A Daily Round up of Formula One news, inside whispers, opinion and comment. Today,
Four Teams Postpone Crash Tests
How To Alienate Your Viewers
According to Michael Schmidt of Auto Motor und Sport tickets for the Thursday in Monaco cost between 48 and 83 Euro with free entry for children. This might look like a sensible idea, but for 57 minutes in the second free practice people only got to see an empty track and could only entertain themselves with watching it dry after a short shower of rain.
Any argument that the teams wanted to save tyres for the race wouldn’t wash as no major rain is forecast for Saturday or Sunday. The problem was simple – the teams wanted to save precious mileage on their engines.
We said it before and we’ll say it again. Drop those “green rules”. F1 is not supposed to be green. It is supposed to be the pinnacle of Motorsports. As that it is supposed to be politically incorrect. F1 should be the guy who walks into a bar, downs his beer in one go, belches loudly, and orders the next.
People keep making up useless gimmicks to “improve the show”. Well, newsflash: The most basic step in providing a show is showing up!
Four Teams Postpone Crash Tests
Nose jobs have been the flavor of the month lately with Red Bull presenting their radical new conk in Barcelona, which took the team more than a handful of attempts to get it through the crash test.
Four teams, Williams, Lotus, Toro Rosso and Force India had all requested an official FIA crashtest for a shortened nose in May, but have now postponed for different reasons.
Williams have abandoned the idea for this year, citing that getting the new design through the crash test would bind too many resources for too little gain on track. Toro Rosso will debut its shortened nose at a later time. Lotus failed the first crash test, money is tight and the season goal of 5th place seems attainable with the current design, so they think about postponing until next year, like the Grove based Williams squad.
Force India can’t afford to wait until 2016. Unfortunately they can’t afford to bring a new nose either. The first crash test failed narrowly and the next one has to work out, as the new nose is part of the oft-postponed VJM 7.5 GTi.
Her Majesty Wants Money
The pesky topic of taxes is giving Bernard Ecclestone a headache again. As the Telegraph and Bloomberg both reported, the authorities asked Mr. E kindly to cough up 1 billion pounds to correct a slight underpayment of taxes up to 2008.
Ecclestones argues he has nothing to do with the Bambino empire, run by his ex-wife Slavica and his daughters Tamara and Petra, This does not appear to wash any-more with the Her Majesty’s authorities. A backroom deal with the Inland Revenue in 2008 that saw Bernie pay a few tens of millions is no longer valid according to legal experts.
Evidence from Mr. E’s sojourn in a Bavarian court last year has been garnered. The British Tax authorities say this demonstrates Bernie may have told them fibs to get his 2008 deal.
Oh what a tangled web he weaves. From what I can make out MrE claimed that Bambino had nothing to do with him yet this fund paid the court in Germany. Here in the uk you can’t hide from HMRC,a twenty year rule means they can dig deep and pretty much empty your manbag. We all know what that means..we can forget the budget entry price of £350 for a race Sunday, the price will now be over a thousand xogs, this increase will be hidden behind the veil of green credentials and track improvement couple this to sky and there goes my home and cars 😉 at least a mugger has the decency to tell you your being robbed
HMRC could huff and puff as much as they like, we all know that they’re only going to receive a fraction of that figure.
I hear you, @Fortis but the scandal is that the authorities / regulators will actually accept way less than the full amount and then tell us denizens of the lumpen proletariat that they’ve done a good job to extract next to fk all from these guys.
Don’t forget what a ‘great guy’ Bernie is for choosing to live in England this whole time, when he could’ve been living in a country where not paying tax doesn’t require you to be a corrupt mini Hitler! You’ve got to admire his warped view of himself in a way
Who said that nothing in life is certain except death and taxes? BE seems to be doing a good job of avoiding both.
I think if you could get hold of Bernie’s birth certificate you’d see his middle name is Faust. It would explain a lot.
No running on Friday isn’t new. But it is the worst thing ever and a big reason why people think they pay to much to see their favorite sport live. And those monaco prices are for one day. But most of us hardcore fans go the whole weekend. Paying as much as you would for a small vacation, taking 2 or 3 days off of work. And what do you get In return…
and if you’re going from the U.S. be prepared to spend about $15000 for the weekend
Say what? Five star hotel and best seats in the house?
family of 4. flight $3500 x 4. hotel $1000x2x4. tickets $1000×4 (because I’m not going all the way to Monaco and sit in shitty seats). food, transport etc.
Jeez. Just spent half an hour or longer filling in Bernie’s GPDA ‘quiz’ and it went tits up. I must have answered wrongly and therefore my survey results cannot be allowed to taint the result Bernie wants.
