There are some in the F1 paddock who think that Formula 1 should ignore the environment and go on racing with the current machinery. This would be cheaper than building a new generation of engines for 2014 but there is a danger that F1 will lose relevance to the automobile industry, which has long been the source of much of the sport’s funding.
“Technology in the automotive field is changing,” says Ross Brawn of Mercedes GP. “We don’t want
to end up as a dinosaur in five or 10 years’ time.”
The industry is definitely on the move towards electric cars. In the last few months there have been several major deals. BMW and Peugeot Citroen formed a joint venture in the spring to build components for plug-in cars, while the Daimler-Renault-Nissan alliance now also covers electric vehicles. Last week General Motors and LG announced a deal to supply battery cells to GM hybrids, which have small engines to extend the range of the cars.
Volvo, the Swedish car firm that is now owned by Zhejiang Geely Holding Group in China, has just announced a new partnership with German engineering group, Siemens to develop electric cars. Work will begin immediately to create electric versions of the Volvo C30.
There are already some hybrid technology in F1, with Williams’s relationships with Porsche and Jaguar and the new link between Team Lotus and General Electric seems to be heading down the same path. And even Ferrari, which is not in favour of electric cars, is putting KERS into its latest models.
The times are changing – and F1 needs to keep up.
Let’s talk about facts. I use a smartphone which battery takes 1/4 the size and I struggle to have it last 24H00. The other problem is that the battery looses so much life in a year, you need to replace it. When the battery is low, it takes a lot of time to recharge it as well.
All these issues concern only a smartphone.
In a car, the energy required is enormous and unlike phones where a weak battery can be replaced or dealt with by having a charger always with you, you can’t have a car loose in a year half its autonomy (from 150Kms to 75Kms) & the recharging process will take so much time. Not only that but batteries are very sensitive to the weather :
- security : you can watch on the net laptop batteries exploding to imagine what might happen with car batteries. The problem is further worsened by working environment particularly excessive heat.
- the autonomy is itself sensitive to the temperatures & that’s hard to make an end user understand.
- in cold weather the heater will further weaken the autonomy if the it is used which is a no brainer for many north European readers.
To sum it up, the electric car has a lot of hurdles to overcome & I don’t see it replacing the current cars in the coming decade. Maybe the cities can benefit from little electric cars but I don’t see Joe Saward going to Barcelona or Monaco in an Electric car. He’ll need to leave a month earlier.
The intermediate solution which is sadly not spread are the hybrid cars
I, and a number of F1 following friends, have found it slightly behind-the-times that there has been such reluctance for allowing KERS when it was first introduced and, even now, there are such heavy restrictions on what can be implemented.
Sure, regulate when it can be used, and other aspects in the name of safety, but why not let them go-for-broke in terms of everything else?
Interestingly, I was just reading about a sub-8min lap of the Nurburgring by an EV race car:
http://inhabitat.com/tmg-ev-p001-becomes-first-ev-to-break-the-nurburgring-8-minute-speed-record/
So perhaps the time is imminent where EV is the primary propulsion and the dirty V8 is nothing more than a glorified battery charger?
have you seen Robert Llewellyn’s Fully Charged podcast? quite insightful about progression of EV tech. He’s actually just had a look at the new Volvo V60 diesel/electric hybrid. He’s also looked at many of the other ones along the way. It’s interesting the shift towards EV, I think it would be foolish if F1 didn’t embrace the technology that’s out there as with F1′s involvement and the pace of development, we’ll surely end up with better technology because of it.
Hi Joe,
Thought this might be of interest to you – it’s the new electric car record lap of the Nordschleife.
I have zero, absolutely zero, intention of owning an electric car. They might be all swell and dandy for puttering around Paris or Milton Keynes, but where I live (and I don’t live somewhere *that* remote) they are a complete non-starter (excuse the pun).
Sometimes we get 2 feet of snow. People get stuck, the roads snarl up and you can get stranded on the freeway for hours in the height of winter. Rely on a battery to keep my family from freezing in these circumstances? No.
We had a hurricane come through here last week. Some people won’t get their power back for a week. No power, no electric car.
I think the reason Formula 1 is moving towards hybrids is more to do with keeping the marketing money flowing as it makes not a bit of difference in the big picture what drivetrains they use.
If F1 doesn’t re-position itself, the legislators (who are heavily influenced by green, and pseudo green policies) will simply re-position F1 out of existence.
If people don’t want F1 to be a progressive sport any more, they can watch historic F1 racing as much as they like, no one’s stopping people watching historic F1 racing as it is, but few people actually do.
