I'll take the bait
WhiteBlue - I would love to buy you a beer and we could talk F1 so please don't take offence if I seem to get annoyed!
WhiteBlue wrote:I voted against output regulation - We do not need it. It is self levelling up to a point. The manufacturers are primarily engine manufacturers that decided they wanted to be involved in chassis making (and apart from Ferrari, doing it badly)
If we go 20 years back in time to the 3.5L engines we see a constant struggle to gain performance by getting more and more power out of the engine. At the same time we witness regular cut backs in power by going to 3L in 1995, to 2.4L in 1996 2006 and by cutting revs from over 20.000 back to 19.000 in 1997. 2007 Now the talk of the FOTA is about a 1.8L engine for 2011
If we go back 25 years back in time we get fuel regulated Turbo cars that were allowed to carry 220l and produced up to 1200bhp in qually and a decent 800+ if they could manage the fuel for a race. The cars were so much slower than today and they could almost double the power
The whole of the R&D effort to raise power is negated in regular intervalls in order to maintain an acceptable level of track and car safety. Those power cuts are as unavoidable as spring follows winter while the earth rotates around the sun. By now everybody ought to have learned that lesson.
it is not the power that causes issues with on track safety - it is the cornering speeds generated by cars that have to rely on handling rather than power for a laptime. Look at the change in motgp from 990cc to 800 - the bikes are faster but they are vicious buggers and the riders have to go round corners so much faster and as a result are seen to be more dangerous than the relatively tame 990 bikes
What is that vicious circle doing to the cost of competing and the spread of competitiveness over the teams? Every cut back and new start ties up huge capital resources at the manufacturers of drive trains. At the same time it opens a gap between the performance of rich teams and poorer teams. This is because the rich teams can afford to start from scratch and redo every single component of the chassis and optimize it to the new weight distribution and aerodynamics that necessarily come with the power discontinuities.
This difference in budget has come about due to the engine manufacturers being able to come into the sport as a constructor and so being able to use the financial clout of the rest of their business to bankroll the F1 effort. Perhaps we need to encourage a distinction between chassis and engine manufacturers and the flow of money from outside that core business into the f1 teams. Ferrari used to survive on their car sales , just about, and I am sure that the only reason your friends Williams are still in business was due to prudent accounting and the realisation they did not want to spend beyond their means even if it meant they would slide down the grid..which they have.
If this is not bad enough you also have secondary effects during the intervalls of constant engine capacity. Because everybody knows how bad a power cut is they tried to delay it as long as possible. During the longest intervall (1995-2006) the performance and particularly the cornering speed increased at such a steep rate that massive safety requirements were forced on track owners and chassis contructors to avoid a fatalities. Run offs were increased, grand stands removed from the tracks, barriers upgraded and gravel pits turned into huge asphalt areas. The passive safety requirements for front, side and rear impact were jacked up in several steps, HANS was made mandatory, high cockpit walls introduced and wide cockpit templates all in an attempt to cope with ever increasing cornering speeds.
If you look at the cars from 10 years ago you will se that GP2 cars are no as fast...or bloody close. You cannot undo technology. The safety improvements should have been made - HANS was introduced after Dale Earnhardt's death and perhaps better cockpit access etc would have come from other series. Money spent on safety developments is good money - why would you have a problem with that?
While I write this up it looks pretty mad to me that nobody spotted the nonsense in this. There is no sensible strategy in the sport. This is what lemmings do. They continue their behavioral pattern right into the abyss. So why is it so hard to understand that F1 needs a fixed level of power to do much better in the future? The main ingredient of motorsport is the competitive gain of performance in order to win. Sure, you can do that by ever increasing power and energy budget until safety forces a cut. But why not keep the power fixed by regulations and let the performance develop by increasing efficiency?
The sport is not sensible - you could never get it started from scratch as nobody would pay for it and people would laugh in your face.. However, it is here, it has a superb history of innovation, engineering excellence and brave drivers who risk their lives to prove they are the best. Fixing power would take the heart out of the sport. The quest for power and efficiency go hand in hand - you do not get one without the other. If you want to increase fuel economy (I know your native language is not English and so we might have slightly different ideas as to what you mean when you say efficiency - Do you mean fuel efficiency?) then you need to manadate a fuel limit - this has been done before and worked as a power cap. I have no problem with that as long as they could strive to improve power and keep the same efficiency.
It may not have been possible in the past because they did not have the sensors to effectively control the power of an engine. For some years such instrumentation isn't a fundamental problem any more. So by fixing the available power at least the secondary knock on effects of the performance race to chassis designers and track owners could be avoided.
Fixing the power would also have a beneficiary effect for the power train manufacturers. If the total power of the engine plus the regenerated power from KERS and HERS is kept constant, every performance gain must come from efficiency improvements. This is what they desperately need to find for their core business in this day and age.
Because power is fixed there would be a continous downgrading of ICE power and fuel consumption. This would require a constant efficiency development of the combustion engine, the KERS and HERS. Whith long life engines and non manufacturer teams pooling their development contributions to an independant power train supplier the manufacturing teams could be given much more design freedom to innovate. There would be constant change without big readjusting steps that shake up the competition landscape.
In my view such a system could be much simpler in terms of regulations and control. The benefits to all stake holders of GP racing could be massive. And this brings me back to my question from the top. Why are the knowedgeable people of this board not seeing the opportunities of such a strategy? I still do not understand it!
Your post is a good one - but you are getting hung up on the power cap - it is a bad idea and flies in the face of f1.
