F1's problem is that it is a technological marvel that is simultaneously obsolete. Like the XB-71 Valkyrie project of the US AirForce, the technology powering modern F1 hybrid power trains is just outstandingly brilliant. However, just like the XB-71 was made obsolete by the advent of ICBMs, the hybrid power train's future for road cars has been overtaken by the advent of Tesla and battery electric vehicles. The metaphorical comparison with XB-70 ends when performance is concerned. F1 hybrids are still far superior to pure battery electric vehicles. So F1 is essentially stuck in the upper-left corner of the price-performance envelope. They are too good to move to pure electric, but their tech is obsolete for road cars. In a few years battery electric vehicles will get to the performance levels of current F1 hybrids, but by that time the mantle of the pinnacle of auto-racing will have been taken by FormulaE. Not a good place for F1 to be. In effect Tesla killed F1.
Tesla killing F1 is a conclusion too far. The success of electric vehicles makes the calculus less good, but it's just another term in the equation for a company doing business in F1. Honda are still in other ICE motorsports.
I think it's worth pointing out that Honda staying this long was a surprise in itself because, to be blunt, they were absolutely awful in their first years and no better than their rivals now.
Also, the issue for a battery powered racing series isn't really efficiency at the moment but actually just being able to actually do the race distance at an acceptable speed. If they could make Formula E cars go fast enough they'd have already switched, or at least put pen to paper.
I've been watching F1 since the 70's and I still love every minute of it today.
Honda pulling out is completely understandable, and I think F1 should sit up and listen. The dynamic simply won't work with three engine manufacturer teams and the rest being customer teams - especially when Red Bull is a customer team.
It might be radical, but I'd prefer to see F1 return to a simpler naturally aspirated V10 ICE only power unit, perhaps with a completely separate (and simplified) system for brake energy harvesting and short-term energy deployment (exiting corners).
We have formula-e let's make F1 more accessible to niche manufacturers.
Engines is the least of concerns. Mercedes win, not because they also produce the engine, but because they pour nearly half a billion euros into the car, with engines being a vanishingly small amount of that. They have a car with superior aerodynamics and mechanical grip. Making the engine standardized will not change that.
> Mercedes win, not because they also produce the engine, but because they pour nearly half a billion euros into the car
It takes more than just throwing money at the problem to win. Otherwise, Red Bull (paying for two teams in full) and Ferrari would be doing a lot better right now.
According to this source[0], for 2019, Mercedes spent $484MM, Ferrari $463MM, Red Bull $445MM, Red Bull 2 (aka Toro Rosso) $138M.
Ferrari's last driver's championship win was 2007, and last constructors championship win was 2008. If simply outspending their competitors by 5% would make all the difference, I think they would have tried it by now (and infact, if you look at previous years, they have, and failed)
Mercedes get prize money and sponsor money. On top of that they get revenue from supplying engines to other teams.
The team might spent untold hundreds of millions (of money they have earned) but the parent Mercedes company spend thirty million a year.
For Mercedes this is excellent value for money, equivalent to a billion or so in paid advertising time on television.
Contrast this situation with teams at the back of the grid: no revenue from supplying engines, expenses for getting engines, poor sponsorship money, no income from a parent manufacturer. Oh, and little in the way of prize money. They do get some sponsorship money from their drivers though, either because they are in a Mercedes/Ferrari/Red Bull 'academy' or because the pay driver comes with sponsorship from his wealthy father or country.
That is simply not true. Mercedes had a huge head start in 2014 by starting the V6-hybrid engine development from 2012, while their competitors (Red Bull and Ferrari) were busy fighting for the championship with V8 engine in 2012 and 2013.
If you mean their first years of a hybrid engine era, then yes, they were pretty awful. But their early years in the 80s as an engine supplier were very very succesful.
Shouldn't F1 cars be about finding the peak of a X engineering problem. For electiric's it's not as much about speed but battery. Maybe having hyper-miler distance races that aren't speed oriented is the sort of pivot F1 should be doing? I know it's not sexy like a fast car moving nimbly among the pack but if car companies can get their tech focused on getting the most distance from a battery then there's the cross over development that can flow to the mainstream.