Awesome – I can’t wait to hear the wind rustling the leaves and the birds chirping in the trees across the track as 24 F1 cars go whistling by…
gs,
You are jumping to conclusions. I did not say that F1 would be electric but that it would be relevant. The FIA has plans for an all-electric championship. F1 cannot be that for many years to come – if ever.
I predicted this about 2-3 years ago. F1 is in danger of become the dinosaur of sport just like MotoGP, it WILL have to change. How soon is anyone’s guess, but it will happen and you then have to listen the whine of electric motors not combustion.
So how long before F1 becomes a glorified version of slot car racing? I can’t say I disagree with F1 embracing new technology, but I don’t fully agree with the whole hybrid philosophy. Perhaps it’s just a matter of balance.
Personally, I’m crossed between the “Good Old Days” of F1 when Mechanical grip was king and the innovation and cleverness of today’s engineers that push F1 to forefront and make it the pioneering force behind the technology that makes it into our road going cars today.
No, Joe, don’t you remember? The ladies love the noise! There’s no way F1 can stay technologically au courant if the ladies love the noise…
I am sure there will be many comments about how this is a disaster for the sport. Frankly, I think racing is racing, doesn’t matter how you power the cars. From all accounts, the audience watched when they raced with chariots and horses…
The times are changing…
Am I the only one who thinks the SPORT of F1 has been taken hostage? I got hooked on racing a long time ago when the environment wasn’t on anybody’s mind. The world has changed a lot since then. However, are new fans coming to F1 because of what it wants to do for the environment, or is it for the same reasons I was.
In this discussion, there is an implied threat that manufacturers are going to leave the sport if F1 is not seen as green enough. We never hear about the fans’ opinions and interests, it is always about what is perceived as good for the manufacturers. To my knowledge, no other sport is constantly under this threat and I find that unfair and hypocritical as other sports are known to be more polluting. I follow most other major racing series and never hear these threats.
In the ’60s and ’70s there was very little manufacturer involvement and F1 was still the pinnacle of racing. What if the manufacturers all left? If Ross Brawn and his colleagues don’t want to be seen as dinosaurs they can go work for those manufacturers and develop green technologies to their heart’s content. Like I said, racing was great before manufacturers got involved and it may not be so bad if they did leave. Of course, Ross & Co won’t be raking in the millions as they do now but who cares? The real racers will still be there.
I’m just afraid that F1 will be changed beyond recognition to please the manufacturers and all other parties be damned.
Agreed. I’m not interested in maintaining the “sound of the engines”, rather in keeping the tradition as the R&D sport of manufacturers alive. In the past you could see the cars dive in braking as the drivers impressively pushed as deep as possible – now the cars are so balanced you cannot tell they are braking – no one laments this, it’s advancement in design. The same story for hybrids and even all-electric one day. Whatever the manufacturers want to throw hundreds of millions of dollars at!
…But keep up with what?
Sadly, if F1 goes ‘leccy, then they are keeping up with the wrong technology.
F1 should innovate, not just ‘keep up’, especially when the EV industry is a false economy.
The 1 fact that people miss (and that staggers me!) about electric vehicles is ‘WHERE DOES THE ELECTRICITY COME FROM???
So in what way is it more efficient to burn fossil fuels to generate electricity(with the infrastructure involcved to produce and deliver that electricity) than to put said fossil fuel straight into your vehicle?
It’s an elephant in the room as big as the one that follows the BBC F1 team around!
paul,
Have you talked to the car industry? They seem to think EVs are the way to go. You would probably save them billions if you told them it was a bad idea…
That way you’d make millions and would be too busy carousing with ducky maidens to have time to comment on blogs. Great idea!
Hi Joe,
why is it so important for F1 to be relevant to road cars? When did single seater, open wheel and cockpit racing cars become relevant to commuter boxes? I know that technology from F1 finds it’s way into road cars over a period of time, but isn’t that just a happy accident? Why can’t F1 be purely about speed regardless of drivetrain? We have any number of racing series that are far more relevant to road cars, such as BTCC, so I just don’t understand the logic behind single seaters being forced down this route.
and i forgot to mention that once the fossil fuels are burned anyway to produce that electricity, there then needs to be somewhere to store that energy (we use a fuel tank nowadays, a simple metal or plastic container)
So what is the modern electric cars’ fuel tank? Batteries.
And how ‘green’ are batteries? The world needs to be raped for the precious metals to make modern ones such as lithium mining (horrendous).
And what happens to this poisonous material once the batteries are done?
The whole claim of electric cars being green is beyond ludicrous.
