godlameroso wrote:I've thought about this often, it bugs me to no end. With all the sensors in the car they must have quite a few components on the ragged edge. Afterall you only need to monitor things if their failure can be catastrophic. Most cars don't give you oil pressure for instance, they give you a dummy light. Or they don't give you a measure of fuel pressure, etc etc because none of those things matter in daily use. If you track your car you will usually invest in more gauges, but these cars are on another plane of existence. Pressure sensors, temperature sensors, flow sensors, fuel temperature sensors etc etc. There's a lot that can go wrong hence the need to micromanage all these different variables. Probably would drive you dizzy trying to monitor it all by yourself.
Just because there's not a gauge for it on the dashboard of a road car, doesn't mean it's not being measured and adjusted for.
Invest a few bucks in an OBD-II reader and get an app like torque talking to it, and you'll see more of the things that are sensed on road car engines: MAF pressure, real temperatures, etc.
In the F1 world, the telemetry is far more in-depth and you don't "only need to monitor things if their failure can be catastrophic". Sure, these exist, but there are innumerable other things you would monitor for performance rather than reliability. You'd measure pressures on the chassis for aero as well as for engine parameters.
As an example - you would have several oil temperature sensors and oil pressure sensors, and oil level sensors (each for different locations on the engine/turbo/cooler). You would probably* want as little weight in the engine as possible with the smallest amount of friction, so you'd want the smallest amount of the lowest friction stuff you could get away with at the end of an engine cycle. For that you don't just have alert-style events (engine oil under pressure limit), you also have monitoring, tracking type information (eg. start of race, 3.5kg of oil, end of race 2.9kg of oil).
*probably. You might have a remote oil tank to move oil around as ballast because you have oil pumps, reservoirs etc.
I'd agree that it would be totally against the spirit of the rules while being entirely legal within the text of them.
More data is never a bad thing. At worst all you need to do is ignore the values you aren't interested in. At best, it can be used to drive development directions and win races.
I'm actually on holiday right now until the 4th. After logging 280 hours from the 2nd until the 23rd, I needed a break. This forum is a form of mental therapy for me.