I watch Formula 1 and Formula E and in some ways Formula E is better racing. It's more accessible, the cars are all a lot closer in performance and nobody seems to run away with the points.
The problem? The lack of straight line speed means you have to build smaller tracks and a lot of the drama of Formula 1 is missing. You don't feel like you're watching the fastest cars in the world and it feels like a major compromise. If you put those cars on a track built for current Formula 1 cars it's going to be a complete snooze-fest.
What makes racing so attractive to fans is the perception (hopefully not that reality) that these drivers are defying death and/or major injury in pursuit of victory. Even if they're relatively safe, the speed itself triggers the lizard brain inside all of us that keeps most of us from attempting to travel at 200+ MPH.
> Shouldn't F1 cars be about finding the peak of a X engineering problem. For electiric's it's not as much about speed but battery. Maybe having hyper-miler distance races that aren't speed oriented is the sort of pivot F1 should be doing? I know it's not sexy like a fast car moving nimbly among the pack but if car companies can get their tech focused on getting the most distance from a battery then there's the cross over development that can flow to the mainstream. But I know, watching a slow race is a big ask.
I don't think anyone wants to watch a slow race. Hyper-miler distance races sounds like an oxymoron as hypermiling usually involves ridiculous theatrics of going 30-40mph on the freeway to maximize efficiency. It wouldn't even be racing in the traditional sense - it would be akin to a time trial but distance based. There'd be almost no need to overtake, would there?
I'm not a big fan of F1 as it stands (it's rather uneventful at times) but using EVs in this way would kill it completely as far as I can tell.
Plenty of people watch the tour de france, which is basically low powered slow racing. The strategy involved in exploiting aerodynamic gains in the pack is kind of fascinating. Trying to sell it as the same thing is kind of dumb though.
What about full electric F1 cars, but where they switch out batteries four times during the race during pit stops. High speed racing without the need to carry a heavy battery pack.
Switching out batteries in Formula E has been problematic up until this point from a technological point of view, so much so that in Formula E they simply have 2 cars and when the drivers pit they hop out of the first car and into the second car. Batteries are extremely heavy and need to be protected so that in the event of an accident they don't explode or kill the driver. Thus far the battery has been more or less part of the chassis. Its not clear that battery technology is advanced enough to provide the energy density required to propel the cars at racing speeds while also being portable enough to be swapped out mid-race.
The cars are so fast and powerful that they have these boost rules that the drivers can use up like nitro in a video game. If F1 went all electric, slowed down a little, and got rid of this boost stuff I think it would be far more entertaining and easier to follow the action, like it used to be.
The only reason overtaking currently happens is because of ERS (this "boost stuff") as well as the relatively large benefit from the Drag Reduction System in high speed sections, so I have to disagree. It would be even more boring than it's already become with Mercedes domination.
Sure, but current Formula E cars are around F3 speed, which is two steps below F1 cars. Formula E even had to avoid racing on the full Monaco layout to avoid headlines comparing (and ridiculing them) for being slow.
Maybe they could get away with slightly slower. They already have a bit of a problem where the aerodynamics have gotten so good that a lot of the tracks have corners that are just taken flat out now. Lap records are still being broken with the lower powered hybrid engines.
F1 technology is a lot more than just power-trains, I wish people would understand that better.
Fuel chemistry, aerodynamics, functional simulation, driver ergonomics, safety dynamics, tire chemistry, metallurgy, analytics, data recording, composites, suspension, real-time telemetry and communication, digital systems management.. the list goes on forever.
If the device/technique/procedure wasn't invented by F1, it was made better by it, and tons of it have trickled down to consumer products in the past 70+ years.
Anybody in tech, and especially information technology, should be able to find something fascinating in F1. Winning an F1 race requires a huge amount of data processing, both for the operation of the race car itself, as well as for the simulations of race strategy in realtime.