Electric is surely coming. F1 i think has to take a few years to get itself sit comfortably though, for other reasons, before changing too much. Also someone has to work out the sometimes unsustainable subsidies handed out to the “renewable energy” trade. (seriously, sunlight is renewable? that depends on assumption stars do not burn out, which they do, even if on a very long horizon) Anyhow, the big recipients of such subsidies do seem to be the same who engineer for fossil fuel power. Whilst no-one has beaten coal with renewables for cost, i think this is pork barrel stuff.
This is just a blog post, or accumulation of them, and not hard science, but it’s definitely interesting: http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/27/the-long-hard-road-to-the-edge/
I’d really like to see F1 incorporate multiple spec, to accommodate electric power trains. Practical worry: given the low visibility etc of a F1 cockpit, how dangerous will this get when you add in silent running?
But it feels maybe like it was turn of 20th century. 30HP would have been really impressive. Sure, electric motors can do amazing stuff now, but i mean the entire energy chain: where do i plug in my Tesla? To a coal fuelled plant? Not for the first time, the consumers of energy have the upper hand. Make powerful car, sell it en masse, politics makes sure of energy supply.
So I’m taking it all a little bit sceptically. I think this would be an excellent place to work, if starting out, but i also wonder if anyone starting now will get to see, let alone be involved in, the breakthroughs.
Hybrid is the only way to head, meanwhile. (and to be honest, i’m a bit against it, for one fan’s view – probably just failing KERS for MW too often – , but i’d rather F1 has a crack at it than didn’t)
That’s the end of F1. Just imagine a bunch of electric Ferraris racing at Spa and Monaco. I can hardly wait.
Not forgetting Lotus Cars / Lotus Engineering’s pioneering work.
I am not convinced. F1 has not been a hotbed of ‘industry’ innovation. Massive importance of non-transferable aerodynamics, while abandoning traction control, active suspension, etc that ARE relevant. Engine technologies, have been limited to the point of spec engineering. F1 has been of limited or non-relevance for almost 2 decades. Gearboxes perhaps the exception. A point? Who is lining up to buy Pirelli’s Mission Impossible line of self destructing tires??
Industry involvement has been PR based, not as an innovation pipeline, except perhaps for the exclusive sport supercars?
dicjkm,
That depends on the era you are discussing.
Joe:
do you have any insight as to why hydrogen fuel cell technology seems to have been passed over in favor of plug in electric vehicles? It has always seemed to me that hydrogen was the better solution taking into consideration the almost unlimited availability of the element and the obvious advantages of the technology (fill up and go and zero emissions, no batteries). Granted there are drawbacks such as retrofitting the entire network of gas/petrol/diesel stations to accommodate for Hydrogen and the cost associated with it, but all in all seems like the better ultimate solution to the problem (electricity is after all generated by burning fossil fuels in many cases and nuclear plants in many others, both models don’t seem to be sustainable in the long term).
I was under the understanding that there was at least one racing series in the works for vehicles with such technologies. Should F1 decide to make a push for such a technology (in the post 2014 engine regs) it could get people excited about making the change to a better fuel source and would keen F1 not only relevant but at the tip of the spear as it should be.
6 wheeled Tyrrell,
Because it does not work… at a reasonable price
Hi Joe, because no one reads my blog as much as your’s, I will comment here.
F1 does need to keep up with the times.
1996.
Where is active technology? Forget electric, the market is doing that already. While we have a mooted “hybrid” formula with 1.5 litre screaming race engines, like we had in 1950, it’s hardly cutting edge.
The big story for me is the cave on aero/ground effects in the regulations, we seem to have these draggy cars that don’t contribute much directly to real world aero (cd/fuel economy). I think the danger is the “pop of ground effect and go flying” problem – can this be solved if it is not already? As I am not a real paid journo or engineer, and just a fan, I can’t be bothered researching this!
Otherwise it was the biggest disappointment for me in F1′s attempt to , even over the inline 4 backdown. I have to admit, V6′s are cooler, as we must have “ICE” for now.
Again I seem to recall Honda claiming to pull out of F1 back in the 80/90′s as they wanted a 750cc turbo formula. Perhaps Honda said this in jest, and those in F1 at the time would be rolling on the floor in laughter or horror or disbeleif. While trying to find this quote in the mists of the ancient internet I found an article by our host that had some other explanations, which were more commercial/contract related.
Perhaps some in the F1 paddock have heard of the internet as well? Is that thing on my iphone? Whatever that is?
The sound of a Formula One car at full gallop has changed subtlety over the years. It is the vibration and resonance of the engines at 17,000rpm with the cars travelling at 200mph that provide the thrill.
