WHAT MAKES FORMULA ONE RUN ? / THE NEW YORK TIMES ( RECOMMENDED READING )

August 27, 2010

What Makes Formula One Run?

By BRAD SPURGEON

In a glamorous sport where drivers risk their lives at high speed and the paddock attracts movie stars, rock musicians and billionaire entrepreneurs, what chance of making the headlines has a hidden piece of precision engineering under the hood?

Car engines hold little interest for most people. Even Formula One fans generally prefer to talk about a sexy new aerodynamic wing on the chassis than a modified piston. Yet in the words of Rob White, the director of the Renault team’s engine department, it is the thing that turns the sleek, inanimate racing car into a vital force.

“The Formula One car is a beautiful object. It’s a fascinating piece of equipment, but it is completely inanimate on static display,” said White at the team’s engine factory in Viry-Châtillon, outside Paris. “It is not the same object if you start a motor in its rear and make it make a noise — it is immediately a violent, powerful thing.

“You feel it in your chest when you’re in front of that car on the race track,” he added, “It’s absolutely a different thing — and the principal difference is the engine.”

Yes, Formula One is also about the ear-shattering song of the growling and whining engine.

“An engine gives life to the car,” added Axel Plasse, a director of engine development at Renault. “When fired up, a Formula One car breathes air, consumes fuel and moves. This is the definition of life: We consume food, we breathe air and we move.”

Indeed, there is a human story behind the most technologically advanced car engines in the world, that rivals anything in the paddock for its splendor. Who would have thought, for instance, that these $300,000 objects are hand-assembled by two or three technicians like Swiss watchmakers?

And for the skeptics who say this is a gas-guzzling, polluting sport, the very nature of Formula One’s technological and sporting challenge makes these among the most environmentally friendly engines in the world. The goal of the engineers is to make the engines as fuel efficient as possible to gain a competitive edge by starting the race with as little fuel in the car’s tank as possible and creating power without wasted friction.

Because the Formula One rules limit the engine capacity and the maximum revs, the only way to increase engine performance and power is to have better combustion and to reduce friction losses in the parts, therefore reducing fuel consumption.

“Although we pursue the power of the engine with great aggression, equally on our hit list is its fuel efficiency, because that directly plays on the performance of the race car on the track,” said White of Renault. “The lower the fuel consumption of the engine, the less is the weight of the fuel that the race car needs to carry in order to get to the end of the race. The lower the car weight, then the faster the car is.”

At full power the fuel consumption is better than most road car engines — with less CO2 production compared with a gasoline car driven at high speed — although this is not the case at low speed because of catalytic converters on road cars. So the fuel consumption relative to the power — Formula One cars use biofuel — is much smaller than on road cars.

“In terms of bang for your buck, a Formula One engine is a paragon of efficiency,” said Mark Gallagher, head of the Cosworth Formula One engine program.

“For a given amount of fuel we produce so much power, compared to say a standard road car,” he said. “You see a Toyota Prius drive down the road and you see that is a fuel-efficient car; a Formula One car’s efficiency in burning fossil fuels is better than the Toyota Prius.”
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The series is now also studying a new, even more environmentally friendly engine in the next half decade that could help develop less polluting road car engines as of 2013.

“It’s our bread and butter to make these engines efficient,” White said, “because that’s how we make the racing car competitive.”

This season there are four engine builders — Renault, Mercedes, Cosworth and Ferrari — supplying 12 teams. For a cold — or rather, hot — technology, their story is really one not of technology, but of people. Still, as technological objects, the statistics regarding raw power are also extraordinary.

“A Formula One engine takes three people five days to assemble, and that engine’s total life is normally 2,000 kilometers and most of the components are no longer used,” said Mattia Binotto, head of engine operations at Ferrari. “These engines rev at 18,000 r.p.m., which means that the pistons go up and down 300 times every second. Knowing that, you can understand what it means in terms of output power, in terms of speed, in terms of being at the limit.”

The technological race to build the best engines lost some of its attraction when, to cut costs, the International Automobile Federation, the rule-making body, imposed an engine development freeze from 2008 to 2012. Costs had begun to get out of control, with engines being made for qualifying, for practice and for the race.

Binotto said he remembered when Ferrari took 15 engines to the Japanese Grand Prix. Now the rules limit teams to 16 engines for each driver for the whole season of 19 races. “The challenge is still there,” he said, “to do the best with only 16 engines.”

The components’ design is frozen, but the usage of the engine is not frozen. It is possible to develop a leaner fuel mixture to get the same power output with less fuel, or run at hotter temperature or improve the drivability of the engine. Engine lubricants can be developed, too.

“It’s a question of pushing all the details to the top, rather than all the components,” said Binotto. “You can do things with the process of the machining to get better quality with the same components and material.”

But despite all this precision engineering, each hand-built engine, according to Gallagher of Cosworth, is different.

“Each engine, when it is delivered to a team, is delivered with a power curve for that motor, and the teams will develop their strategies on their simulations based on that specific data for that motor,” Gallagher said. “You don’t have a generic engine, you have got an engine which produces a certain type of performance within a certain band.”

It all goes back, of course, to what the driver wants and needs. And as each one has a different driving style, they search for different kinds of responses from the engines. .

While the fans only see the races running every two weeks, behind the scenes technicians are constantly at work running engines on test benches that mimic entire races. Software on the car “records” electronically an entire Grand Prix from what a driver does with his foot on the accelerator, and the engine in the test room “replays” that recording as the technicians analyze the engine wear and drivability.

The “recording” of Fernando Alonso’s drive around the Monza track is still used in Viry, and so a visitor hears the roar of the engine changing gears in just the way that Alonso drove at Monza. But that differs from another driver’s style, so each driver also requires specific tweaks to his engines.

“Nowadays, what we are looking for is good drivability,” said Jarno Trulli, a driver at the Lotus team, “which means the possibility and the chance of the driver to use the engine power in the best possible way during the acceleration without having too much wheel spin.”