The teams bring enormous amounts of equipment to each race. Obviously a lot of that equipment is wrenches, screwdrivers, and related machinery. But every team is bringing essentially a portable datacenter to each race:
The car has around 300 sensors and the SECU monitors over 4,000 parameters. During the course of a typical race the car will transmit around 3 GB of telemetry data as well as around 4 GB of logging, however this is just the seed for computation. When processed and combined with other sources such as audio and video analysis it can mean a team leaves a typical race weekend with over a terabyte of valuable data — data that is drawn on again and again before and during future events and seasons.
-- https://www.eetimes.com/the-importance-of-electronics-in-for...
While not F1, I did get to check out the garage of a Nascar team and was blown away by the technology and engineering. The car has a ton of sensors recording all kinds of data, and they have a rig that can use that data to essentially put the car into the physical condition at any millisecond of a previous race, i.e. wheel and tire position, precise suspension loads, etc.. so they can physically examine the car/tires/etc.. at any moment in reply of the whole race. Extremely cool stuff!
Try Adrian Newey's ghost written memoir "How to Build a Car". It's not a deep dive into technological tidbits, but has got some interesting details about the technology and the development of his cars.
To those not familiar, Adrian Newey, currently at Red Bull Racing, is the most successful race car designer by almost any metric. His first championship winning cars were designed in the 1980s (for American racing series), and he's built championship winning cars for Williams, McLaren and Red Bull.
How did you digest that book? I admire the heck out of his accomplishments but he seems like maybe not such a great person. Not sure he’d be an interesting dinner guest. All the anti-social stuff of a top sportsman but in a position where he simply doesn’t age out of it and have to be a normal person. Not a bad guy, per se, but not someone who’s life you want your to emulate.
Very interesting read, especially about the dynamics. Winning teams have a focus, they don’t run well by committees (look at Ferrari) the difference between a championship and average season is often in the margins and the spaces between the “rules.”
A lot of it is proprietary and kept secret from other teams. Diagnostic monitors and even the back of the steering wheel are censored in official media. Chain Bear F1 is a YouTube channel that produces good summaries from public information.
and not only that, but they do impose limits on how much they can use at each stage. I know for example that the computing power for the algorithms that generate the best shape for the best air flow are all equal among teams.
> You could stick a commodity pushrod V8 in there and make 1000hp easy with a bolt on turbo and run the same laptimes.
Here's the issue: the engine manufacturers are also one of the most important financial sponsors of the sport. You'd need to convince Mercedes, Ferrari and Renault to build obsolete engines and put down a big bag of money.
And besides, you won't be able to fit a big V8 engine under the bodywork of a current-gen F1 car with the narrow coke bottle shape at the rear.
The engines are also pretty damn impressive, running at 50%+ thermal efficiency. Ye olde pushrod V8 would run out of fuel at half race distance with current fuel regulations.
A bit more than that, but LS motors are light for their power. Full street dress is about 210kg. I’m sure you could shed quite a bit of that right a way (you don’t need things like power steering or an alternator.)
In your mind, how many years is a few years? I watch Formula E, but it's hard to imagine it becoming the pinnacle of motorsport anytime soon.
Formula E's definitely made progress: e.g. they no longer have to run two separate cars just to finish the race, and they are decently quick. But they're still pretty far away in other aspects: 45 minute race, on temporary circuits purposefully designed with many tight turns to allow for braking regen. Battery technology has to improve quite a bit if you want to see electric cars turning laps at Spa at standard race distances.
Formula E has also made the conscious decision not to pursue open chassis and aero regulations - good for keeping the costs down, but it makes it harder to take it seriously as a potential future 'pinnacle' series.
That being said, the attraction to manufacturers coming into FE is large and it'll only take a few more generations before I'm sure there'll be differentiation in some parts.
I'm bullish on FE, especially when they can run on "proper" circuits at a consistently decent pace (that being said, smaller city-centre tracks might very well be the future of the sport in any case).
Not really. Electric vehicles are absolute junk for racing still, hence the underwhelming nature of Formula E. Battery based vehicles are insanely heavy and lack the ability to corner. That's not going to change anytime soon.
