ScottChegg – Member

I think they had a disctinct advantage coming into F1 when they did.

They could watch Renault and Ferrari make their mistakes last year and have a good long look at the Merc unit in the back of the McLaren which is a tremendous leg-up.

I can’t see why all the best bits couldn’t be pulled together to make a decent unit. I get that it wouldn’t work straight out of the box but with all of Honda’s previous turbo experience etc etc

Although I enjoy watching F1, I am not that familiar with the rules around what they can and can’t do, or the secrecy around the technologies so perhaps this is a stupid question….but….how do Honda have the opportunity to have a good long look at the Merc unit and how would they go about pulling together the best bits?

Surely they can’t just ask Merc for one of their engines so they can benchmark it and make their own version?
Won’t their engine have to be developed from the ground up around the rules/regulations of what the requirements for that engine are?
Just being able to see the Mercedes engine going quickly round a track doesn’t mean that Honda can just take the good bits and run with it? They need to know what the good bits are and how to replicate them and indeed make them better.

I never thought for one minute that Honda would come into this season and be anywhere other than struggling given the effort it has taken the other teams.
I hope by next season, they will have more of a grasp on the requirements and would have something that can at least keep up with the rest of the field.
I assume that Honda still don’t have the energy recovery stuff fully sorted so are having to use more fuel in the race as they aren’t getting as much ‘free energy’.

Stumpy – McLaren ran the Mercedes engine last year, so you’d have thought they’d have had Honda down the factory stripping and analysing it.

One of the big revelations last season was the split turbo on the Merc. Innovative; very clever. Most teams had spy shots of that after the first few races.

Yet Honda were doing a deal with McLaren to make a world class engine. You know, just like the one in the back of the (then) current car.

Am I a cynic, or would the opportunity to have a very close look at the set up be too good to miss? In the car, out of the car, in pieces?

Rather than a clean sheet of paper, that would get you along way down the path of building a motor, chuck in a few smart tips and tricks and you would think a good unit would be the result.

McLaren are a smart outfit, you would think they would have a few key improvements they would like rather than the fait accompli of a customer engine, even if it was the best in the field.

they kind of did their own thing

dooosuk – Member

Stumpy – McLaren ran the Mercedes engine last year, so you’d have thought they’d have had Honda down the factory stripping and analysing it.

Oh yeah. I forgot about that!!

LOL. There’s no chance that Merc let Honda have a look at the engine. In fact, they only allowed McL to do stuff on it supervised by Merc people for this very reason. McL staff have no reason to look inside the engine so would only know about the externals of it and certainly little about the detail of the control, etc of the non-IC parts of the engine.

Its interesting that everyone is talking about Alonso being able to leave and get a drive is a decent car and no mention of Button being able to do the same. Is this because Button doesnt have a get out clause in his contract or because he wont find anywhere better that will have him?

…or because he wont find anywhere better that will have him?

This – he was nearly out of F1 for good at the end of last season.

I’m a big fan of Button but he’s a very good driver, not a great one like Alonso/Hamilton (and maybe Vettel). The view is that he wouldn’t get a drive at another top team at present as there aren’t any seats spare that would take him.

Jenson was on the edge of retirement last year; I think he’ll be quite happy to putter about at the back; getting to the airport before everyone else and thinking about his lovely salary.

Alonso still has aspirations of World Championships; I don’t think this year is realistic. He would at least sit the rest of the season out, unless he gets back in the Lotus?

I’d wager that Alonso won’t be winning any more F1 championships.

Have to say, I don’t think that would be an awful bet. Mind you, we just don’t know with Honda – could be that they have the basics of a brilliant engine but that they’ve pushed things too far to the limit for now so that it’s going to take much longer to get the benefit (due to detuning for reliability) than Alonso has

due to detuning for reliability

**sniggers**

One of the big revelations last season was the split turbo on the Merc. Innovative; very clever. Most teams had spy shots of that after the first few races.

Yet Honda were doing a deal with McLaren to make a world class engine. You know, just like the one in the back of the (then) current car.

Am I a cynic, or would the opportunity to have a very close look at the set up be too good to miss? In the car, out of the car, in pieces?

