A place to discuss the characteristics of the cars in Formula One, both current as well as historical. Laptimes, driver worshipping and team chatter do not belong here.
Road cars spend very little time at full power, many never get near it.
Depends on the market segment I guess. I imagine the likes of a Focus RS or Mustang GT350 are much more likely to spend significant amounts of time at full throttle, particularly when they are taken to a circuit day?
We are thankful you do that testing & fit road cars with shift lights etc, so owners can drive their road cars at full throttle to the redline with full confidence of durability.
Road cars spend very little time at full power, many never get near it.
Depends on the market segment I guess. I imagine the likes of a Focus RS or Mustang GT350 are much more likely to spend significant amounts of time at full throttle, particularly when they are taken to a circuit day?
We are thankful you do that testing & fit road cars with shift lights etc, so owners can drive their road cars at full throttle to the redline with full confidence of durability.
Thank you for the music
If you take a high performance car too the track, the milage you get out of them is much lower then a F1 engine (at the moment).
to compare, at motorbikes, the S1000RR Race, with more or less the road engine with minor tweaking, has a life of 5000 km. The road bike can take 150.000km without much trouble.
Small city cars with tiny engines get stressed much more then big powerful steetlegal racers.
The development costs of a, lets say, 600cc city twin cylinder mass produced engine is also a lot higher then either a F1 engine or a hypercar powerplant. The R&D costs per unit are just a lot lower.
Having worked on both race and production engine design I would not be surprised at all if overall development costs were similar.
The main difference is that large automotive companies tend to do comparatively very little work in-house and instead rely heavily on outsourcing which is very cost inefficient, while motorsport engine manufacturers do the bulk of the work in-house but spend relatively more on facilities and "throwing prototypes at the dyno".
Generally the design philosophy for a production engine is to take your time and get it right the first time. For a race engine you want to get it in the dyno as fast as possible and then work on fixing it.
But, to return to the original question, why are F1 engines more complex then their road going counterparts:
F1 engines get around 1000HP out of a 1.6 turbo hybrid with very limited fuel. The last 20 HP are the expensive ones and are the ones that will win races.
For a road car, there are less rules. If you want more power, you can just increase boost pressure, make the engine larger and inject more fuel. There isn't a race for those last few HP. For a 1000 hp car, they now use something like a 4.0 twin turbo with three electric engines and drown the beast in petrol, probably around 200l/h instead of the 100l/h of a F1 engine.
You can see a bit of complexity in homologation models, but they are becoming rare with changing motorsport rules. The old Group B was a good example of this (with the Ferrari GTO, Porsche 959, Peugeot 205 16v Turbo, Ford RS2000, etc.
In short, F1 is a competition. What ever the rules are, that last 1% of laptime is expensive. Doesn't matter if its a V8, a V12 or a V6 hybrid. More speed will always mean more money and more complexity. A F1 engine is as expensive as the manufactures want to invest.
Every car manufacturer I have worked at had dozens of dynos for engine development, even Lotus (maybe not a dozen).
Most do because calibration and durability are still done in-house.
But how many of them still had sub-system development rigs (valvetrain, pumps, oil and coolant, etc), fatigue rigs, metallurgy labs, machine shops capable of making most of the development parts and the quality inspection capability they would require? Or a design office capable of clean sheet engine design ?
For design.. Countless hours in CAD, and test benches.. Many protoypes.. Most street cars have engine families spaning different market segment that are themselves evolutions from the past. And micro improvements are usually not rigorously tested. BMW is notorious for this.
For manufacturing.. Tolerances are extremely tight. street car engines do come close in tolerance these days though. But the big one is surface finish. Racencar engines have crazy detail in functional surfaces. That is paid for in machining hours. Materials is the other one. More expensive materials used throughout. Fittings are also more expensive. Parts are small batches.
F1 engines also come with a team of engineers and service.
Oil analysis is relentless. All parts scanned and archived.