You're not likely to see an electric WRC car either.
Real racing isn't going fast in a straight line. It's decided in the turns.
> The metaphorical comparison with XB-70 ends when performance is concerned. F1 hybrids are still far superior to pure battery electric vehicles. So F1 is essentially stuck in the upper-left corner of the price-performance envelope. They are too good to move to pure electric, but their tech is obsolete for road cars.
I think there problem is that it's just boring to watch because they are so fast - it is extremely hard to pass without hacks like DRS, which makes F1 races really boring to watch. And I'm sure most fans would much rather switch back to the v10 engines even though they are more "obsolete", a conventional powertrain doesn't make them any more boring to watch (it actually makes them more exciting imo).
And if battery technology is ever good enough to last a full F1 race without adding tonnes of extra weight, I'm sure they will switch over to electric. Powertrain isn't the main focus of F1, teams are quite limited in what they can do there.
DRS is a hack that is necessary because of the current downforce-heavy aero designs of cars (which is why current F1 cars can still break lap records even though they are slower in many straights than their older siblings). Here’s hoping the 2022 technical regs remove the need for DRS, because it’s a hard-to-balance bandaid for the dirty air problem.
I attended an F1 race in the V10 era. And my god, the noise! It's like the sky was being torn to shreds. The sensory experience is/was definitely a huge part of being a live spectator. I've been to a few other kinds of races, and nothing ever really came close to that. Just the raw power/pure violence of those cars coming out of a turn with that ear splitting shriek is just phenomenal.
That being said, the booz fueled americana tailgate party weekend that is the indy 500 is pretty high up there in great times. But the actual racing was waaaaaay super less entertaining.
I once walked the footbridge over the hillclimb at Goodwood during the Festival of Speed as a V10 F1 car went underneath. Was something else entirely.
Seeing the musical demos the Renault team used to do was always interesting too - if you haven't heard an F1 car play God Save The Queen [0] it's a great watch (and a reminder about how controllable they are).
I think the midfield racing has actually gotten better this season. If they could just do something about Mercedes being so dominant the sport wouldn’t be in a bad place.
Any suggestions of racing series more interesting than F1? I tried to watch Blancpain, Super GT, IMSA, Le Mans - all of them seem to have almost non-existent level of overtaking (even worse than in F1 imho)
Try watching rallycross [0], it has lots of action. Depending on your location you can see parts of or all of the races live on YouTube. They have also started with an electric series, project E, that looks promising.
Second this. Not sure why people watch F1. MotoGP is infinitely better and in fact, it seems to just get better each passing year! The secret is that it's "90% rider" and "10% machine".
I really think "it's 90% rider and 10% machine" is a big exaggeration in MotoGP. Even Marquez is not going to win a race on a current generation Aprilia, and I'm not sure there is anyone other than Marquez who can win races on the current Honda.
edit: regardless, Dorna has done a great job making MotoGP competitive and MotoGP has to be at or very near the top of the list for the best racing on the planet.
I'm a big fan of rally racing. It's a fundamentally different model of motorsports -- driver vs. course instead of driver vs. driver -- so there is no overtaking at all, but the action is still far more exciting.
Formula E, Formula 2, and IndyCar have been producing better on-track racing than F1 pretty consistently — but they’re all spec series, and engine/chassis development is strictly limited.
Standard season of WEC tends to have more overtaking than Le Mans itself. For interest rather than overtaking, WRC is obviously well up there. And if you really want no-holds barred overtaking, anything on the BTCC schedule should be well up there (well, except F4 and oddly, the Porsche Carrera Cup) - Ginetta Juniors is a particular highlight.
The current V6 Turbo engines with advanced Energy Recovery Systems were introduced with two major ideas in mind; 1. It would make Formula 1 engines relevant for road cars. 2. It would attract new manufacturers to the sport.
1. Failed miserably; there is 0 road relevance for F1 engines.
2. Failed miserably; only Honda entered the sport and they are pulling the plug now. Juicy detail; they extended their IndyCar contract and IndyCar is switching to V6 Turbo Hybrid engines in a few years.... So the "carbon free tech" reason they gave to pull out of F1 isn't entirely true.
