When Formula 1 Engines Revved to 20 000 RPM!

listen to this the V10 era of Formula 1 produced the best engines the world has ever seen they're raw powerful revvy and in my opinion the best sounding engines ever but how on Earth did they make them able to reach over 19 000 RPM and why aren't they in current F1 cars well let me explain the V10 era started in 1986 with the 3.5 liter unit built by Alfa Romeo but it really started finding success in 1989 with Renault at this time the engine regulations were actually pretty free with one key rule keeping them in check the overall engine capacity could not be more than three and a half liters and turbos were banned and with the engine rules being so free the engine manufacturers each landed on pretty different designs with V8s v10s and v12s all on the same grid and at one point they even had a W12 but to be fair it kind of sucked and never actually qualified for a race Ford at the time swore by a V8 for its Simplicity and relative fuel economy very Ferrari stuck to a V12 with complexity and cost not really being an issue for them they aimed at maximum power and you can see why they chose those engines by looking at their road cars at the time Renault were the first to really make waves with V10 where they started to create significantly more power than the V8s and the v12s but why they were all 3.5 liter naturally aspirated engines how were they creating more power well it actually comes down to the specific design of the V10 engine so let me explain the recipe for power in a naturally aspirated engine is torque times RPM divided by a constant so you can increase power by adding displacement like in an American muscle car they run them at lower revs but with much larger engines but in F1 you had a limit on displacement at three and a half liters so this means that once you've got your engine working correctly and the combustion working correctly it's harder to create much more torque so engine manufacturers decided they were going to push for higher RPM and that makes sense if you can't increase the force the crank turns at you you may as well turn it more times per second but of course it's not that simple if you just remove the rev limiter from your road car and floored it on your driveway you would have a very broken engine very quickly that happens for two main reasons firstly the Pistons conrods and crank are all designed to work up to a fixed speed so even in your Ford Focus the Pistons are traveling at 35 miles an hour inside your engine they're going from 30 miles an hour to zero at the top of the stroke and then accelerating the other way so the loads on the Pistons are pretty large so if you flew past the rev limit these could basically explode or snap the conrod or any number of other metal snapping ways but before we get to the second reason I need to tell you about today's sponsor Masterworks potential catastrophes aside this era of F1 was so fun to watch these cars are engineering Marvels but they're also Priceless pieces of history of course we've all dreamed of owning cars like this and for some fans they draw huge interest as potential stores of wealth even from Global players like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs the logic is that over time assets like these can often appreciate in value and that value isn't necessarily affected by external factors like that of traditional assets but Goldman says these physical assets don't just end at classic cars in the same sentence they also call out fine art as a way to potentially protect your accounts from inflation because even during the financial difficulties of 2022 our prices still Rose 29 according to the Knight Frank wealth report which outperformed other luxury Collectibles like fine wine watches and even classic cars now we may not all be in the position to be increasing our spending on Art but that doesn't matter anymore because of Masterworks Masterworks just brought 682 000 members and it's easy to see why given their results in 2022 they paid out over 25 million dollars in total net returns to their investors by allowing almost anyone to invest in Contemporary Art without investing millions of dollars and so far all all of their sales have delivered positive returns but if you didn't sign up before don't worry my subscribers can still skip the wait list for Priority Access to Masterworks newest offerings just click the link in the description now back to the video second reason is to do with the valves they're pushed by the cam lobes and are pushed back by these valve springs they as well are designed for a particular engine speed so if you go above this you get something called valve float essentially meaning the valve doesn't return back to its position in time this can lead to a loss in power as the gases in the chamber can escape too early or even worse the Piston can smash into the valves and in a battle between a 35 mile an hour piston and a teeny tiny little valve the Piston always wins bending the valves and costing you a lot in mechanic bills or in Formula One terms a big engine failure so you can see why F1 Engineers couldn't take their existing engines and just add a zero to the RPM limit and so the engine manufacturers began working on these issues coming up with pneumatic valve timing rather them relying on the old Springs this meant they had to install a Pneumatic pump to the car but it meant they could control the valves much better at higher RPM it then meant that they wouldn't bend the valves like you might do in your road car this system has developed a lot of the time but the basic concept is still used today they also started using various Exotic Metals in the engines things like titanium aluminum and beryllium all used for their better thermal properties meaning they didn't expand or contract