If a suitable ‘realistic noise’ cannot be generated by the new electric engines, without comprimising authenticity and ‘keeping it real’, it’s probably best they develop an energy efficient 1.5 litre turbo charged unit, like we had in the eighties, perhaps running on recycled oil.
Some serious thinking ahead; spectacle is everything!
Joe, I just finished reading your spa GP magazine and it is really awesome. The pictures the articles by all 3 of you and particularly the historical features are very very cool. Thanks and I look forward to many more.
The in-car footage of the Toyota Motorsport electric car at the Nurburgring was interesting; tyres squealing and the sound of the wind rushing past…
But try comparing it to the in-car footage of Senna’s qualifying lap at Suzuka.
Jo Torrent, I think we may overcome your issues with electricity.
Is F1 a circius or a brand? The brand of F1 is Formula 1. As in one, number one the best.
A Circuis has clowns, and freakshows. A travelling roadshow of V10′s is one thing. Think cirque de soleil not barnum bros?
We cannot relegate all motorsport to a show with no message, a whirl of colour and advertising. Formula 1 has to keep it’s brand, of being the best, and that is all that matters.
Once the connections at the grass roots of engineering and motorsport are in place, all these new countries on the calender that no one at the chippy have ever heard of will make sense to me, perhaps we can push a greener futrure through religious, social and physical boundaries through F1.
And buy a Ferrari.
And thank you Joe, I am still looking for someone to explain email to me but I like your wordpress thing. You are the internet of F1 !
6 wheeled Tyrrell – H+ fuel cells will be viable once platinum becomes cheap… until then, you’ll be stuck with million-dollar power plants. Also, they’re not overly efficient on smaller scales, and work better when they are much larger scale (like powering a building… but even then, efficiency-wise, it’s usually easier to pump water to the top to store energy, then run it through a turbine when you need the energy…). Fuel cells are engineering students’ favourite solution: very complex, very interesting and very cool… if you ignore all real-world practicality.
Personally, I think electric cars are cool. Big deal about the noise. Boo-hoo. As a driver, I want to drive something fast, not something loud. At the same time, as a fan, I want to see close fast cars, whether they’re loud or quiet. The new diesel LMPs? Very cool, even if they are whisper quiet. Speed trumps noise any day.
That being said, they need to make EVs faster with better range… because as I said, if it’s not fast, I won’t be interested.
Canopies = less dead drivers.
Wheel covers = less dead people.
Why TF does it need to be “open wheel” racing, whatever TF that is? Who cares? Make the cars more deadly?? I know you are not quite with me on this on Mr Saward.
cyberspace,
You seem to be on a roll. I have no idea what you are talking about but I don’t wish to ruin your enjoyment of yourself.
Joe Torrent, lets talk facts.
I like that comment about Joe’s wonderful holidays.
Not his most gripping works, I agree. Maybe he did it in Prius, I didn’t read it!
Why cannot an F1 driver have a surround sound screen to help avoid collisions.
Hello, Sony.
?
True, it would not be cheap. It’s just that hybrids/electrics seem to me like kicking the problem further down the road without actually solving anything.
At the very least the FIA should open up the regulations for these systems (hybrid/electric) and let F1′s greatest minds loose on the task of truly pushing the envelope of what is possible. That could prove an interesting area of development, but then again comes the issue of cost, would the teams agree to more spending?
And a beeper? My road car has beepers.
I think Paul missed a few facts in his trashing of electric cars.
1. Controlling pollution is far easier, more effective, cheaper, and simpler when it is done at a single power plant than when the technology to do this needs to implemented (and monitored) on millions of road cars. This saves money and saves lives (air pollution kills tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people a year around the world)
2. The best internal combustion engines are about 50% efficient. Electric motors are about 90% efficient.
3. Did you happen to read about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico recently? How about the Exxon Valdez? Not much environmental damage there. Whatever technology we choose to use for power generation, we need to mine the earth. Electrically powered cars can be powered by wind and solar energy generation, some of the most environmentally friendly sources of power.
thank you
Thanks for the info Malcolm, I have to say I know next to zero regarding the tech that goes into a H fuel cell, but the basic theory of it does seem interesting. Too bad it’s not viable.
For Joe Torrent,
there are ways to programme a computer to be light on energy consumption. Just as you want to optimize for speed, some routines just use more transistor gates, more electricity. To an extent, you can look to control that, do things smarter with less operations . . .
