Quote:
Originally Posted by JABWOA
I read this as each car should have limited amount of items each race - ie, 4 wheels, 1 cockpit, 1 front wing, 1 back wing and 1 power unit. Damage it, day is done or fight on as is.
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I think I read somewhere that this is how NASCAR does it with their engines. Not to downplay NASCAR technology, that can working in a series that effectively has tightly controlled technology that generates solutions that are generally reliable, well understood and in the grand scheme of things... cheap (lets say ~$80k per engine). I have read this works out to ~$3M per season (30+ races). Which is clearly doable. And some smaller teams will run the same engine for more than one or two races.
Lets look at current F1 numbers...
Some quick Google help says teams may be spending ~$8 million to lease what is supposed to be four engines per season. That comes to $2M per engine. With 20 races per F1 season, that is ~$40M just in engines alone.
I know these numbers are not accurate. First, who knows how accurate my Google searches are, but also because part of the larger lease fee is support costs and other overhead, etc. which means the actual per engine cost is lower. Also in both NASCAR and F1, there are additional engines that would be used for testing, etc. So with a fixed per season cost, that also drives down the per engine costs.
But in general it should illustrate that F1 can't scale up the current engines to be "one race" engines because the engines are so expensive. Now, maybe they can be made to cost less if the longevity is not built in. But frankly the manufactures have already engineered in the longevity and it would take new R&D to try to make them cheaper and you know that what would happen is it would be a race to extract performance at the cost of reliability and not a race to drive down the cost by keeping the same performance. So would the cost drop much? For the current spec, I suspect not.
What can potentially happen is that lets say the rules do allow for one engine per weekend. I expect the manufacturers would want cost reductions baked into a revised engine spec because not only could their customers not afford the engines, they also wouldn't want to be spending that much money themselves.
Basically the above could work if there was a drastic rework of the engine spec to create VERY simple engines. And that is not a bad thing. Question is... would current manufactures continue to be interested in providing low tech simple engines? They may complain, but in reality, they probably would be OK with it.
Richard