Formula 1 Losing Weight

[mrluke]

Well to be picky, the chassis is a very minor cost of an actual f1 car. These new power units cost like 14 million I was hearing for mercedes engines. Entire body of the car isn't even 1 million...

http://www.tsmplug.com/f1/average-cost- ... ula-1-car/

This isn't a like for like comparison at all.

The actual production cost of the body may be 1 million but how much is the R&D cost? The numerous protoypes? The wind tunnel time?

The PU costs are not just for building the actual PU, its the R&D and ongoing management of the units that ups the cost.

[godlameroso]

If you didn't already have the facilities for it(like Renault, Ferrari, Mercedes, or Honda), you would have to invest just shy of a billion U.S.D. in engine block manufacturing alone. Forges, sand molds, metallurgy, mills, lathes, and other misc tooling is just part of the cost, then there's the design process, and the multiple iterations involved. Dyno testing, even the fasteners themselves have to be designed often times through trial and error. Then there's the combustion chambers, valve train, pneumatics, gearing, crankshafts, that all require separate facilities to design and manufacture, and we haven't even touched the hybrid stuff. Luckily most of the ES itself is outsourced, along with some turbo components, but the MGU-K and MGU-H have to be developed from scratch. Also all the cooling has to be manufactured, this is not as labor intensive however as creating better MGU's

[Vortex347]

This isn't a like for like comparison at all.

The actual production cost of the body may be 1 million but how much is the R&D cost? The numerous protoypes? The wind tunnel time?

The PU costs are not just for building the actual PU, its the R&D and ongoing management of the units that ups the cost.

This goes both ways. How many engines do you think they test before they even put them in the car. Like i said, the engine is worth 15 times as much as the body to build so even if it was an r&D phase for crash tests of bodies and what not, they'd still have to do at least a lot of body prototypes. Just how many engines do you think they test in the R&D phase? It certainly isn't one.

They might test the equivalent of probably 30,40 chassis's at an extreme, that's not even the equivalent cost of 3 engines.

Engine Dyno time would effectively cancel out chassis (body) wind tunnel time fairly easily I would think (especially in terms of expenses: after dynoing and running the engines they would conduct crack testing and what not).

If you didn't already have the facilities for it(like Renault, Ferrari, Mercedes, or Honda), you would have to invest just shy of a billion U.S.D. in engine block manufacturing alone. Forges, sand molds, metallurgy, mills, lathes, and other misc tooling is just part of the cost, then there's the design process, and the multiple iterations involved. Dyno testing, even the fasteners themselves have to be designed often times through trial and error. Then there's the combustion chambers, valve train, pneumatics, gearing, crankshafts, that all require separate facilities to design and manufacture, and we haven't even touched the hybrid stuff. Luckily most of the ES itself is outsourced, along with some turbo components, but the MGU-K and MGU-H have to be developed from scratch. Also all the cooling has to be manufactured, this is not as labor intensive however as creating better MGU's

Exactly, I completely agree with you. What do you need to build and test a car body...not much especially since I'm pretty sure their bodies are hand made from carbon fiber. So you might need a few ovens and a wind tunnel (definitely not a billion dollars worth... maybe 50 mil) as well as few perfecting tools. I don't think the aluminium honeycomb in between the carbon fiber is made in house (designed in house but manufactured elsewhere...I think).

[mrluke]

This isn't a like for like comparison at all.

The actual production cost of the body may be 1 million but how much is the R&D cost? The numerous protoypes? The wind tunnel time?

The PU costs are not just for building the actual PU, its the R&D and ongoing management of the units that ups the cost.

This goes both ways. How many engines do you think they test before they even put them in the car. Like i said, the engine is worth 15 times as much as the body to build so even if it was an r&D phase for crash tests of bodies and what not, they'd still have to do at least a lot of body prototypes. Just how many engines do you think they test in the R&D phase? It certainly isn't one.

They might test the equivalent of probably 30,40 chassis's at an extreme, that's not even the equivalent cost of 3 engines.

Engine Dyno time would effectively cancel out chassis (body) wind tunnel time fairly easily I would think (especially in terms of expenses: after dynoing and running the engines they would conduct crack testing and what not).

If you didn't already have the facilities for it(like Renault, Ferrari, Mercedes, or Honda), you would have to invest just shy of a billion U.S.D. in engine block manufacturing alone. Forges, sand molds, metallurgy, mills, lathes, and other misc tooling is just part of the cost, then there's the design process, and the multiple iterations involved. Dyno testing, even the fasteners themselves have to be designed often times through trial and error. Then there's the combustion chambers, valve train, pneumatics, gearing, crankshafts, that all require separate facilities to design and manufacture, and we haven't even touched the hybrid stuff. Luckily most of the ES itself is outsourced, along with some turbo components, but the MGU-K and MGU-H have to be developed from scratch. Also all the cooling has to be manufactured, this is not as labor intensive however as creating better MGU's

Exactly, I completely agree with you. What do you need to build and test a car body...not much especially since I'm pretty sure their bodies are hand made from carbon fiber. So you might need a few ovens and a wind tunnel (definitely not a billion dollars worth... maybe 50 mil) as well as few perfecting tools. I don't think the aluminium honeycomb in between the carbon fiber is made in house (designed in house but manufactured elsewhere...I think).

My point is that the PUs dont cost £15m to build. They are leased to the teams for £15m and that will also include the ongoing support, mapping, testing, development and will offset the initial R&D costs incurred by the manufacturer as well as retooling etc etc etc.

Your comparison is not like for like.

What do you need to build a test car, some carbon and a mould.

What do you need to design the shape of the car? Oh about 500 staff, CFD, wind tunnel, track testing, safety testing etc etc. Its not £1m.

Or we could come at this the other way, the PU has x kg of aluminium, x kg of titanium etc. the cost is probably £500k per unit.

Each team has 4 PUs per season per car, plus 1 for testing (say) so thats 10 PUs per team, the widely reported costs are £15-£20m for a PU deal so immediately that brings the cost per power unit down to £1.5m-£2.0m. Then you have all the other considerations I outlined above to take into account..

[ringo]

You can further cut costs by outsourcing. A billion dollars doesn't sound realistic.

[godlameroso]

You can further cut costs by outsourcing. A billion dollars doesn't sound realistic.

It does if you plan to do all the manufacturing yourself. Even ultra exclusive and expensive road cars like the Konigsegg 1:one where no expense is spared still have to outsource the engine block. Of course it's reworked but they themselves do not cast the engine blocks, neither does McLaren road cars. The actual block is cast by Cosworth, the facilities needed to manufacture engine blocks requires substantial investment, that is why new engine block architectures are either joint ventures, or made to accommodate a wide variety of models in order to partly recoup the cost.