I can get about a day and a half with my Nokia N8, and i’m trying to get value out of a expensive contract, so 4 hours use on calls is nothing. (I have it also patched in, just not set just right to the thing as a VoIP terminal – they suddenly sent a massive update for it, and it became slick to use)
That changes when using 3G data. There are very odd things done by the networks to data feeds. The same kit Syria uses to snoop on citizens (which can do everything down to activating the camera to rewriting messages on the fly) is installed everywhere. The network providers play silly games with connexions, causing overhead, which in turn causes battery drain. If there was one thing i saw in Google buying Motorola, it was a tacit admission that some software doesn’t run nice without knowing lots about the hardware, though i think they got cornered into that deal and will regret it. But on the network thing, when it connects over wifi, the battery isn’t drained so badly. That’s because my ISP is one of only two in the UK who don’t mess with your connexion.
Or my earlier phone, a E55, would run for sometimes most of the week (and still heavy call use) but that may simply be not having to drive a big bright screen. The Microsoft – Nokia deal might make fans of other OS vendors choke up and say “bloatware” but Nokia really knows how to trim systems neatly (when they care to remember how). Brit firm, Psion, is the origin of that. Though i met their founder, and immediately knew from his hyper arrogant dismissive attitude any of the good tech was stillborn. It would drive you nuts, as a brit, to know what cool engineering gets deep sixed. Inmos then Ferranti is now SGS Thompson. It’s so frustrating because this tech is genuinely important.
. . .
6 wheeled Tyrrell,
same Q i want to ask!
have a crack at this:
http://en.akihabaranews.com/tag/fuel-cell
i haven’t had the time to look into it. But i remember the school experiments. I think it’s a lobby issue as much as tech.
On that note, Karen is not being silly saying F1 will get a push from higher places.
cyberspacesomewhere,
I can buy a BMW or Benz, with IR HUDs and a smorgasboard of aids. I’d find them distracting. I don’t much like even the radio on when i drive. Guess the market is execs who are driven.
Barry,
no link to data on this, but i read in several fairly reliable places, that oil spills get cleaned up by nature better if we don’t interfere so much. The problem is that it’s such graphic tragedy. Why is it that mass rape and vile wars get less coverage? If we could extend the wellbeing of life to even a technical majority of souls on the planet, we’d grow up many more capable brains to attack these issues we face.
I think i ought to grow a pair and sling a car around a track or a dozen, before saying this. But i don’t see why F1 may not be left alone to burn some high octane and keep its open wheels. The problem comes when you consider the perpetual motion machine of money coming in. Insofar new tech makes this sport safe, most part, that has to be fed. I recently appreciated that to the point i get the heebies getting into an older car, even a very cool one.
. .
malcolm.strachan,
or we make cheaper the recycling?
Seems to be Canada, SA and Norilsk who sit on the deposits.
But it’s also rare earths in the motors. Some Chinese students just wrote a paper about how to try to pull asteroids into LEO to mine them. I’m almost thankful that tech won’t likely get so far in my lifetime to screw up and aim something like that by accident onto our earth!
Maybe because tantalum is useful for batteries (just a bit) and we tolerate vicious war in the Congo, where all that is, then that is the reason why we are running with battery tech . . .
. .
F1 is never going to swing trillion dollar industries. But that’s precisely why i want the sport to hunker down, stick to its knitting a while, so it has the best position it can afford. I’m all fuzzy because this is really staring into the future.
– j
I fail to see the allure of hybrids. They combine the pollution of a petroleum engine with the pollution caused by manufacturing lithium batteries.
To me, if F1 want’s to be commercially relevant, they should be looking to the NEXT step, not trying to catch up to the current one.
Hydrogen slush would be the perfect fuel, and F1′s involvement could lead to technological developments that make it much more efficient to produce. Plentiful, 100% non polluting and potentially available for home production.
Plus, the cars would still be as fast as all hell.
Hybrid F1 cars would be a bit of a sham. Hydrogen F1 cars would still sound fantastic and be appropriate for the commercial market, meaning the F1 teams that innovate could profit for it on the consumer end, or sell the technology to someone who could.
Hybrids? How quaint – presumably they’re also embracing email and texting while they’re at it. “F1″, if one wishes the activity to so define, has the same conundrum as its larger automotive, geopolitical and energy sector backrounds: There’s really no justification for the kind of unproductive spending they’re engaged in – or rather engaging us in – and are poorly equipped if not wholly incapable to replicate their socioeconomical roles and profit margins in a decentralised, sustainable economy. So they cling even more ferociously to what they know.
