The Formula 1 Car with INFINITE GEARS | The Blueprint

this 1993 williams has one of the most unusual gearboxes ever in f1 rather than eight gears like modern f1 cars it had an ingenious mechanism that could smoothly change through an infinite number of gear ratios it promised to make the car easier to drive more efficient and much much faster it's called continuously variable transmission a cvt it's not a new thing but it was new to something as powerful as a 90s f1 car it meant the car was always in the right gear and could make best use of the engine's power delivering all 850 horsepower all of the time so how did it work well to best understand this let's first talk about engines very simply engines create power by the combustion of fuel and air that pushes a piston you create more power by having larger bangs or more of them throughout the years in f1 there have been limits on engine size and the number of pistons allowed from 16 to 6. so to create the most power within the rules teams create very high revving engines essentially having more bangs per second and of course the highest revving ones often sound amazing too engines are most effective at certain points in the rev range you can see this if we plot power versus rpm higher rpm means more power but up to a point as the power starts to dip toward the very top of the range there are a few reasons for this the faster the engine turns the more friction built up things like pistons rubbing against the cylinder pushing the valves and powering all the various systems needed to keep an engine running also at really high rpm there can be a situation where you can't get enough fuel in and exhaust gases out to keep producing so much power manufacturers also add a rev limiter for two basic reasons to stop the engine getting too hot and melting its components or the vibrations getting too powerful and literally shaking itself to bits so naturally there is a sweet spot the balance between power and friction as a driver you want the engine to be in this range as much as possible and that's what the cvt system took to the next level the same applies when you're pedaling a bike you're most effective at certain rpms sometimes the gear is too heavy and you can't get moving sometimes it's too easy and your legs just spin so you use a number of gears to allow you to reach a range of speeds with limited power a cvt is as if you removed the 20 or so gears on your bike and instead had infinite gears that could smoothly transition you could always be in exactly the right gear this is the benefit of a cvt so how do they work there are many different types of cvt with more clever ones being trialled in cars all the time they're not new though and they are often used on anything from pillar drills to scooters it's essentially two pulleys with a belt connecting them one pulley is connected to the engine the other to the wheels each pulley has one side fixed in place while the other side can move when the pulley is squeezed together it forces the belt up the cone the same as shifting into the largest cog on the back of your bike the same happens in reverse pull the two sides apart and the belt moves to the bottom similar to the smallest cog on a bike if you were to hold the pulley somewhere in the middle you can have any gear ratio you like as the belt can deliver power anywhere on the surface of the pulleys there are a few things you need to know to fully understand this cvt system one the belt is at a specific length so that when one pulley is at its largest diameter the other has to be at its smallest two the wheel pulley has a spring pushing it together forcing the cones together and moving the belt to the maximum gear and the engine gear is controlled by hydraulics so as the engine cone is being pushed together the belt moves up because of the length of the belt it pulls itself down the other pulley and it's held together by a spring it can compress the spring and move down to the smaller part of the cone this ingenious system allows the gear ratio to be changed by one set of hydraulics while maintaining perfect tension on the belt for the best grip against the pulleys hydraulic systems in f1 in the 90s typically went wrong and so only having one system help the cvt be more reliable if the car is accelerating out of a corner the gear ratio needs to change to keep the engine in its sweet spot so the engine pulley is pushed together by the hydraulic system forcing the belt to the outside diameter the belt then pulls on the pulley wheel separating it moving the belt to a smaller diameter now the wheel pulley turns a few times for every turn of the engine pulley we now have a higher gear ratio to accelerate out the corner as you probably realize the belts have to be pretty special they are made of loads of steel sheets shaped perfectly to be strong across their width so they can squeeze the pulleys apart as well as be strong enough to deliver the engine's power to the wheels without snapping so why would you want to put one of these in an f1 car a cvt has four main benefits in f1 firstly you could always be in the sweet spot the best power that the engine can deliver so that's all 850 horsepower all of the time it would also mean that no