What If F1 ENGINES Had No Rules?

so I've been thinking what if F1 engines had no rules how powerful would they really be I'm talking about no rules on the configuration so you could have an inline 4 a V12 or even a w24 why not and no rules on capacity so is it better to go for a 2 L that's small and light or a massive 10 L that's powerful and heavy and would you bother using a hybrid system yes an electric motor adds a lot of torque but the batteries are still pretty heavy and cumbersome and that's all way you still need to break turn and accelerate around a circuit so if the goal is to get an F1 car around the circuit as quick as possible what would designers actually do well I spoke with the Red Ball powertrains performance design team leader to find out what it get up to but there must be some rules otherwise we might end up with a rocket strapped to the rear wing so let's say that our no rules engine must be able to fit in 100x 60x 60 cm space that's 39x 24 x 24 in which by the way is a huge volume and way bigger than f1's current engines for example an old V10 from the 2000s would be about 62 cm long 56 CM wide and 42 cm tall and of course we can't go too big the Aden newers of this world will already be complaining that the engine is getting in the way of their beautiful aerodynamics beyond the size and the fact it can't be a rocket in terms of rules I don't think there's much else we need to cover it can have a turbo it can be any configuration it can be whatever capacity you can fit in our space and it can use a hybrid system oh and it can use any cool materials that currently exist now F1 has seen some crazy engines in the past so let's first look back to see what insane designs Engineers have come up with and hopefully get some inspiration just take a look at this Lotus from 1968 first it's a bit of a weird shape for a race C it's kind of like a wedge but look closer particularly at the rear of the car and you'll see that it's even stranger cars from the late 60s normally have exhaust coming out of the rear like this beautiful Ferrari but this Lotus doesn't have any and instead has a large exhaust or something coming out of the top just behind the driver and that's because under the Bodywork is a pratt and Whitney turbine engine it compresses incoming air combines it with fuel ignites it and uses the high-press gases to spin a turbine which drives the car's gearbox and then the wheels it's basically a jet engine adapted for a race car and this thing is wild what on Earth were the designers thinking well they were thinking they were on to something the car and engine competed in six F1 races but only finished once so it' be easy to write it off as a stupid experiment but this type of propulsion did have some success this is the STP Paxton turbo car and it's what inspired the Lotus I mean it almost won the 1967 Indie 500 where it led the race for 171 laps however it had a mechanical failure with only 9ine laps to go it came so close to winning with a gas turbine engine okay so turbine engines seem like a decent choice but let's head back to a combustion engine with this flat 12 design just listen to this that's not the kind of noise you want to hear when testing a new engine it sounds like a back of spanners it did get going though but it still didn't sound great we just made a video about why v10s are scientifically proven to make us happy and this sound definitely wasn't included it's the Subaru 1235 from the 1980s and just look at how complicated it is Subaru were trying to become an F1 engine manufacturer and partnered up with motori Maneri to create this 3 and 1/2 L flat 12 and apart from being massively underpowered it also required cooling from the top of the side pods rather than the typical airbox in the roll hoop meaning that the colon car that the engine sat in had to have these weird air ducts ruining the car's aerodynamics the package was incredibly slow and at One race there was 17 seconds off Pole Position meaning that they got cut off at the pre-qualifying stage which was a thing back in the 80s when there were too many cars for the grid anyway the colony team dropped the engine after only eight RAC basis and Subaru have never tried to return so flat 12s might be out of the picture but to be fair Subaru engines aren't known for [Music] reliability but how about a W2 look at this the life W2 it has a naturally aspirated 12 cylinder engine so there's three Banks of four cylinders just look at the W shape and the unusual exhaust configuration now of course we have W configurations in cars like the Bugatti Veyron and while they work well in a modern Road car they didn't work in F1 in 1990 the engine produced only 400 horsepower when the same capacity V configurations were hitting 700 and it had reliability problems as well the chassis was also pretty terrible initially failing to pass the fia's crash test and the car never qualified for an F1 race as it was always too slow okay so I know these examples aren't going too well but I love how engineers are trying different things and perhaps they were just ahead of their time and no rules engine could learn from their mistakes so it's time for some Innovation from Ferrari this is the Ferrari V6 comprex it was an experimental engine developed and tested in 1981 the engine was a V6 configuration and used a unique form of forced induction known as a complex mechanical monoch charger now that's a lot of words and to be honest it is pretty complicated but the idea was to get rid of of Turbo lag which is a nightmare for drivers you hit the accelerator pedal when you want to accelerate but