For what tech and resources are available right now it is ludicrous to even suggest a fossil fuelled reciprocating V6 ICE with a smattering of supercaps from 2014 onwards. If they’re actually able to follow through with this and derive profit from it, we’ve been had in a much larger sense than in the sole framework of motorsport and not in a remotely agreeable way either. Hopefully the “Arab Spring” will lead to a situation where mideastern social stability – and thus that of our shared Earth – doesn’t hinge on “shorting” our quite immediate futures (holistically, not as a mere financial instrument) by inducing yet more unprecedented climatic rates of change. Yet the sphere of Mr. Ecclestone’s apparent interests has shown some remarkable stubborness to plumb – drill, really – these depths during this very season also.
We’re now at a point where societies and individuals both are made to accept a cost for hosting and entertaining “F1″ – that pretty much sums it up (or “subtracts it down”) in a microverse, don’t you think? Enough. Since when were we made to give up on the notion that progress is mutually – even universally – beneficial? Why should we be made to adopt the phenomenally naïve and narcissistic definition of profit being irrespective of the whole being the sum of its parts? How are we so myopic as to assign no value to the incredible amount of work done by our living environment and so busy hampering its capacity to sustain itself, if only so locally as on Earth? Because it defies our comprehension, so we’d rather make it something lesser, a measure of mere men and their ignorance? We celebrate “our” science and the resulting technology but when it comes to living up to its basic tenet – accepting that we’ve been wrong and acting accordingly – we fail as spectacularly as if there was a flat earth falling on our faces.
Joe, sorry to be so harsh on “your” sport. Your writing highlights the human dimension in a remarkable way, no doubt because of your personal investment and involvement. There is much beauty in being human and doing something as such, imperfections and all. I do try to make as clear as possible the distinction between issues and people and thus the above is not in any way intended as discouragement or belittlement. “Existentialist” case in point: If it was, it wouldn’t have come to be. While I’ve lost my rationale to consider “F1″ as an activity in any way separate from its environments (apart from being a trademark?), diversity of thought and perspective is also a thing that sustains us. That’s why I’m perfectly content that you’re among a few good F1 journalists.
People tend to forget that fuel cells generate electricity to drive the car, they don’t power the car itself. So, electricity for electric vehicles doesn’t have to come from the grid, nor require batteries. Yes, the hydrogen used comes form fossil fuels; but, as I understand it, you would need only a fraction of the amount of fossil fuels currently in demand to meet worldwide demand for hydrogen for use in cars. Apparently commercial scale production begins at several companies in 2016, I think.
The notion that F1 is a development ground for technology which will trickle
down to road cars is a myth and has been a myth for several decades. This is the case because the rules in F1 prevent the use of some if not all of the technology which might actually be useful in a road car, and because the
requirements of an F1 car are so extremely different from the requirements
of a modern road car.
Road cars already use plenty of sophisticated technology which is not allowed
in F1. Various technology has been removed from F1 because it
tends to reduce the importance of the driver in the overall equation of which
“car + driver” combination is the fastest. This is not new, it was an issue when
Senna was still alive, and WIlliams had active suspension which allowed inferior drivers to achieve quicker laps because of the abilities of the car
alone.
The plain truth is that road car technology can and will be developed as needed in the R&D departments of the companies which build road cars or
by companies which provide consulting engineering ( as Lotus and Porsche are known to do for other car companies ). F1 teams are in the business of
winning constructors’ and drivers’ championships, not in the business of improving road cars.
Best to admit that F1 is a circus, not a breeding ground, and quit entertaining the pretense that F1 will bring improvements to road cars. If you don’t think I am correct in this, ask Adrian Newey or Gordon Murray, if you can get a few minutes with them.
If you want an area of automobile competition which does actually have relevance to road cars, you need to look at rally cars. Of course that’s not
F1, but it is the truth nonetheless.
Henry,
You are simply not right in this respect. There is all kind of technology that moves from racing to the automotive industry. OK, I may not all be obvious and in recent years that has been less than at some other times, but when the rules allow technologies that are useful for road cars, then the technology is useful to road cars.
The only races with full houses every weekend are in NASCAR – without any hit-tech or pretended enviromental efforts and even Toyota takes part in it.
Hybrids are only political case. Why putting 200 kg of batteries to the car for having the same consumption as a small diesel? But I think KERS development is better challenge for engineers than expensive games with aerodynamic details.
EV record in Ring is interesting, but who will be interested in 15 minutes race and two hours waiting for charging?
Vlado,
You cannot base audience figures on arguments about technology. It is about ticket price.
I’m all for hybrids but as others have said the current EV’s are a tiny plaster on a gaping wound.