What F1 should do is one of two things;
1. Find a way to become road relevant again. I'd say the only way to do this is to skip Electric as Formula E is doing this already and go for hydrogen fuel.
2. Screw road relevance, and focus on entertainment. This means abandoning the insanely complex/expensive engines and go for simple, powerful, and most of all cheap engines.
There are almost fewer cars running on hydrogen on the road right now than there are F1 cars on the grid (only half joking), and while many mainstream manufacturers have made prototypes and concept cars even before they did anything pure electric, pretty much all of them have real full-electric products in their lineup, or at leat in the pipeline. There are some hydrogen pilot projects, sure, but I can't go to a dealer right now and order one. So going for hydrogen would be a really bad move, also because its energy density is inferior. The current ICE units in F1 are already at the upper-limit of possible efficiency, so replacing it with a fuel with a lower energy-density will be a step back in performance, with little or no future path to real improvements they don't have right now.
I'm an F1 fan, but I see that it is on a dead-end, one-way street. It'll take a while to reach the end, and as long as there's not a superior technology which can beat it on it's own grounds, it's not going away.
The "only" thing standing in the way of electric race-cars beating them is energy storage, which I expect to be improved at a break-neck speed in the coming years. FE has the advantage that this is the exact same problem affecting road-cars, which is why you see quite a few mainstream brands being attracted to it right now. But the energy density of oil-based fuels will be hard to beat, it will take a while before an FE car can beat an F1 car in every situation. But I'm excited for when this happens, since right now, FE fails to capture my interest for multiple reasons. There is no track-overview, all look pretty much the same to me, there are no iconic locations. Next year they'll finally be using the full Monaco circuit, which is a good start, and currently one of the very few viable F1 tracks for FE, but they have a long way to go.
1. Find a way to become road relevant again. I'd say the only way to do this is to skip Electric as Formula E is doing this already and go for hydrogen fuel.
F1 cars have more in common with jets than road cars and hydrogen is a dead end technology.
> 1. Failed miserably; there is 0 road relevance for F1 engines. 2. Failed miserably; only Honda entered the sport and they are pulling the plug now. Juicy detail; they extended their IndyCar contract and IndyCar is switching to V6 Turbo Hybrid engines in a few years.... So the "carbon free tech" reason they gave to pull out of F1 isn't entirely true.
Could be because Honda already has a V6 Turbo Hybrid but don't want to invest more money and resources to develop the next iteration of F1 engine?
Also yes. Their strategy to re-enter F1 was the classic playbook, start with an engine At the beginning of a new rules era, get some top customers to gather info and then create a works team eventually.
Well, that didn’t play out the way they hoped so either they commit to F1 spending billions ( I wouldn’t ) or get out.
Considering this is both a sport and one of the most heavily rule driven sports currently in existence, I’m really not sure the value you’re putting into the loopback consumer product cycle is really that high.
There’s far more to the sport than a grand R&D experiment (the value of just being “in it” within the grapevine of other top end machines, the marketing, the fun and prestige. Prestige is massive in F1). Especially considering how slow and incremental the new tech addition rules are added to the vehicles and how much the rules neuter the cars on purpose.
This is probably just down to the team/human capital not being super interested in investing the time and energy to play in the top league.
Honda still has a very large presence in the Indy series which arguably offers plenty of the more consumer oriented R&D bits in the short term.
Additionally the non committal F1E stuff makes the consumer R&D argument less persuasive.
> In a few years battery electric vehicles will get to the performance levels of current F1 hybrids, but by that time the mantle of the pinnacle of auto-racing will have been taken by FormulaE
I strongly doubt that Formula E will be a drop-in replacement for Formula 1. It's a completely different (and unfortunately so far very boring) replacement for Formula 1. If anything my guess is that once they figured out the battery problem so they can go on bigger courses, they will introduce electric vehicles in the Formula 1 and start phasing out Formula E.