not much happens and only then after a while the power comes in and usually all of a sudden this causes the car to get wheel spin and makes it hard for the driver to drive on the limit however the comx mechanical monocharged intake air at the speed of sound it meant that the driver didn't have to deal with a traditional Turbo lag and the power wasn't drawn directly from the engine like with a supercharger it was the best of both worlds however as with many of these Innovations it was just too fragile and it also affected aerodynamics and cooling as well so it was dropped from this car and Ferrari used a twin turbo instead okay so enough with the history how are we going to get as much horsepower from our no rules engine as possible well there are five areas we're going to cover what configuration do we choose do we want to use a turbo or even supercharger and are we going to use some kind of battery and motor hybrid system what kind of exotic materials are going to be the best and what kind of RPM and horsepower can we really expect okay so F1 Engineers have really played with engine configurations over the years from two cylinder V twins in the 50s to 16 cylinders also in the 50s and in the 60s these 16 cylinder monsters were made by brm British racing motors a race team that competed in F1 from the 1950s to the 1970s and a team that won the World Championship in 1962 with graham Hill and they really push things with engine design as well they produced a V16 in the early 50s with the brm type 15 and then a 3 L h16 engine in the mid 60s an engine that we've spoken about a few times on this channel these engines were wild and I love the fact that the rules were wide open and that Engineers explored such AED routes to getting a car around a track as fast as possible but what's best for our no rules engine and if we have the space why I just go for a v24 there are obviously a ton of configuration options we could go with a single cylinder an inline a v or any of the more unusual options a w an H or even a u so first let's write off a single cylinder engine with just one piston it will have fewer power strokes and it wouldn't be balanced and as it's a single piston to have any kind of displacement it would need to be huge which in turn means it would be very heavy and a big heavy piston moving up and down means a high reciprocating Mass so it would either have to run a low RPM or risk exploding however it would be simple with few removing Parts but we need more power baby I'm more power baby I'm more power baby so what about an inline a typical Choice here would be an inline four or six a Mercedes even ran an inline 8 in the mid 1950s which won the World Championship in 1954 and 55 in lines are great as they're still really simple and remember we need reliability and the most powerful engine in Formula 1 ever was in fact an inline a BMW 1.5 L Turbo from 1982 and just look at it I love that color scheme but it also had a reported 1350 horsepower which must have been wild in a 1980s F1 car but the real issue with bigger inline engines is the packaging if you want to add more power with more cylinders it's going to take up quite a lot of space and if you went for eight cylinders in a row that's a lot of room and also the engines tend to be quite tall so Mr newie would not be happy with us the crankshaft would also need to be pretty long and the longer it is the more likely it is to bend so we want more cylinders in order to save some piston weight but we need to save some space so let's take the Pistons and position them horizontally moving away from each other what a good idea flat engines are basically a v configuration squash down with an angle of 180° so that means in terms of the space that they take up they're pretty good not too long thanks to cylinders on both sides and not too tall thanks to the horizontal layout however they are quite wide so it's good for a lower center of gravity but bad for Arrow as there's less room for newie to do what he wants with the back of the car just look at this Rabon bt45 from 1977 that had a flat 12 and you'll see what I mean the engine cover is super low but flat engines aren't perfect either and we can do better so how about a w configuration well before I get into Bat's favorite configuration I need to tell you about today's sponsor brilliant.org if you'd like to learn more about some of topics covered in this video including maths data analysis programming and AI lessons then you should check out brilliant brilliant has thousand thousand of interactive lessons where you learn by doing and this learning method is six times more effective than just watching lecture videos they're predicting with probability course shows you how to start building a foundation in data science there's no doubt that data skills are necessary for navigating this modern world and Brilliant is the best way to get them and learning a small about each day is so important for your growth so if you'd like to try everything that brilliant offers for a full 30 days for free then visit brilliant.org / driver61 to start your free trial today or scan the QR code on screen you'll also get 20% off an annual premium subscription so what about these W configurations after all Bugatti Veyrons and Chiron use them and they're capable of 270 and 300 mph respectively well this is a block from a Bugatti w16 as you can see it's basically a v configuration but the length of the block has been reduced meaning that the cylinders need to come up alongside each other forming two wider Banks but it's worth noting that the Bugatti W configuration is a different