the safety quote. TJ13 has a better article, though it's peppered with their usual bias, innuendo, and excess of commas. Hopefully Scarbs attended and will write something up.

Thanks for pointing that out. I feel this backs my point even more: the fia usually keeps a low profile. This isn't how they usually work.

Agreed. Almost always, in any upcoming court case, all parties are told to say nothing. I am unsure if this is to try to sway court opinion or just a massive PR battle to see who has the biggest ****.

Either way, we have front seats to see the result of an unstoppable force against an immovable object. Let's hope for both of them the results don't destroy them both.

As for the F1 'show', they should re-badge this stuff and sell it as a soap opera.

[bill shoe]

The nub of the problem, Whiting observed, is that the rules state that if there is a problem with a sensor teams have to use a back up solution which has been calibrated against a known sensor. Red Bull did not do this, whatever the accuracy they may claim for their own system, it had not been calibrated against a known sensor in a controlled environment. This will be central to the FIA’s case at appeal.

http://www.jamesallenonf1.com

What is the backup they are talking about? from what i understand it is not the fuel rail.

1. The lack of any kind of calibration for the backup system is the fundamental problem with RB's claim. Anyone who's actually done on-road fuel economy testing knows this is required to determine an absolute accuracy. RB's after-the-fact calibration was a dumbed-down bench test of some kind.

2. I keep hearing more about internal team measurements from the "fuel rail". I don't know if they are referring to a virtual sensor or an actual sensor. If an actual sensor then what is this thing and how does it work? Please don't tell me the "fuel rail" measurement simply refers to the injectors that are calibrated on an indoor static measurement device away from a running engine. Once a component like an injector is put in a running engine with large amounts of heat, vibration, and electro-magnetic interference, then the component may behave slightly differently. I think this was the fundamental lesson from RB's and Renault's pre-season testing.

The only way to positively demonstrate the accuracy of an in-vehicle on-road fuel measurement system is to test it and calibrate it, um, in-vehicle and on-road. Notice the need for this type of representative test and calibration applies regardless of whether you are calibrating a single sensor or a complicated virtual sensor that depends on a fuel model and lots of indirect sensors.

Everyone in F1 (including the FIA) has apparently put their full faith and credit in dumbed-down bench testing. In this situation nobody has a really accurate understanding of absolute mass flow in the car, and all you can hope for is relative consistency between mass flow in the various cars. This is what the standardized FIA FFM achieves, regardless of its absolute accuracy. The team fuel rails and fuel models are no better, and it's quite weird to hear high-level managers talk with certainty about how they know the "real" fuel mass flow in their car based on bench-testing their fuel rail. True believers to the core.

[flyboy2160]

I just disapproved a post from someone who repeated the entire long post by WilliamsF1. Please don't unnecessarily repeat a whole long previous post or string of pictures just to make a comment about some part of it. These long repetitions just make reading harder to follow and waste server space. Ellipses are your friends..............Thanks.

[jz11]

bill, I'm amazed how you just put down people who work in that teams and portrayed them as completely incompetent bunch

How do you think they - teams, get to the 100kg/h limit in the first place? with dumbed down bench tests? or, perhaps, they worked with the engine manufacturer with the engine on dyno and had the fuel tank on a precision scale in the next room, ran the engine through the track sims and then adjusted maps accordingly to get to the flow limit as close as their instruments allow them? <- this is simplest way I can come up within couple minutes of thinking about the problem of how it could be done to very high accuracy.

You can then, with those measurements, create a mathematical model for the flow, where you correlate your scale/chronometer readings to your injection maps and calculate fuel flow for any fuel map of your choice if you would want to.

How do you think the Gill sensor has its calibration done in the first place (and in the second, in case of that 3rd party that does the calibration for FIA)?!? Do you think they only rely on math and physics behind ultrasonic flow measurement? Or they did those very same bench tests to match the flow meter reading to the fuel rail actual flow measured by the method I explained above? Notice how I use "the" not "a", because the nature of the flow is inherently "noisy", which is dependent on all sorts of factors, low/high pressure pumps, volume of the fluid inside the section of fuel supply system that the flow meter is fitted in (Ferrari had to change fuel pump(s) so the FFM would actually get any sort of reliable readout?)

How can you then go and say - team measurements are a load of bollocks (implying that they are nothing more than cheats), only the all mighty FFM, that has some sort of "calibration" done - is, do you not see how that creates uneven playing field for the teams who, I'm 10000000% sure of, have done the homework of getting fuel flows right for their particular fuel supply system, because it plays a HUGE role in terms of lap speed.

The whole idea of using quite expensive fuel meter instead of the simplest restrictor and then use the sensor as a precision instrument is just dumb, I don't care if it homologated and who has done the calibration - it will not read the same flow for all different applications in each car around the pit lane, problems were described in detail both in this topic and the gill sensor one.

Watch this video and imagine FIA being the client and Gill sensor the expert - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg , and don't tell me that (in F1 case alone) 10 teams each forced into purchasing 10+ sensors at a price tag of 4500GBP a piece is not a good business from Gill sensors management point of view, because the application simply doesn't suit the technology! It is great for steady laminar flows (and accuracy will be as stated in the sensor data sheet) for sure, but not for a pulsating/reverberating flow, where its "precision" reading can determine the outcome of multimillion race weekend.

and backup system may very well be volumetric ultrasonic sensor fitted in the fuel tank to measure fuel levels in the tank, which will not be nearly as accurate as flow sensor in the line, but can still give some estimate of the fuel consumed by the engine, that is, of course, if they distrust the fuel temperature and pressure sensors on the car, and fuel maps that they have access to

[beelsebob]

bill, I'm amazed how you just put down people who work in that teams and portrayed them as completely incompetent bunch

No one is claiming they're incompetent. They're claiming that they have a conflict of interest. And are smart enough to get the numbers to say what they want them to.

[jz11]

in other words - you simply call them cheats, based on a dodgy reading of a sensor that isn't suited for the task at hand?

[beelsebob]

in other words - you simply call them cheats, based on a dodgy reading of a sensor that isn't suited for the task at hand?

Correct. And that's what the FIA called them too. Hence the disqualification.