Red Bull's SECRET Engine Upgrades to Beat Mercedes | Formula 1 Engineering

so we've seen the intense battle between max verstappen and lewis hamilton this year max parking his car on top of lewis in monza lewis being pushed onto the curbs in imola and max being fired off into the barrier at silverstone but we're engineering nerds here so let's dive into the battle between mercedes and red bulls engineers this year because they have been trading blows as well both have found incredible breakthroughs in engine performance and aerodynamic advantages so let's dive in and explain just how they've done it there is some juicy engineering to get into for this video red bull and mercedes spend weeks designing to make their cars as compact as possible for maximum aerodynamic performance climbing all of that performance into the sleekest package possible a bit like raycon the sponsor of this video they make small sleek earbuds that have been designed to cram in great sand bluetooth 5.0 for seamless pairing loads of battery life as well as wireless charging and what's best is that they are half the price of the other premium audio brands whilst sounding just as good they have great battery life too allowing you to listen to music or podcasts for up to eight hours at a time and that's as if you watched our last 57 videos back to back and you should buy these just so you can do that if you want to get some of these check out the link in the description or go to buy rakon.com forward slash driver 61 for 15 off thanks to raycon for supporting the channel and now back to the video this development race has come down to two main factors engine power and downforce and we're going to start with the engines now in 2020 the engine was the main factor that gave mercedes the edge over red bull honda they quite simply had more power meaning they were much quicker at circuits like monster and spa however mercedes often weren't the fastest in a straight line as one of the main benefits of more power is that they can load the car with more downforce and not pay the price on the straights this combined with the longer wheelbase design meant that the mercedes was faster in the medium and high speed corners but the agile chassis of the red bull meant that they were quicker in the slower corners now for 2021 this seems to have flipped honda really have upped their game with an amazing push in engine development and whilst a lot of this is kept secret for obvious reasons there is a decent amount we do know they have made massive performance games that have actually meant that they were faster than the mercedes on the long straights in austria something that was definitely not the case last year the first factor is that the engine is much smaller than last year and looks to be the smallest engine on the grid meaning that the rear end of the car can be packaged much tighter this in turn reduces drag and allows for better flow to the downforce generating components at the rear of the car something that works really well for red bull back in the sebastian vettel days when renault actually took a hit on power to create an engine that allowed for improved aerodynamic performance the smaller engine allows them to use a shorter wheelbase whilst also keeping the center of gravity slightly lower down and concentrated in the middle of the car it goes to show that even the engine on a formula one car is designed to enhance the aerodynamic performance as well so exactly how did they go about making it smaller well first of all they use a split turbocharger this is a system that was introduced by mercedes where they put the hot side of the turbo at the rear of the engine and the cool side at the front and allows marginally more oxygen to be pumped into the cylinders again creating more power however this actually isn't the main benefit for red bull this year it has allowed them to create a smaller plenum this is the part here that directs the air into the engine we'll cover how exactly this part works later on but having a smaller plenum allows for much tighter packaging as well as no bulge like the mercedes has having the turbo here also allows red bull to have an air-to-air intercooler this is a radiator that cools the air that goes into the engine and is located in the side pod this system is much lighter than the liquid called intercooler in the mercedes and allows red bull to keep the weight more central in the car again for better handling absolutely genius honda have also switched to a stronger alloy for the engine block and this has allowed them to reduce the gaps between the cylinders essentially making the engine shorter they also reposition the valves for improved ignition and a tighter package now this explains how red bull made their engine smaller but not how they made them more powerful and it's the fact that they have done both which has led to the increase in performance this year the advancement has come from the mguh which sits in the v of the engine between the hot and the cold side of the turbo so as the exhaust gases spin up the turbo this powers the mguh and allows them to recover energy from the exhaust gases and as we know this can then be deployed again for extra power on corner exit and whilst regeneration from the braking is capped by the regulations the energy recovered from the mguh is unlimited however it's important to know that the factor that limits this regeneration is back pressure so let me explain the way the mguh works is that on throttle the exhaust gases drive the turbo but the turbine can only spin so fast and so the mguh can capture this energy without slowing down the turbo but if you tried to harvest more from the mguh this could slow down the turbine if there wasn't enough exhaust pressure coming from the engine so this would reduce the boost pressure whilst also reducing the power from the engine a strategy that really wouldn't pay off but remember the changes in the internals we mentioned earlier honda engineered these so that they allowed the engine to operate more efficiently at higher back pressure so this meant that the mguh could recover more energy whilst not hurting the efficiency of the engine this means that the red bull can keep the batteries charged with much less regen at the end of the straight something that massively improves lap time now whilst that was a lot of engineering talk it shows that tiny changes can take a second place car and put you out in front it meant that mercedes had to find their own gains to keep up and they did mercedes have created an engine that is very different in philosophy