take on the W that we saw with life's W2 from earlier as you can see here the Bugatti engine only has two Banks but the life W2 has three which in my mind at least is a true W configuration and again aside from the complexity the packaging is a problem with the w the three Banks and all the exhaust just take up too much space which would damage the aerodynamic design of the car now there are a couple of other feasible configurations U VR opposed rotary radial horizontal K and X but they really don't stand a chance on our no rules car so it looks like we'll have to return to the old favorite the trusty V configuration it's been the most common configuration in F1 and other Motorsports over the decades and there's good reason for it take a look at this the V configuration is a great balance between length width and height you can squeeze in a good number of cylinders in the space and keep the weight down reasonably low and for F1 in particular there's a good amount of space around the bottom of the engine meaning that the rear of the car can taper away which is good for aerodynamics and our mate Adrian adri in F1 we've seen all types of V configuration V2 V4 V6 which we have at the moment V8 V10 V12 and V V16 someone just needs to try a v14 and we've got a full set but how many cylinders is best if we don't have any rules well the first thing to know is that we're not limited on displacement we can get plenty of fuel into our engine so if you want to use all of that fuel but only have a V2 V4 or V6 to play with the Pistons are going to have to be massive in turn that means that the engine will be bigger but more importantly the reciprocating Mass the weight of the Piston moving back and forward will be huge and with all the extra mass the engines parts are more likely to break so we'll either have an engine that's unreliable or one that needs to run really low RPM to keep the reciprocating Mass down and the parts where they should be so to keep the Piston's weight down and to keep the same number of liters we need more Pistons more Pistons with the same displacement means lighter pistons and an engine that can rev higher and good news that means we're talking v10s v12s or v6s however from the engine expert that we spoke to a v112 seems to be the best balance this is Micah McMahan who formerly worked at Red Bull powertrains and he loves v12s good man with the V12 is you have plenty of space for a large boar for the given power we're going to have you don't have to turn obsessive RPMs nothing wild it'd be honestly it'd be a relatively low strong engine at a meter long with the V12 you're still talking like you'd probably be out like 102 104 mm boore I mean it's it's a big piston and not turning a crazy RPM is important for for the previous reasons keeping the reciprocating Mass down and the engine unexploded but it's not just about the Pistons if an engine has a traditional overhead cam valves can become an issue too valves manage the air and the fuel into and the exhaust gases out of the combustion chamber intake valves open to allow a precise mixture of air and fuel into the cylinder while exhaust valves open to remove the resulting gases after the combustion but before the valves open open the cam shaft turns and its lobe hits the valve before it's closed by a spring but at higher RPMs the cam shaft turns faster and the valve is hit harder which increases inertia and so if the valve isn't strong enough to overcome the inertia there's going to be a delay in closing the valve and if the valve closure is incomplete or delayed that's not good and we call it valve float it means that some of the power is lost and at worst it means that the valve is still open as the Piston comes to the top of its stroke where it hits the valve and causes serious damage and in order to make F1 engines rev higher this needed fixing so in the late 80s Reno introduced the first pneumatic valves engine into F1 however it wasn't until the 1990s that the other F1 teams began to adopt the same technology just take a look at this diagram from the Motorsports Story YouTube channel and how pneumatic valves work is actually pretty simple instead of a traditional spring the camshaft presses the valve against the Chamber of pressurized nitrogen which acts just like a spring however the difference is that unlike a regular spring which doesn't provide additional resistance when compressed harder a Pneumatic Springs resistance increases as the valve is hit harder this means it offers better control over the valves and this pneumatic system is key for getting F1 engines up to 20,000 RPM allowing them to open and close the valves incredibly fast without smashing the valves to Pieces well most of the time anyway okay so what about turbos or maybe even in a supercharger well it's safe to say our engine expert likes turbos I like turbos I mean superchargers are cool they make cool whining noises but for the given weight and packaging and power you get from it the power inity you get from a turbo you're just not going to pick up in a supercharger and naturally aspirated for the given again Arrow package and everything that goes along with it is going to be so much smaller and lighter to run a turbocharged car first turbocharge engine in Formula 1 dates back to 1977 and it was Renault again who pioneered it in the development of the rs01 a 1 and 1/2 L V6 initially these engines were not very reliable but did offer a massive power Advantage when they worked and in our case there are a few solid reasons that we like turbos first of course they boost power I don't need to tell you how they work but