corners are in between gears sometimes when you're racing especially in a car that only has four or five or six gears some corners would either be too low revving in one gear or two high revving in another in this case the engine isn't able to offer the optimum power or torque and so the driver will lose time the cvt could also give the perfect amount of power and torque for the amount of grip the car has at any one time torque is a twisting force and so helps the car accelerate from slow speeds torque has a slightly different curve than the paragraph we spoke about earlier this has a different sweet spot slightly lower in the rev range the cvt would be able to choose the maximum torque band for accelerating and the maximum power band for going down the straights a lot of design and tuning goes into making engines work over a larger rev range so that the car doesn't need 20 gears to be effective you see this with loras where they produce most of their power over a small rev range so they need up to 25 gears to have enough pulling power over a range of speeds and loads optimizing the engine for a cvt would potentially allow designers to make the engine's power graph much more peaky as the cvt holds the engine's revs fairly consistent they could make the engine much more powerful in that specific range making the sweet spot sweeter so williams took their already dominant fw15c and fitted a cvt don't forget that this is already one of the most advanced f1 cars ever it had automatically controlled suspension advanced traction control and abs a young david cortard was the test driver that day as the car accelerated at maximum revs sounding very different to any car you've ever heard it's so strange to hear an f1 car that's not flying through the rev range and changing gear every few seconds the feeling of the car now is i'm very excited because when i enter the corners it's so smooth sadly there isn't any reliable lap time comparison to the normal six-speed car but it was suspected to be seconds a lap faster than the same car with the regular gearbox this if it were correct is pretty impressive considering this williams car had no conventional gears well the cvt the constantly variable transmission i think it was a belgian company that belgian or dutch that were working on that with williams and patrick had loved all all the the sort of you know potential tech innovations uh there was also another gearbox we worked on with an american chap called the weisman but the cdt was uh i tested that at silverstone and it was a strange one because the rpm the theory was that it got the engine to the rpm where the torque was at its best and it would kind of stay there and rise up so when you came into a corner instead of the sort of classic you know zoom zoom zoom zoom as the engine comes down the rpm it would uh it would be like so you'd be breaking and slowing down but yet the rpm would still be like 15 000. so it was slightly uncomfortable and both of the weisman box i think just never ran reliably and the cvt got banned by the fia before it ever was introduced so um a shame but it was good fun to do that so why did it never race sadly there were a number of reasons engines aren't designed to be run at nearly 18 000 rpm for a full f1 race distance the heat and the wear would be significant and we could expect a lot of failures the engines of the time could rev that high but through the corners and acceleration zones the average revs would be much lower and so the wear on the engine through a race would be much less higher revs mean more bangs and much more heat the car would need much larger radiators and cooling systems which would add weight and have a significant aerodynamic penalty radiators and intakes are very draggy then we get to the biggest problem the belt williams weren't able to find a belt that could withstand 850 horsepower for any reasonable amount of time the belt would either wear and slip on the pulleys or snap altogether this isn't a problem on a normal road car but add 800 horsepower lots of vibration and heat and the belt doesn't want to last very long and so it proved much more unreliable than a conventional gearbox then came the final blow for cbt in f1 the year after the cvt was tested the fia explicitly banned it from the sport meaning it couldn't be raced they gave no reasoning for the decision but i'm sure you'll all speculate in the comments so williams understandably stuck with the six-speed gearbox and the cvt test car is sat in the williams museum having only been driven a few times thanks very much for watching if you like this video you will definitely like the video where we talk about this car's predecessor and its incredible suspension system thanks we appreciate you watching and see you next time

Channel: Driver61

Views: 767,937

Keywords: Formula 1, Driving, Coaching, Motorsport, Engineering, F1, Racing, Incredible Motorsport, Driver61, Williams, CVT, Williams F1, FW15, FW14B, continuously variable transmission, continuously variable transmission vs automatic, Gearbox, Sequantial, Double Clutch, DC, David Coulthard, formula one, Active Suspension

Id: 6nWrDKGoYJo

Length: 10min 14sec (614 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 13 2021