Quote:
Originally Posted by GTRMagic
See that's the bit I dont get... put the engine in the back of one of their HPD sports cars and drive teh wheels off it for days on end on circuits across the world. Once it actually runs for more than 10 laps at a time without blowing up, transfer it into a McLaren.
Surely its not that hard to achieve on-track testing..
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It's tempting to think along those lines, but I believe that you will find that it is the "packaging" of the power-units that seems to be one of the major problems that the teams are encountering. On a sports car, there is a lot more space in and around the PSU environment, plus they have additional space at the front and the sides in which to place parts that feed the PSU.
This is a luxury that doesn't exist on a modern single seater, although the radiators are in the the side but they are probably still smaller than on the average sports car. And to return to earlier comments made on this or another thread, nowadays it would seem evident that no matter how many hours the engineers run the PSUs in test beds, they can never replicate the reality of running them in the actual chassis on a real track.
This truly shows how brilliant the engineers at Mercedes/Ilmor were/are as it would seem as though they were the only ones that produced a power-unit that worked pretty well as it was designed to do right from the get-go at the beginning of testing last year. I believe also that there are rumours along the pit lane that Mercedes are not even running their PSUs at their maximum potential, as so far no one else is really able to challenge them.