A six-pack to make your head spin

Tiny V6? That isn’t the half of it. Six connected elements will contribute to the biggest F1 power shake-up in years. And don’t get us started on the aero…
Writer Adam Cooper

This season represents a brave new world for the F1 World Championship and at this stage, with the 2014 cars finally emerging and taking to the track for the first time, it’s impossible to predict what the overall impact on the sport will be, never mind make a call on how Ferrari, Mercedes-Benz and Renault stack up.

What is clear is that preparing for the new rules has been a huge challenge, both for the three manufacturers and the 11 teams with whom they work, and that no one is entirely confident they have got their sums right.

“I think it’s probably the biggest change I’ve seen in more than 30 years of doing F1,” says Williams chief technical officer Pat Symonds. “People might say that we went from ground effect to flat bottom, we’ve gone from turbo engines to normally aspirated, all this sort of stuff.

“But this time we’re going to a very different type of power train, and the aerodynamic changes have gone almost under the radar compared with the power train changes. But they are really significant. Overall, the two things together make me feel comfortable in saying it’s the biggest change I’ve seen.”

Ferrari technical director James Allison adds, “It’s the biggest set of regulation changes in my professional career. Accommodating the new power unit is the biggest part of that, but almost thrown in as a sideshow are the largest aerodynamic changes we’ve seen since 2009.”

Power unit

Since the last year of the old turbos in 1988, F1’s engine makers have experienced relatively gentle transitions, with the drop from 3.5- to 3.0-litre capacity in 1995 followed by a relatively seamless switch to 2.4 V8s for 2006. Then KERS came along in 2009, albeit as an optional extra.

The shift to the 1.6-litre turbo V6 and associated energy recovery systems, in conjunction with a tight fuel flow limit, is of a previously unseen order of magnitude. It’s been a massive task for the three engine suppliers, and they were not helped by a false start with the original four-cylinder format, dumped by the FIA during the summer of 2011 in favour of a V6.

The traditional term ‘engine’ has a new meaning, because it’s now just one element of the six that what we must now call the ‘power unit’. The FIA regulations handily sum it up thus: “The power unit will be deemed to comprise six separate elements, the engine (ICE), the motor generator unit – kinetic (MGU – K), the motor generator unit – heat (MGU – H), the energy store (ES), turbocharger (TC) and control electronics (CE).”

Get used to those acronyms. Their significance is that a driver has only five examples of each element to use on the 19 Saturdays and Sundays that comprise the 2014 season, and if reliability issues lead to a sixth turbo or battery being needed, grid penalties will start to accumulate.

The road to this month’s car launches has been a long one.

“The electrical subsystems are extremely important,” says Renault engine chief Rob White. “There were some similarities with existing KERS, but it was absolutely not transposable, because of the system sizing. We also needed to design and develop turbocharger solutions, which are actually very different to road cars. So we had a number of these programmes to set off in parallel. And then the macro project over the top of that was to have three phases of learning and gaining experience.”

Renault started with single cylinders, followed by what White terms a “dyno donkey” V6 to test systems, and finally the first version of the engine that will actually race. The latter reached the dyno in June 2013 and development hasn’t stopped since.

“The fruits of all these parallel programmes came together,” says White. “We had to characterise the performance versus reliability envelope for the whole thing, and also push the performance, push the reliability, develop the control systems, and develop what we call the energy management.”

It’s been an extremely intense process, one made more complicated by the need to commit to making parts for the season way in advance of the first actual track running.

“It’s not a World Championship for dynos,” White says, “and the acid test is the car – with such a big change we’re all extremely anxious about the learning that will be done during the first tests. And the very real challenge is to incorporate what we learn the first time we run it in time to fix any outstanding trouble for the next time we run it, and more importantly for the early races. It’s going to be extremely difficult, tough, bloody – call it what you will!”

The greatest challenge is that the final engine spec has to be homologated before the first race in Melbourne, although some scope for limited updates is built into the regs.