Rather than a clean sheet of paper, that would get you along way down the path of building a motor, chuck in a few smart tips and tricks and you would think a good unit would be the result.

McLaren are a smart outfit, you would think they would have a few key improvements they would like rather than the fait accompli of a customer engine, even if it was the best in the field.
The evidence would suggest that it’s maybe not quite as simple as looking at a good engine from the outside and building one the same.

That’s certainly still plausible on the basis of available information – given that engine changes for reliability reasons are free, it’s a no brainer to leave that bit to work on rather than the required performance level when engine specs are frozen.

An alternative view on what’s wrong with F1 is that we now have too much information. Tyre, fuel and brake management have been part of F1 to a greater or lesser extent in the past – it’s not as if we’ve never seen a race won or lost because someone ran out of fuel or had brake failure. But back in the day all the driver had was a fuel gauge and the seat of their pants. After that they had more info but we didn’t hear it. Now the teams are micro managing every aspect, continuously feeding updates to the driver and that then gets relayed to the viewing public.

So rather than us just seeing a gap decreasing we now know that the guy in front is doing 100m of lift and coast and is trying to eke another 3 laps out of their tyres. What if the fia had carried through the full team radio restriction so all the driver got told was what was on the pit board? The driver would then be making their own calls and we’d get less predictably and maybe a better show.

Almost word for word what Brundle’s just said…

If the drivers weren’t saving the brakes, it was fuel or tyres. I explained to my mates that during the 1980s and ’90s, when I was lucky enough to drive, we were doing all of that and significantly more. We also had to look after the clutch, gearbox dog rings, driveshafts, suspension and much more. So what’s changed the perception from what a good number of fans consider the finest era of F1 racing?

Back then, we didn’t have much, if any, telemetry on the cars. We weren’t sending back bursts of data shared by the pitwall, the back of the garage, and a factory-based mission control. The drivers were managing all of this and hoping for the best. Reliability was shocking even into the 2000s but critically all this housekeeping and babysitting wasn’t being beamed to the TV audience in great detail via team radio.

This aspect has really changed the perception of what’s going on, which is all important. I’ve often thought about this but it’s never hit me so hard as during the Canadian GP. Unfortunately we weren’t helped out by rainfall or even a Safety Car. Some would say they weren’t pushing hard enough to crash but that’s too harsh. The top speeds and braking energy generated were brutal. I spoke to many fans after the race and they were buzzing with excitement from having been trackside, and so we are not getting this energy across well enough on the TV and we are diluting it with endless cautious radio calls.
http://www1.skysports.com/f1/news/24096/9879047/f1-is-on-the-wrong-wavelength-with-radio-ga-ga

It’s like Colin Chapman said, something like ‘if the car doesn’t break as you cross the line, it’s built too well’.
It’s the nature of the sport to push everything to the limit, but now we know what the limit is so the drivers can back off so they can just cross the line.
I remember when most cars didn’t finish (ok, maybe not most, but many) because of unreliability. I’d rather see drivers back off and finish then only have a handful running at the end.

if the car doesn’t break as you cross the line, it’s built too well’.

Wouldn’t be much good in these days of 5 race engines and gearboxes 😉

I remember when most cars didn’t finish (ok, maybe not most, but many) because of unreliability. I’d rather see drivers back off and finish then only have a handful running at the end.

IMO the push for ever greater reliability is one of the problems for F1.

Reliability is for sportscar racing not F1.

4 engines per year, no in-season development, sod-all testing. Yep – all fine if your desired outcome is to see one team lead and the others unable to catch up until the engine regs are changed again xx years down the line.

I want to see engines blowing up and gearboxes breaking – adds some spice to it all.

the flip side is the viewers cant digest the information the teams are getting. Long gone are the days of watching a spot move around a map. In moto gp there are rev counters, gear indicators, lean angles and that new invention rotating cameras. The information is fragmented and the viewer is lost on what strategy / fuel consumption and any thing related to delta.

