How Much Fuel Does a Formula 1 Car Use?

formula one hybrid engines produce over 1 000 horsepower from a 1.6 liter v6 engine which is just incredible and the mercedes power unit is one of the most efficient internal combustion engines on the planet including road car engines but if you took your road car and did a full f1 race distance at a racetrack you would use less than one third of the fuel than the formula one car would now this might theme backwards surely improved efficiency leads to better fuel economy well not always and let me explain first we need to figure out the mpg or the fuel consumption a formula one car produces during a race so let's run the numbers formula 1 races are approximately 300 kilometers in length sometimes marginally more depending on how the lap distance works out but let's run with 300. and the cars are limited to just 110 kilograms of fuel which at typical temperatures is around 140 liters now depending on the track the cars don't always use all 110 kilograms but the majority of the time they do so what would you guess to be the mpg number based on these numbers this works out to just over six miles per gallon whilst at circuits like monaco this can be as high as seven when you compare this to the typical road car which in the uk is at 38 miles per gallon this seems very low so why exactly is this it all comes down to thermal efficiency which essentially is a fancy way of saying how much of the energy in the fuel is actually being used to push the car forward and for reference even the most efficient road cars don't get much above 30 efficiency this is for a number of reasons so let me show it like this this is the total energy that is contained in the fuel and so 35 of that goes into useful work i.e creating power so where does the rest go engines create a lot of heat by igniting the fuel and using that rapid expansion to push the pistons inside the cylinders but this leftover heat has to go somewhere and so it's mostly expelled in the hot exhaust gases and this is as much as 40 of the total energy think about that you put a tank of fuel in and then produce about 150 horsepower as you drive your vw golf around town as you're doing that you're losing 150 horsepower in just the heat in your exhaust gases this loss is pretty much unavoidable but still it's worth thinking about the next chunk of energy is lost to the coolant as this heat is produced it heats up the entirety of the engine and can cause real problems if your engine gets too hot so coolant is used to take this extra heat from the engine to the radiators before being cooled by the air you're driving through and then the rest is used by what we call parasitic losses this is stuff like friction within the engine as well as powering the camshafts and other mechanical systems that are needed to keep the engine running and what mercedes did in formula one was essentially steal back some of this lost energy their engine is achieving over 50 thermal efficiency which is an absolutely incredible feat and here's how the f1 engines take back some of this energy lost in the exhaust gases by using energy regeneration from the mguh this is a small generator that is connected to the turbocharger so when the car is off throttle it harvests energy back into the battery and hence can be used to produce more power when the hybrid energy is deployed on the next straight but all of the teams do this so what makes the mercedes engine special well they were the first to deploy these two ingenious systems the first thing is that they actually split the two halves of the turbocharger across the engine so where a normal turbo looks like this with the hot side and the call side connected by a small shaft mercedes took the two sections apart mounting the call side in front of the engine and the hot side behind it as i'm sure you know a turbo works by using the exhaust gases to power one turbine which then directly powers the compressor on the other side and pressurizes the air going into the engine this allows you to use more fuel and hence create more power but putting the cool side of the turbo on the other side of the engine to the hot side allows them to keep the cool side cooler and this means a smaller intercooler can be used and the air can be kept cooler in general and cool air is denser and so means the engine can produce more power really clever and this next innovation is even better it's called pre-chamber combustion you may have heard of running a car lean or rich and generally there is a sweet spot between them where the engine operates at its best but if you can run lean you can save fuel and depending on your engine and how you tune it you can often create similar power however typically running very lean can cause real issues i remember this from back when i was casting where you could actively change the fuel mix of the engine leaner was typically quicker but you always run the risk of overheating the engine and seizing it and to be honest i broke a fair few engines doing this now you can do the same thing with a car engine but if your mixture is too lean it can be hard to get the fuel to ignite properly and produce good power so what mercedes did was run an engine with pre-chamber combustion and this is so clever that since its introduction by mercedes pretty much the entire grid have coppered it they run a very lean mixture in the cylinders which would normally cause problems and create much less power but instead they ignite this using a very clever method they essentially have a small combustion chamber next to the fuel injector which is run fairly rich this rich mixture allows for proper ignition which creates small flame jets which then ignite the fuel in the main chamber this allows them to run the engines at similar power but with less fuel consumption absolutely genius and as i mentioned earlier this achieved a thermal efficiency of over 50 which is absolutely incredible and even if you compare this to the v8s and v10s that preceded these v6 engines they ran at about 35 to 40 thermal efficiency but back in the 80s the consumption was even worse the teams experimented with some very volatile fuels this allowed them to crank up the turbos and produce over 1400 horsepower for short bursts and we explain that in this video here thanks very much for watching make sure you subscribe to drive61 and i'll catch you in the next one

Channel: Driver61

Views: 525,081

Rating: 4.8914447 out of 5

Keywords: Formula 1, Driving, Coaching, Motorsport, Engineering, F1, Racing, Incredible Motorsport, Driver61, MPG, Fuel Efficiency, Fuel Economy, Thermal Efficiency, Engineering Explained, Fuel, Power, formula 1 2021, formula one, motor racing 2021, formula 1 documentary, belgianGP, belgian grand prix

Id: 9hd-L6mhkCU

Length: 6min 43sec (403 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 27 2021