(no title)
neor | 5 years ago
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.
koffiezet|5 years ago
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.
Hypx|5 years ago
mywittyname|5 years ago
F1 cars have more in common with jets than road cars and hydrogen is a dead end technology.
what_ever|5 years ago
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?
PedroBatista|5 years ago
Well, that didn’t play out the way they hoped so either they commit to F1 spending billions ( I wouldn’t ) or get out.