If they want more than watching cars going around in circles they have to make it meaningful when they back off or let cars through without a fight. As usual its the the last few laps after the final round of pitstops does the story unfold as to who has fallen off the cliff, run out of brakes, needs to conserve fuel. I dont think even the commentators have enough information at hand. If bernie wants a better show he has to get a a super computer in to crunch the numbers and show us whats going on in realtime for the viewers to appreciate what the drivers / teams are doing

Nah. I used to like it when the leader had to coax the spluttering car round the track with the fuel tank about empty and the turbo set to zero boost as the rest of the field tried to catch him.

I still think that giving them a few points for the qualifying times, but sending them off in reverse championship order would be good.
Vettel did ok working his way up through the field – anyone good should be able to do the same.
Result? Lots of overtaking and more reliance on a driver’s racing ability (though a fast car would still be a bit, ok quite a lot, useful). At the end of the season you’d know that a fast car, with a good driver, both quick and able to overtake without hitting things would win the championship. You wouldn’t get champions who’d only made half a dozen overtakes all season. And for the sponsors? Well the big teams would still be big, big the little teams would be running ahead and on camera more often – ought to share the money out a bit more.

I like the proposal of removing all driver coaching from the radio communication.

Give the drivers a fuel gauge on their car and let them decide as the race unfolds when to lift and coast. Or let them decide how much energy they should put through their new set of tyres etc. The teams can still monitor everything but unless there is a safety concern they cannot let the driver know.

Is there any news about making the rules stricter in the future?

Mclaren-Honda news isn’t good, Jenson Button has given up on the idea of a podium this season and apparently McLaren have sent some of their IT and software experts over to Honda.

looking at a good engine from the outside and building one the same.

Well they haven’t. They’ve gone their own way with the axial flow compressor whose benefits are hard to see.

I don’t see how Buttons pronouncement is a surprise; he can only just stay in front of Manor!

All this talk of McLaren Honda’s piss poor performance ignores the inevitable ups and downs of motor sport. Compare Williams’ championship points haul for 2013 and 2014.

i agree with @igm

what i dont understand is there are a lot of little things that could really spice up F1 without increasing costs or the big teams thinking “i’m giving away my advantages”

like what @igm said, make it almost zero communications except for when the driver asks to pit, and he has to choose the tyres too, and emergency messages (yellow/red flags etc) from pitwall and just use the pit board and a fuel guage and a few other buttons they have now.

above is just an example, but there are many other ways of small changes to help spice up the show .

it now seems that the Tyre situation will remain the same until at least 2020 as the new tender from the FIA is the same as the old one….
why dont they let the teams run whatever tyres they want for any race without this “using 2 compounds” …but limit the number of sets PER DRIVER PER SEASON and they will HAVE to run all the different compounds at some point, and if one driver crashes in the race, we know he’ll have a good race in the next one because he has a few extra super-softs he can chuck on and go all out….
this would help the championship get a little tighter, a bit more variety in who wins and when, and season-long tactics as to when to use tyres they prefer to the ones they do not….

again, no extra cost…

Pirelli pay a lot for advertising at the race tracks. that’s why they’ll keep the contact – Bernie wants it…

As to the radio messages, teams want control. Radio gives them that – they can tell the driver to watch the brakes or that their fuel consumption is too high or to short shift in gear X because it’s looking a bit dodgy – and avoids DNFs which the teams really hate.

When you do the sums for the number of tyres that the tyre mfr has to make for 1 single race weekend, for 2 slick compounds, inters and wets… it’s pretty understandable why there’s not really free reign. Would have to be each team booking their preferred compounds for each race in advance.
At least in the current set up Pirelli send one complete delivery to a race, and nothing gets shipped from race to the next race.

Allow two sets for the weekend. Quali on one set, race on the other lights-to-flag, with the quali set available in case of puncture. No undercut nonsense. You want more points, you have to pass.
edit: puncture twice, and it’s retirement or risk the inters if it’s the last few laps.

As to the radio messages, teams want control. Radio gives them that – they can tell the driver to watch the brakes or that their fuel consumption is too high or to short shift in gear X because it’s looking a bit dodgy – and avoids DNFs which the teams really hate.