Do I detect the same hands on this survey as those of the fool who’s make a horlicks of F1.com?
took me about 10 mins no problems
When you do get to the end of it Bernie wants your email address and for you to approve his terms and conditions. I can’t see why they need an email to accept the answers to the poll.
That survey/quiz or what ever one what’s to call it is being done to please the public to show that it was run to gather people’s options. Bernie will do what is best for Bernie and not what’s best for the teams, manufacturers, drivers, sport, etc. Formula1.com should be loaded with all kinds of bells, whistles, and features given all of the top notch nerds that work in Formula 1 but a user is lucky that it functions properly most days.
Today is a historic. Reading the comments it would seem today was the first time ever that a server crashed. Can anyone confirm that no server has ever crashed before.
Hippo, F1 is not going green for the sake of being green. F1 is going to green in order to stay relevant to road car technology, since that’s where the road car technology is heading. Racing with a naturally aspirated engine that revs to 20k RPM and gets replaced every weekend is as road relevant as racing with a steam engine. It’s old stuff. Using space age materials and technologies to produce an engine that lasts only one weekend is not road relevant. Moreover, the engine number limits help to control the costs and level out the field. Back in the early 90s, an engine factory like Renault could produce about 60-70 engines a year, which allowed to supply only two teams. These days, those 60-70 engines would suffice for five-six teams. Sure, this did squeeze a few mediocre engine manufacturers out of the market, but these rules allowed the mid-field and backmarker teams to lay their hands on the race and championship winning engines (before 2014).
Road relevance is just something they say to keep the people happy. it’s just bullshit from the top level.
Recent interview given by Andy Cowell I thought worth a read – and if true, billions will be saved worldwide eventually
Mercedes F1 engine boss Andy Cowell said road cars would soon be using “exactly the same” technology as in F1.
Two separate hybrid technologies are being used in the F1 engines, which were introduced last season.
One recovers energy from the rear axle during braking, stores it in a battery and reapplies it under acceleration. This is exactly how current hybrid road cars work.
The second – and new – technology recovers energy from the turbocharger shaft and is used for two purposes.
It can be applied directly to the rear wheels to boost acceleration, and it can be used to prepare the turbocharger system so it is ready to be used as soon as the driver presses the accelerator.
This almost completely eradicates the delayed throttle response inherent in turbocharger engines, which is known as “turbo lag”.
Combining these two hybrid technologies has meant F1 engines now have a thermal efficiency of more than 40% – better than a road-going diesel engine.
Cowell said: “People strive to make road-car engines more thermally efficient, so the fuel economy number comes down to match in with regulations for the EU and worldwide.
“The way you make an internal combustion engine more efficient is to downsize it.
“So, smaller capacity, take cylinders away, drop the rpm. Then you go: ‘But that’s not creating much power.’ So then you put a turbocharger in it to put more oxygen in so that you can burn the same amount of fuel, previously a little bit less, but you get the power back.
“As that continues to develop, you end up with very small engines with very large turbochargers. And then you end up with a lot of lag.
“How can you reduce that? You can either put a hybrid system on, so that as you pull away from the traffic lights there is a large electric motor helping before the turbocharger spins up.
“Or you can put an electric motor on the turbocharger so that spins the compressor up so you have boost so when you pull away from the traffic lights you’ve got power. That’s where F1 engines are road-relevant.”
Cowell said this system would “definitely” start appearing on road cars.
“In the road-car world we don’t need the amount of power we have in F1,” he said. “So the power level will be smaller but the schematic of the power unit will be exactly the same.
“We will all end up driving cars that when we brake there is an electric motor that does the braking for us; the brake discs are there for emergency.
“All the energy when we brake will go into electric machines, both axles, store it in a battery.
“We will end up with very small capacity, low rpm, highly boosted engines that have an electric motor to spin up the compressor.
Monaco: a wonderful anachronism of a race, in which 900bhp Grand Prix cars are wrestled around narrow hillside streets barely wide enough to cycle on.
“When we’re then cruising, there is the opportunity to recover energy from the turbine into that electric machine. So when we’re going along the motorway, you could harvest it.
“That is exactly the same as what we do here in F1.”
All four manufacturers in F1 – Mercedes, Ferrari, Renault and Honda – want to continue with the turbo hybrid engines for this reason.
None of the technologies Cowell talks about are new – they are only new to F1. It appeals to the same crowd that think covering their country with windmills is a good idea.
I seriously doubt that you really need F1 to develop that technology. The brake energy recovery is already here. It was very noticeable when I drove a Tesla P85D last month and they don’t race in F1. And while that big ass electronic brake is there you can also use it for kickass acceleration.
Spinning up a turbo with electric energy. Come on. 1+1 = 2. Besides, WEC would be a better place to develop that stuff because you show the world that it lasts for 24 hours of heavy use instead of lift and coasting around an F1 track for 2 hours times 5 weekends or so, whereby the engines are stressed for considerably lower durations.