basically the more air that you force into the engine means that you can add more fuel and so the bang is bigger and if we're looking at the entirety of the car over a race distance turbocharged engines are more f fuel efficient too meaning that the fuel tanks can be smaller and the car can be lighter but exactly how much extra power would a turboed engine produce compared to a normally aspirated engine a rough rule of thumb with of course differences and efficiencies and small things roughly by putting a turbocharger on for each atmosphere you add in terms of boost you you know gain that entire displacement so that means for example if we had a 2 L displacement and we added an extra atmosphere of boost so 14.7 PSI you'd effectively have the same air going into the engine as a 4 liter and with more air going in you can add more fuel and again get a bigger bang okay but how much more power does it actually create well if we go back to the end of the era in F1 when both normally aspirated and turbocharged cars were allowed with 1985 being the final year of turbos with unlimited boost you'll notice a big difference that year the teams were allowed a 1.5 L engine with a turbo or a 3 L engine without the champ ship winning car was the McLaren tag which had a 1.5 L V6 that produced about 850 horsepower in race setup and a massive 960 horsepower in qualifying and the best placed non-turbo car was the tyrl Ford and actually that Ford cars worth engine was only used for half the season anyway the dfy was a 3 l V8 that only produced about 520 horsepower and while it didn't suffer from Turbo lag the forc induction engines more than made up for it once they were in a straight line so yes we are going to have a turbo but what about hybrids what about electrical power is it worth carrying the extra weight of a battery around for the extra power and instant torque in F1 we've seen the mguh and the mguk they're difficult to understand acronyms but basically they soak up the energy that would otherwise be lost as mainly Heat this is the mg and although it's being banned from 2026 we'd still like to use it in our no rules car the mguh means motor generator unit Das heat it's connected directly to the turbocharger shaft and has two roles it can both generate power and deploy power the mg takes the heat energy from the car's exhaust gases that powers the turbo and otherwise would just float away into the air and turns that into electrical energy it gets stored in the car's battery ready for use then when it's finally ready to be used it acts as a motor it spins the turbo compressor and it uses that energy to give the turbocharger a quick boost it spins the turbo compressor faster than it would just on the exhaust gases alone and Micah likes this technology this is where you might still leave a little bit of hybrid in the system if you're going to have turbos you could have a really big turbo but it's going to be super laggy so you would in my mind I'd still want to keep an mg on it and what about the mguk the motor generator unit Das kinetic this is basically how a Formula E car is so efficient this is the part that captures the kinetic energy when the driver hits the brakes it then STS the energy and then in an F1 car adds the power to the crankshaft when the driver accelerates but mic doesn't think that we'll need it and in my case I would probably I would probably take the hybrid away because you wouldn't need it for actual transmissive power because you'd have all the displacement you want basically we'll have more than enough power from the internal combustion engine so we're better off saving the weight of a larger battery remember adding lightness is key and talking of adding lightness are there any crazy materials we could use that are currently banned in F1 you know I would look at I reintroduce metal Matrix composits MMC Pistons as they used to be known in the Formula 1 World before they got banned uh really strong High thermal uh really good thermal properties these materials were actually used in F1 from 2004 but now are mostly banned in an MMC you have a metal like aluminium or titanium which forms the base of the material but instead of being pure metal it's reinforced with part particles or fibers of another material often Ceramics like silicon carbide or Boron carbide these ceramic particles are incredibly strong and hard which means they can reinforce the metal and make it much tougher and more resistant to wear and heat and that means that the MMC Parts can be stronger stiffer lighter and can handle heat better all of which are incredibly important if we're trying to get our engine to rev as high as possible so how much faster would this engine be how much more power could it have well I'm sorry to say that with all these things it's incredibly difficult to know without any proper calculation Mikey didn't want to put an actual figure on it but he basically said that it would be more power than any F1 car with its current grip would be able to handle the point is that it actually wouldn't be that difficult to make an engine with 2 3 or 4,000 horsepower but what's the point if you can't put that power into the circuit and the driver is just wheel spinning from corner to Corner in every gear I spoke to an F1 aerodynamicist about what he' design if F1 had no aor rules you can see that just here thank you for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: Driver61

Views: 904,599

Keywords: Formula 1, Motorsport, Engineering, F1, Racing, No Rules, Aerodynamics, F1 Engines

Id: MlKOrg0zpKY

Length: 23min 10sec (1390 seconds)

Published: Sun May 12 2024