Quote:
Originally Posted by AGD
It's a very intriguing option. I like it better than the current rules. How much controversy would their be in determining the energy content of each fuel?
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Energy content would be pretty easy to calculate, they would only have to be careful and analyze the actual fuel the race cars use - because it's not quite pump fuel, especially racing diesel I think.
But using only that criteria brings another issue: diesel is inherently more efficient than petrol by a few percentage points. It revs slower, the burns more efficiently... diesels would still have a decisive advantage, but this time because of the very philosophy of the rules as opposed to the current situation where the restrictor/boost tables are meant to make different engine types equal. Turbochargers and direct injection would also become mandatory for entrants who seriously want to have a shot because extra power would be directly linked to how much fuel one can save over a non-optimized baseline figure (fuel saved of course equals room for more power). Hybrid systems would also help gaining a bit of efficiency and would thus be needed to have the ideal powertrain.
Privateers, even if they added a KERS system to their Judds, would still lag behind the
highly optimized (and costly) systems the manufacturers would use, but this time that would be because it would be the very intent of the rules. That's unless another dimension is added to the rules to give them some hope of being competitive without spending 50 million dollars for all the gizmos that help them gain the 5%-10% efficiency richer teams will always have. But then we're back to the equalization that already generated a hundred pages of discussion here and God knows it's tricky to get it right...