I am not convinced that F1 should be used for road relevance. Mercedes will tell that because the board will not let them race at Le Mans ever again. And I am pretty sure that most F1 fans do not give a damn about road relevance. They want to see powerful hard handling monsters that look, feel, sound and smell hard to drive. How road relevant were V12 atmospheric engines in the eighties. How road relevant is a V10? And how road relevant was a V8? ABS and EBD were road relevant but banned the moment somebody wanted to use it. F1 got powersteering when it was already used for years on roadcars. And does the Audi DSG automatic come from racing? I doubt it. And are flipper gearboxes relevant to road tech? Only sportcars have them, in most other cars it is just an automatic transmission with a flipper override.
Take your road relevance to some other place. FFS.
But bernie’s friends says…
I think that has been the best explanation we’ve had so far about this new technology and its relevance to road goers.
I want to see F1 at the forefront of technology, it makes me facepalm every time someone drones on about going back to N/A engines. Why would you chose something with less power, less torque, which also uses more fuel?
Road relevance doesn’t really bother me but since in many ways F1 and road cars strive for similar goals it only makes sense that they are linked. I think there just needs to be an acceptance that change isn’t always bad, after all without chance we’d be watching what, horse and carriage racing?
None of this new technology is groundbreaking, here is an example of a regenerative motor system that has real world applications but has been around for a number of years
http://www.5starscooters.com.au/product/alber-adventure-electric-wheelchair/
The current systems if we are talking green are only a bandaid,if f1 really wanted to blow away its carbon crater then it would be looking at burning hydrogen or even alcohol.
Dragsters have been doing this for years
Mein Reden seit ’45…
If F1 really wanted to go green they’d be runnin g hydrogen fuel cells.
“Hippo, F1 is not going green for the sake of being green. F1 is going to green in order to stay relevant to road car technology, since that’s where the road car technology is heading.”
Yeah. In the 20’s we should ALL have stayed with the horses, I tells ye! Old, proven technology. All this flashy stuff with ICE and pistons and…. wheels, how odd it must be to race… again… on wheels. We should strip down technology to its basics, and put a monkey spinning those pistons round and round and round…
Ridiculing aside, technology tends to move along. And holding to old technology (V8’s and all that) means going backwards in practical terms. Nowadays technology is craploads of a programming, and fancy optimizing, and F1 can’t avoid that for too long… So F1 needs to go “green” to stay relevant to technology altogether…
You didn’t understand the comment. If you have a “green” concept that allows them to race – bring it on. But if your green concept means that drivers have to ‘lift and coast’, ‘speed manage’, or ‘save shit’ then it isn’t fit for racing purposes.
Racing doesn’t need to be relevant. It’s only purpose, always has been, was to go as fast as possible from start to finish.
“…It’s only purpose, always has been, was to go as fast as possible from start to finish…”
Wrong. As any champion will tell you, they aim to win at the slowest pace.
None of these are unique to the supposed “Green” F1 of today. Drivers have been “managing” fuel consumption, tyre wear etc. for decades. I’m not sure why this is unacceptable now other than it is more widely known.
As you say..racing is in no way green, we go around in circles so the mpg is zero so why even whisper about reducing a carbon footprint when the tubs are made of the stuff. F1 needs to rethink what its about as there isn’t a single valid argument to even put across to the ego warriors. The battery store uses rare earth metals and the toxic sludge that’s left after production would melt whales. Even burning the limited fuel with a heat recovery system claiming a 40% recovery still produces carbon monoxide and other greenhouse gasses as I don’t believe they run a cat on the exhaust. Racing is totally earth unfriendly but really, 20 cars zooming around a oil based road surface floating on 4 plastic discs while the engine sits in a bath of old dinosaurs boosted by toxic metals holding a charge is a drop in the ocean when its flown around the entire globe in a fleet of 747’s. One thing no one has asked or answered is this, how much fuel do the hospitality unit generators use on a race weekend? Or the backup systems for the night races? Or even this..we race in the desert..bathed in perfectly good sunlight so why switch on 400 floodlights just so it looks cool?? I for one would gladly lose the night races and air con if we could just have our planet eating,ice cap melting,penguin killer of a race car back
I see Bernie is hoping to get back into car sales. Should customer cars be allowed, he will be acting as greedy piggy in the middle, between the manufacturing team and the buyers. Obviously taking a suitable cut from the transaction. It strikes me that changing the rules and directly benefitting from them is probably illegal in the EU.
I’m thinking F’ecclestone’s missed a trick with that lay day that Monaco garners.
If he could introduce that on a wider scale and tap in to the enormous extra cost imposed upon the followers, CVC would have an ever bigger smile on their way to the bank……..