Of course they do, but all it does is turn the drivers into glorified monkeys and ruin the spectacle for the viewer. I’d ban all radio comms, and only have pt lane boards. The teams would be allowed to install black boxes for post race analysis.

And there’s where is comes down to the teams’ conflict between self interest and the interest of the sport. Scary as it is, the only way you’ll resolve that is to give Bernie and Todt control of that and I’m not sure that’s great in itself for the long term.

The biggest problem at the moment is the fuel restriction. Give them 150 ltrs, let them turn up the engine and really go for it. If they explode or run out it’ll mix the pack up.

No it’s not – there are plenty of races now where teams are not topping the tanks and that’ll only increase as the engines are further refined.

You could more easily mandate filling the tanks to 100 litres regardless of how much fuel they need but that seems rather against the green credentials the sport is aiming for.

The fuel flow limit prevents team running much more dramatic lift and coast strategies so increasing that would actually make the situation look worse.

my understanding is they are bound by the fuel flow rate they are allowed. I read that they are now fueling the cars below the 100kg limit as to reduce the weight penalty on the lap time. I guess the short fall is made up by the efficiency of the ers of which some are more efficient than others and hence use less fuel.

Coulthard pointed out that even before the fuel limit they always tended to put less fuel in than required to drive flat out for the whole race, as it’s faster to do that and have to do some fuel saving than it is to carry the extra weight of fuel around.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/formula1/33060280

I don’t buy that.

If the leader has 850hp and the guy behind turns his engine up to 1,200hp, it won’t take long to make up a second a lap for the weight penalty.

But they’re not talking about turning the engine down to that extent – the fuel saving they are doing costs them far less than that on lap time, the fuel saved by doing so gains them more.

Well it’s how it is whether you buy it or not…

If you allowed 1200bhp (ie free fuel flow), aside from needing a complete redesign of the engines and gearboxes, etc to cope with the massive increase in loads, everyone would be doing massive lift and coast (assuming that you’re going to keep some restriction on tank size).

If you expand tank size, that goes against the direction the engine manufacturers want to make the sport have some relevance to real world cars.

Also don’t forget that there’s interaction with the tyres – if you allowed 150l tanks, the tyres would be even more on edge compared to now so although the drivers would be quick on the straights they’d have to tiptoe round the corners which would mean more pressure on the brakes so looking after those more and so on.

The main thing to try and fix IMO is the tyres – make it so that they can be ragged a bit longer and a lot of the issues would be sorted. Fuel saving and brake concern is nothing new, it just wasn’t on the radio. Driving 5s below what you could theoretically do because the tyres will die otherwise is the problem.

The thing is, everyone is looking back in time misty eyed at big tyres and bucking bronco cars, in 88 McLaren won 15 out of 16 races in an era whic h was fuel and boost restricted – the Honda engine together with Senna and Prost kept things interesting.

In 92, Williams dominated with active suspension – technology ruled so they banned it all. I still think the hastily thought banning of active aids led to the death of two drivers (Roland and Ayrton) as the cars were simply too fast for the drivers to control safely.

In 2000 era Schumacher and Bridgestone dominated the sport – there was a rumour that Bridgestine were providing Ferrari tyres costing 100k each!

Today, the only thing that needs sorting is the tyres, they are frankly rubbish. We need tyres that can go the distance and give the current format 5 years to work. The alternative is to strip the cars back to basics, take the wings off, make them more like road cars – hang on that would be touring cars!

It ain’t broke, Bernie likes us to think it’s broke because it suits his agenda, it undermines Todt, pleases Ferrari and that’s all that he cares about.

If you allowed 1200bhp (ie free fuel flow), aside from needing a complete redesign of the engines and gearboxes

Well, that wasn’t an issue in the mid 80’s when cars frequently had 1500hp in Qualifying trim.

The difference is the rule book getting thicker and thicker, and any innovation is almost always banned. Chuck way half the rules and the Formula will get broader and smarter.

Loads of power! Wide tyres! Big wings!

there was a rumour that Bridgestine were providing Ferrari tyres costing 100k each!

So? No-one was forcing them to. They decided that was what worth it to raise the profile of the brand.