Packaging

Just as significant as any outright performance factors, the complex new power units must successfully be incorporated into the chassis. It’s been a monumental task – and engineers have been more eager than ever to see what approach rivals have taken.

“Physically trying to integrate that much stuff into the car in a neat package is quite challenging,” says Ferrari director of engineering Pat Fry. “There will be some dramatic differences in cars, for once. It’s not like just looking at the aerodynamics: what have people done differently, what’s right, what’s wrong, what can you do? You’re going to be doing all that with the engine and ERS systems as well: how people choose to run that, what’s the trade of packaging for turbo size, radiator areas, seeing what people have actually done.”

Symonds concurs. “I certainly don’t think everyone will be the same,” he says. “I think we’ll see several different interpretations. I guess as rules stabilise and mature, people tend to gravitate towards the best of those solutions.

“The biggest challenge is the packaging of the power train in two particular areas. One is weight. On a 2013 car with KERS it was not easy to get to the weight limit, but it could be done, and I guess every car out there carried an amount of ballast – although not what they had prior to KERS. In 2014 it’s going to be really difficult getting to the weight limit.

“The second thing that’s going to be hard is the vastly increased cooling requirement. With these engines we’ve had to think again about what the duty cycle is – basically the amount of full throttle. And then we’ve had to do the energy management, which is another challenge. We’ve really had to think a lot more about the harvesting, the storage.”

No designer wants to compromise aero efficiency by being too generous with cooling provision, but cut things too fine and there could be huge problems once the cars run in the heat of, say, Bahrain. Just to make life more difficult, the goalposts have been moving as engine developers find more performance and have to tell teams to allow for greater cooling capacity.

“It’s one of those years when you need to be developing the car rather than fixing cooling problems,” Fry says. “If you get the cooling wrong a huge amount of work goes into fixing radiators, bodywork and so on. I’m sure they’ve done it here in the past. We certainly did it at my former place [McLaren], where you pissed away the first couple of months…”

Gearbox

Teams are limited to eight gearbox ratios for the whole year and these have to be nominated before the season starts. That restriction gave engineers a lot to think about – the same eight gears have to be used at Monaco and Monza – although the consensus is that it’s not such a big deal, thanks to the torque available.

“It’s got another gear but that doesn’t make things terribly complicated,” says Symonds. “We would like a little bit more knowledge of how we use the engine to get those right, but it’s not a game-changer. The engine’s got a huge amount of torque. At 20,000rpm a normally aspirated engine was quite sensitive to ratios – these things are not going to be anywhere near as sensitive. The biggest challenge with the gearbox is that you’ve got the turbocharger sitting pretty damn close to it, and you have the exhaust over the top of it.”

Aerodynamics

There’s no escaping the fact that 2014 cars look… different, thanks not least to their ungainly low noses. It’s a result of a change introduced for safety, so that they meet the sidepod crash structures in T-bone accidents.

Aside from the cooling issues already outlined, three key regulation changes have had a massive aero impact. The front wing is now 100mm narrower, while the beam (ie lower) rear wing has been outlawed. Significantly, the black art of using exhaust gases to gain downforce is no more, as exhausts now exit from the rear, far away from the diffuser.

The changes add up to significantly reduced downforce.

“After taking a 2013 car and doing a quick legalisation to 2014 rules, the initial downforce drop was 30 per cent,” Symonds says. “Of course, it doesn’t stay like that for long, as you start seeing what’s really screwing things up. But it’s of that sort of order, about 2008-09 levels, and a lot of people got that quite wrong. There were semantics in the interpretation of those rules, and I hope we’re not going to see something similar in 2014…”

The changes have created a lot of headaches, notably because the narrower front wing changes the way the end plates interact with the tyres.

“I think the hardest thing will be the front wing endplate change,” Allison says. “It was an innocent little change when we dreamt it up, ages ago now – it was just to make the front wings a little less vulnerable to cars hitting one another at the start. But actually it has made a lot of the development of the last few years semi-obsolete. Reinventing that from scratch, and doing a good job of it, will be a challenge for all the teams.”