to the honda they very much prioritize power at the expense of aerodynamic performance so remember i spoke about the plenum on the honda well this is the component that takes the air from the turbo and directs it to the engine and the shape of this component really matters for good airflow over the car what honda have done which is believed to be similar to the ferrari and renault engines is turn their inlet trumpets these things here to be horizontal reducing the space they take up and this is to improve the airflow over the outside of the car but mercedes have elected to use vertical trumpets meaning that they need a much higher plenum to feed them correctly and that is the reason for the bulge on the aston martin and the mercedes cars this greatly improves the airflow into the engine and allows mercedes to increase power over the 2020 version so with an engine air is only ever flowing into the engine when the inlet valve is open this actually means the air flows into the engine in waves and what the designers realized was that the trumpets can actually be tuned to help the waves of air arrive at the right time to produce maximum power however f1 teams have been doing this since the 50s but these waves there will actually vary with engine speed so formula 1 cars now use something called variable length inlet trumpets and what's crazy is that they can change length depending on the engine rpm and so increase the power throughout the entire rev range not just at the top of the range it's so so clever now this new mercedes plenum not only increases airflow to the engine but also cools the air and they are believed to be doing this by running super cooled engine coolant through the walls of the plenum cooling the air and meaning the engine produces even more power but what exactly does super cooling mean well this is where the coolant is actually cooled to lower than its freezing temperature but somehow stays in liquid form now of course we would need a chemist to explain why this happens properly but in simple terms when a liquid is cooled rapidly this can allow it to reach temperatures below freezing as there isn't enough time for crystallization to occur crazy stuff and this allows mercedes to cool the engine more effectively as well as the air going into it and these immensely complex changes have made a difference for mercedes allowing them to keep up with red bull however there is more really interesting stuff going on on the aerodynamic front the big change this year was the rear of the floor where the regulations stated that there was a reduced area where the teams could put bodywork this hurt mercedes more than red bull and that was to do with the angle of the rake so in short this is the difference in the ride height between the front and the rear of the car and this is where the cars use two different philosophies red bull use a short wheelbase high rake design this is to enable them to be more nimble in slow corners whilst also producing sufficient downforce the high rate design allows the volume of the diffuser to be larger enabling them to create more suction and improve downforce whereas the mercedes uses a longer wheelbase for increased stability in the faster corners whilst also lower rake this is to reduce drag as the more rake the higher the rear of the car is and therefore the higher the drag and they can afford this as the longer wheelbase means the floor is longer giving them more area to create the downforce however this relies on the floor being well sealed which they couldn't do as well with the new regulations so mercedes have actually redesigned many of the aero components over the year allowing them to increase the rake but what is really interesting is that the car has significantly less rate angle on the straights compared to the red bull and this is really clever all the cars have something called a heave damper which is also sometimes called a third damper this connects the rear suspension on both sides of the car and manages the up and down movement of the suspension and what mercedes have done is tune this absolutely perfectly so the rake angle is high in the corners where they need the most downforce then when they are high speeds on the straights the higher error load actually compresses the heave damper and allows the rear of the car to sit down now it's important to say that this isn't unique to mercedes but they seem to be doing this more than the other teams however there was more when it came to changeable arrow on the straights at the beginning of the season people noticed that the red bull's rear wing was flexing on the straights now officially the teams are not allowed to create flexible components or movable aerodynamic devices however nothing is ever perfectly stiff it came down to just how much flex is too much flex as ever in formula one if there is a gray area the teams will do anything they can to maximize this so they created wings that would create a lot of downforce around the corners and then flex on the straights for lower drag and when we say flex it's actually flexing in a couple of directions for example on the red bull the wing was actually flexing downwards to reduce the height of the wing and minimizing the drag on the car it was also rotating backwards which was reducing the wing angle this was actually allowed by revised wingmans they were actually on a hinge they support the wing and transfer the loading into the gearbox of the car whilst allowing the wing to rotate all very clever now all of this has now been copied by most of the other teams but the differences are in the details and it looks like mercedes and red bull are ahead of the pack on this specific area however the majority of these advances in aerodynamics will all go out the window with the introduction of the new regulations next year with an entirely new rear wing we made an entire video about that which you can watch here thank you very much for recon for sponsoring this video and thank you for watching i'll catch you in the next one

Channel: Driver61

Views: 937,089

Keywords: Formula 1, Driving, Coaching, Motorsport, Engineering, F1, Racing, Incredible Motorsport, Driver61, Honda, Red Bull, Mercedes F1, Mercedes, Verstappen, Hamilton, Engines, Performance, Power, Weight, Valve Timings, Regeneration, Hybrid, Formula 1 Turbo Hybrid, F1 2021, F1 Championship, formula one, max verstappen, red bull, grand prix, lewis hamilton, f1 tech, motorsport news, mercedes w12, f1 updates, f1 2022 car

Id: gzdV5lfMl7E

Length: 12min 6sec (726 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 15 2021