These days the only thing more boring than formula 1 is formula e. It’s the political correct one, we all know what everyone is thinking but nobody tell :)
> If anything my guess is that once they figured out the battery problem so they can go on bigger courses, they will introduce electric vehicles in the Formula 1 and start phasing out Formula E.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe Formula E has an exclusive contract with the FIA to be the only series that uses fully electric vehicles until 2039. Formula 1 could only switch to electric vehicles with permission from Formula E, or through some kind of merger. If anything it seems more likely that Formula 1 is the one that gets phased out.
The largest problem is that it's incredibly easy to build a car faster than any human can reasonably control. This has lead to so many accidents and rule changes that F1 racing is a wholly artificial sport in terms of engineering.
It would be really interesting to see a version of F1 with self-driving AI, to see if that would allow them to exceed the design limits imposed by human drivers.
Unless someone managed to increase the energy density of battery tech by two orders of magnitude, I don't see pure EV reaching hybrid powertrain performance on most metrics (with obvious exceptions i.e. responsiveness).
The F1 crisis today is that F1 used to be three things rolled into one.
1. The sport. Fans, parties, passion, excitement for race results.
2. Advertising showcase of engineering prowess for companies selling cars or car-related parts.
3. A testing ground for future production car technology, send your best engineers to learn under the pressure of F1.
With commoditized electric cars taking over the road car market, this no longer works because the interests have diverged. By trying to continue to do all three, F1 is just imploding.
Personally I wish F1 would focus on #1 and let Formula E be the proving ground for street car tech.
F1 is entertainment, a show. The key is to make it exciting and interesting to watch.
I think whether the engines are ICE, hybrid, or electric is not key. More technology can actually make it more boring and the number of restrictions has increased through the years because of that.
They need more energy than even the new tesla batteries can provide.
If they needed anything, it's a change from pistons to turbines running a generator. This is also an area where those millions could actually translate into use in normal vehicles.
There is a paradox in that when F1 started becoming explicitly geared towards using more "clean technologies" F1 essentially stopped having any relevance to street cars. Or the environment.
Note that an FE car can't run a full F1 race, and the "ICBM" doesn't exist in the context of motorsports. Both racing series are much more likely to stay where they are given the circumstances. The most extreme outcome would be F1 switching to zero emissions in some way.
It's not Tesla's technological prowess that is killing F1. It's their marketing dominance that's reason for their effect on F1. They have dominated mindshare to the extent that governments are fully invested in building the infrastructure for electric vehicles, even in developing countries where hybrid tech would be a better idea.
Formula E has a 25 year-long exclusive license for single seaters on electric. That doesn't rule out the possibility of a merger happening at some point in the future.
Unless F1 and FE merge, F1 cannot become fully electric until the end of the exclusivity period. It's a gamble by F1 that the world (and more specifically, the teams and manufacturers involved) won't be ready for a full-electric pinnacle series by 2039 (i.e. speed and name recognition parity).
All F1 teams have signed the Concorde Agreement until 2025 - which means they're "committed" in one sense or another. I don't think FE will be in a position to attract Mercedes and Renault fully by 2025 (the two mass-market manufacturers who'll be most heavily influenced by the move to fully electric, with toes already in the waters in FE).
The late 2020s will be a lot of political posturing, and should FE look to be attracting F1 backmarkers with promises of cheaper overheads, more future-relevant tech and decent audiences in addition to manufacturers, 2030-2039 will be interesting as heck.
> Aren’t there rules imposed in F1 to keep the technology relevant to industry?
Not in the slightest. Unless things like 12,000 rpm engines with exotic valvetrain materials, while banning driver assists or dynamic suspension which has not been uncommon for decades counts as industry relevant.
In "As We Go Green", the guy who founded Formula E made it seem like there was some internal politics among FIA leadership that was resisting green tech for whatever reason, and now that Formula E is a thing, it doesn't make sense for F1 to try to catch up.
Formula E is a thing because “E is the future” and all manufacturers don’t want to miss out. From a racing and entertainment point of view it’s absolute dog shit. It will die out if it can’t survive by their own merits once the electric novelty wades.
