bigblue wrote: ↑27 Oct 2017, 20:57
I'm very understanding of the size of the task Honda have set themselves, but I genuinely don't understand this one, surely the assembled engine had a check on the dyno ?
Honda didn't test a fully built v6. they tested an individual chamber, and the results they saw in that were beyond positive. one might ask; why test only 1 chamber, essentially thus, a 1 cylinder engine. well for one, it's cheaper and faster and easier to build, and beyond that i dont really know. They had computer simulation data and the simulation data was similar from computer to real world data in the form of a 1-cylinder engine. The computer simulation for a full V6 gave a very hopeful image, and because they based their findings on the computer to real world comparison that it should be the same for a full v6, they went ahead and built the thing, instead of actually making a full test rig with 6 cylinders. that is in all fairness a gamble. a well educated gamble, but still a gamble, and when you gamble, you can win, and you can lose.
unfortunately, they lost because in the real world, there was a unforeseen consequence going from 1 cyl to 6 cyl and that was the vibration issue, which was either completely unnoticed, underestimated or simply wrongly read/not present in the virtual/computer simulated v6 - but then did appear in real life. that was the 'death' blow for this years engine. That vibration issue came from a variety of causes but the oil tank was one, and the fact the testing rig was much more rigid/stable than an actual f1 car, which caused massive vibration damage. When vibrations hit a certain frequency, it can be -instant- destructive for the material it influences. which is essentailly what happened.
you could thus say that Honda made a - huge - judgement error. And i think personally, that this started when they decided to step away from the previous engine design that was in 2015 and 2016's Mclarens. They had to get their resources to make the best out of a new engine, and surely were looking to 'cut corners' to spoon in the 2017 spec engine in 2017 [probably from immense mclaren pressure] instead of, possibly, mid-2017. Somebody, or multiple people, ran possibility calculations and went this route of 'development' - the one where they test a single cylinder on a computer, see if they can use that as a v6 in the computer, and then test that 1 cylinder concept in a real life rig, and when the real life data is as promising as the digital computer version, then go for the full v6 one. it's also been said that they didn't opt for testing the engine in a 'mule' before preseason testing. That also can be defended in the sense that would they have decided to do that, that would have cost time. time honda thus thought was better spend on developing the engine and relying on the data they had.
in the end, unfortunately, that was a judgement error, and from that initial judgement error, a multitude of issues arose, and that's how it went down. or i have completely misread all the news articles and the unreadable amount of posts in the honda engine thread, and i understand it wrong, but i believe i understand it just right.
the big question mark is though; is the engine still hopeful and is it essentially a strong potent engine, or is this 2nd type of engine essentially a complete failure due to the design mistake and does that mean that this engine never can be good either? it remains a question untill next season.