A car that costs 30k, looks, feels drives like a 7k one and runs out of juice halfway home from work isn’t of much use to me. Not to mention having no second hand value after 5 years because the batteries are dead and cost 7k to replace. Cars should be lasting longer to be truly “environmentally friendly”.
The industry needs to improve hybrid efficiency, aerodynamics and energy recovery systems so you get more bang for your litre of fuel, dump battery store ev’s and throw their weight, knowledge and money into fuel cells.
I’ve not missed a gp (on tv) since Canada 1989 (god damn slept in – (australia)), but even then f1 was a restricted technology battle. This is f1′s biggest issue. They have to be seen as cutting edge and development driven, but these cars haven’t been the fastest POSSIBLE cars for many many years. I want to see what is possible, not what is allowed to be possible. Like unlimited KERS.
My point F1 needs to open up some more electric options while accepting that fossil fuels have an energy density that far exceeds all other environmentally friendly options.
The fastest way to complete a grand prix distance will be in gas guzzling racing cars for quite a few more years. F1 needs to be that category. As a fan of f1 and electric cars, I can’t see any other solution, other than hybrids. Free up the rules and let some imagination lead this drive forward.
If they try to limit the cars too much the technomaniacs will find something more interesting to do.
F1 is politics, sport, machine, man, religion, money. The only way things will change is if the money goes away, and of course that’s what they are trying to avoid.
I guess I’ll keep watching until I get bored, but that’s a while away.
@Jo torrent
5-10 years ago if you’d have described your smartphone to your friends they would have listed a whole lot of “laws of physics” that meant it couldn’t exist….
Neal Rayner,
in integer performance terms, a cellphone isn’t far off an early 1990′s Cray.
Mind you, those performed because who wrote the software were not your slouches . . even despite the tendency in academia to write awfully non optimised code because the primary thing is the experiment . .
That was also about the time i reckoned John Sculley had it right how to move Apple, with the “knowledge navigator”. He wasn’t far wrong, for a soda salesman . . you likely own something like he would have dreamed of. (Not bad for an ad man, says me defending my own kind!
)
What i missed, because i was only learning this, was there would be a push down from software into silicon as Moore’s etc kicked in for real. (I read the right papers, did not suss the game, not much of a shocker that) The chips stopped being “dumb” and started to reconstruct the instructions on the fly to make use of how fast they could actually go. Chips gained their own mini operating systems called microcode, which was indeed loadable. Which is also why i think we get too many abstracted layers now, because a generation started to think software would be “fixed” by the compilers, or 4GLs or whatever was the management buzz which had nout to do with the tech. Itanium is the biggie misdirection along these lines, taking the opposite gamble, i.e. not putting the smarts inside, but a very nice chip for business boring stuff still for reasons of over engineering on other counts.
I think 5 or 10 years ago, people were actually frustrated that today’s cellphones were not happening, because of entirely different logjams. 20 years ago, no self respecting geek wanted to play games on a cellular handset, so there wasn’t quite the imagination going on! I remember a hack for Ericsson phones which interpreted base station signaling to give an effectual GPS (called aGPS now) in 2000/01, well before phone advertised “GPS”. That came from an amateur German bloke, not the manufacturers.
The truly amazing thing is not the tech, but the economics. There’s a similar risk in F1, to be too far ahead.
Lately, you cannot even use the web, a fairly basic text plus pictures thing, with a bit of simple database thrown in (would explain most blogs anyhow) without a pseudo operating system (browser) you cannot even set frozen in time because “security” updates are just munitions warfare between you as a product and dubious advertisers who feel hard done by and who feel outrageous levels of entitlement to your life. Corollary to that, you can download Wireshark and a dozen other tools to see what is really going on with your signal. But it seems a long way from the idea of publishing to me. Because the web never really addressed economic imbalances (why would it, for much it’s naissance run by academics?) the freetards rule, look like fair game to poachers, and we’re lumped. Tech does exist (or could be conceived) to do wire level compensation of web publishers, but it has many risks including bifurcation of the system due to upgrade costs.
I even read the other day a long bug report how firefox fails on a very basic rendering thing, essential to most websites, which has languished for years.
I often think we are stuck with laws of people, not of physics!
Try a different thing: a few years ago, most people would have been delighted to get the internet on a home PC. Now they can get it on a cheap cellphone. It’s not the same thing. But a vast effort has gone into that distribution. I wonder how much rioting and all that is exacerbated by shoving down people’s throats technical nirvana but demanding their underwear as security for a mere glimpse . . This is where sidetracks of tech in F1 worry me. Too many engineering sink holes. Therefore i am content if F1 buys off the shelf stuff for electric, so long as they stick to the main game. Electric drive trains is that cellphone thing . .