“The narrower front wing is the most significant of the changes,” Symonds adds. “Although I guess those who got their exhaust blowing to work might say that’s pretty significant. Those who didn’t are maybe breathing a sigh of relief! I can’t say I’m sorry to see it go.

“Don’t underestimate the loss of the beam wing. The beam wing in itself is not a terribly powerful device, but what it did was connect the low pressure from the top wing to the diffuser. By removing the beam wing you’ve created a separation between the top wing and the diffuser that really makes it quite difficult for the two to interact. So the loss there is more significant than you might think.”

What it all means

Creating a package for the new rules is one challenge, operating it successfully quite another. While factory simulators have been busy over the winter, teams still have a great deal to learn, especially about how to get the best from the ERS.

Ferrari engine boss Luca Marmorini says: “Once the driver asks for torque, and pushes the throttle, we will have to decide how much of this torque will come from the engine and how much from the electric motor. This will be part of the strategy.”

White says: “The way the systems are operated becomes another variable in terms of the way you achieve car performance. One way to tackle reliability or driveability is to fiddle with the settings. There are more adjustable settings in the new power units than the previous ones… And not only are there more, but the influence of some variables is much greater.

“You can wind a knob on the engine control and change the engine life from a few fractions of a second to a few thousand kilometres. Engines will be extremely sensitive to detonation. Clearly, when looking for the edge of the performance, we will want to flirt with that limit, but we will want to be reasonably risk-averse, because you pay very dearly, very quickly, if you overstep the mark.”

With only 100kg of fuel available from lights to flag, will races turn into Mobil economy runs? At some circuits, possibly.

“At some races 100kg will be difficult,” Symonds says. “It’s not going to be every race. There are plenty where 100kg is going to be fine and we’ll be able to run full power throughout.”

“We’ll need to decide when to go flat out and when to save fuel,” Fry says. “It’s going to be a game of strategy. All the teams will be doing the same thing; we’ll all be trying to outsmart each other, so it’s a battle that will be fought and won in ‘simulationland’, I guess.”

That might be a depressing thought for the purist, but fear not – the very best drivers, those who are both savvy and can adapt to changing circumstances, should still reap rewards.

“I don’t think management of energy is going to be a big problem for the drivers, they’ve just got to do what they’re told,” Symonds says. “The way you’re really going to save fuel is to lift on the straights, that’s the most effective way. You lose very little lap time, but it needs discipline. However, getting the most out of the car in terms of performance with a very different type of power train will require a particular driving style, and that will be where the intelligent guys will really benefit.

“It’s not just that it’s got a turbocharger. It’s so highly hybridised that the whole way you operate it is different. Torque curves are different, it’s going to affect the vehicle dynamics and it’s going to affect the tyres in a big way. You’ve certainly got enough torque to do a lot more damage than you did before.”

Reliability will be a huge story, especially in the first part of the season, and all elements of the new power units are potentially vulnerable. Just think how many times we’ve seen the Red Bull drivers forced to switch off or nurse a dodgy KERS system. Last year it cost a few tenths in lap time, but an ERS issue in 2014 will invariably mean retirement.

“It affects your braking systems, everything,” says Symonds. “We’ve looked at FMEA [Failure Mode and Effects Analysis] and limp-home strategies for failures during the last couple of laps, but any earlier than that… These are bloody complicated bits of machinery, but I don’t think there will be mayhem. There won’t be hand-grenading turbochargers left right and centre, like we saw in the Eighties.”

So, will we have a competitive championship? Only time will tell.

“There are openings to make mistakes,” Allison says. “The professionalism of all the teams is at an all-time high. There is sufficient opportunity for any team to dominate if it does a good job. That’s true of any season. Red Bull has been very strong for a number of years, but anyone who’s watched this sport knows nothing lasts forever…”