– j
Jo, whilst it’s true that manufacturers are producing hybrid and full electric vehicles, it’s not because they want to. it’s because it’s cheaper to do that than it is to pay the fines applied by governments based on the tailpipe CO2 emissions of the vehicle fleet. Electric cars are expensive and hardly sustainable to produce, and manufacturers make a loss on them. F1 running hybrid systems will not help that, the current issue is around sourcing the materials required for batteries.
Also, you’ll notice I was clear to specify tailpipe emissions. Electric cars will do absolutely nothing to clean up pollution, if adopted widescale then yes they might clear up localised smog in LA or something but they’ll probably make it worse on a global scale.
An if you read the detail of the proposals for the 2014 regulations, you’ll see that they carry barely a whiff of genuine energy efficiency. They are now not even referring to the new system as KERS – it’s now ERS. What this means is that, with the continuous fuel flow limit, the engine will simply be working to full capacity more of the time, and under braking it shall simply be charging up the ERS. Thus, no less fuel will actually be consumed due to the hybrid system.
The next big environmental crisis will be how to dispose of all these dead car batteries. Again the lawyers will win.
Can’t say I like the trend of electric car racing, thankfully it will come long after my interest has faded.
I guess Tilke is ahead of his time. All those flat featureless circuits will by ideal for electrical cars. Spa may be the best thing we have now but it would be murder on battery life.
It seems to me that all the new money coming into the sport has little to do with car manufacturers. I hate that F1 gets on its knees to the car manufacturers when they disappear immediately their stock price dips
This is just a PR stunt, everybody knows the huge deficits of an electric car, it is just a transition technology, feel good, love the pandas kind of gimmick.
The real future is in Hydrogen cell fuels but, until somebody commits a lot of cash to break the cycle of the chicken or egg, there is going to be a slow roll out. I heard in Germany M-B is very committed as is BMW. So somebody has to start a chain of new refueling stations as I doubt Shell or BP or et al are going to sell Hydrogen while they are so heavy invested in oil.
So why not have F1 transition to this technology? Or Le mans? That would be interesting, the thing is that because nobody can buy such a car now, we will not see that happen. Chicken or egg?
If they want to push engine development and green credentials then they should free up the drivetrain regulations and state that the teams get a fixed amount of fuel per race weekend with the amount scheduled to decrease every year.
Teams are already doing this to an extent as they short fill the tanks for races.
Ads-green
Read the new regulations.
MiamiJAG: Hydrogen fuel cells aren’t overly efficient in smaller scale applications (like cars), they are ridiculously expensive due to the platinum electrodes and in terms of well-to-wheel there are more steps than an EV.
Think about all the losses you have from generating the hydrogen, shipping it, storing it, filling a car with it, using it to make electricity, then running an electric motor that drives the car. With an EV, you just need to generate the electricity, charge the battery and then use that to run the electric motor that drives the car. Less steps = less losses.
Beyond that, BMW has been opposed to fuel cells. Their hydrogen car used a regular engine using hydrogen as the fuel source. Different kettle of fish.
Malcolm,
I agree, I am not at all convinced about fuel cells.
Malcom, Joe: as the old saying goes, don’t trust me trust Google, BMW dropped the Hydrogen 7 last year to focus on HFC. Other car makers working on this are: Renault, M-B, Citroen, Toyota and others.
Here is an example of a press release:
BMW working on hydrogen fuel-cell hybrid drivetrain for 2014
Posted: Apr 13, 2010
BMW has announced that it is testing a new hydrogen fuel-cell hybrid powertrain that could be used by the next-generation Mini and the front-wheel-drive BMW vehicles planned for 2014. The system combines a front-wheel-drive architecture, a hydrogen fuel-cell system, an electric-motor and a small gasoline engine.
Engineers say that the system is designed to allow compact vehicles to travel emissions-free in city areas. The company has already built functioning prototypes based on 1-Series hatchbacks converted to a front-wheel-drive architecture.
Power comes from a gasoline engine, a 5 kW (7-hp) hydrogen fuel-cell drivetrain and an 82 kW (110-hp) electric-motor.
The hydrogen fuel-cell system, which can fit in BMW and Mini models that are at least four meters long, has yet to be given the green light by BMW executives. The company still needs to make sure that hydrogen fuel-pumps will be available in most large city areas.
The key here is THE FUEL PUMPS as I mentioned in my post. Once you can have an alternate energy supply to gasoline-diesel as easy to pump/charge then you have a real option. Charging a car with a range of a 100 miles for 8 hours is not practical.