too much with temperature and also for how strong they were for their weight and so the engineers began solving these issues and slowly started increasing the Rev limits on their cars one thing they could do to get their engines running faster was to change the bore and Stroke of the engine the bore is essentially the diameter of the piston and the stroke is basically the difference between the top and bottom points that that piston goes through to reduce the speeds in the engine you can decrease the stroke meaning that the engine can rev faster without breaking anything but to keep the displacement from changing you need to increase the bore or the size of the Piston now bear with me if the bore and the stroke are the same we call that a square engine but F1 teams actually run with an over Square setup even to this day oh a larger board than the stroke as it allows for much higher RPM anyway back to the early v10s compared to the v12s and V8s raising the rev limit was a little easier and that's down to the V10 layout compared to the V8 the V10 means two more cylinders obviously which with a fixed engine displacement means smaller cylinders even being smaller it means they are typically lighter meaning that the conrod's Pistons and wrist pins don't need to be quite as beefy so with the reduction in weight and the valves being kept out of the way by the pneumatic system the engine could spin much much faster of course you might be thinking surely the v12s have much smaller pistons and yes they do but they couldn't get the engines revving quite as fast the v12s have the penalty of more rotating mass and more complexity meaning they never quite got to the same RPM as the v10s but there was another benefit to the v10s the reason so many people love them they sound incredible interestingly the V10 sounds like it does because of this layout they typically rev higher like the LFA Road car does of course also have a layout of five cylinders in each bank and unlike the V12 which has six cylinders in each Bank the V10 is not fully balanced meaning it sounds a bit more interesting than the smooth part of the V12 anyway you listen [Music] see what I mean and so all of this engineering combined is what allowed the v10s to eventually rise up to 19 000 RPM putting that into perspective that's three times higher than your typical Road car and twice the highest revenue production car no matter what your Civic owning mate might tell you these speeds mean that the Piston is doing 70 miles an hour inside the engine and at that speed the g-force means it effectively weighs two and a half tons meaning that despite the ridiculous Metals the Conrad's actually stretch by up to one millimeter per stroke they've actually driven quite a few v10s from this era and they are my favorite the cars and the engines are just so raw and violent the cars are super light with carbon monocox of course and engines that only weigh 95 kilograms and plenty of aerodynamic grip they actually rev so high that you have to adjust your hearing to the car and often people up shift way too early when they're getting one as they simply don't expect the engine to be able to rev that High by the way if you haven't yet entered a competition to drive a formula car you can do that in the link below we've now sold 75 of the entrance so make sure you get your ticket as I'm not sure if we'll do this again but the other thing about the cars from this era is that they just weren't as refined as they are today they ran with really stiff suspension and not as much downforce as they have today so they were a real handful but in my opinion all of that adds up to the fun of driving them anyway why did the V10 era die well to get engines to rev this High it took lots of development and so in turn loads and loads of money the teams are spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on exotic materials just for one engine then spending thousands on processing to ensure the parts didn't melt or wear through the teams even had to test every component's natural frequency as the vibrations in the engine were so high that they could spontaneously fail under normal running conditions now all of this meant that developing a Formula One engine was just way too much for many manufacturers and formula one could see this becoming an issue so in 2006 the FIA brought in the 2.4 liter E8 in hope to get costs down and entice manufacturers back into the sport initially not a lot changed they still revved high and sounded pretty good maybe not V10 level but that's a discussion for another day and actually Cosworth broke the 20 000 RPM barrier with their engine using loads of crazy technology which came at enormous expense so later F1 brought in RPM limits in the rules to get rid of the advantage that the big spending teams had initially this limit was 19 000 RPM then 18 then 17 and now it's 15 000 RPM it's a shame for the sound and the rawness of the cars but I guess better for Formula One as a whole you should check out this video about the evolution of F1 engines from what they looked like in 1950 all the way to today thanks to Masterworks for sponsoring and thank you for watching I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Driver61

Views: 889,291

Keywords: Formula 1, Driving, Coaching, Motorsport, Engineering, F1, Racing, Incredible Motorsport, Driver61, Scott Mansell, Callum McIntyre, V10, V12, V8, Ferrari, Yamaha, Cosworth, RPM, 20000 RPM, V10 Era

Id: HyEBQueIUmA

Length: 10min 21sec (621 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 08 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/Infamous-Arm3955]

I’m pretty sure I remember(?) a large bore V8 hit 20k. The idle on it was around 9k and dropping it into first gear needed 11/12k. Not sure.

[u/reddit0r_123]

That sound still gives me goosebumps. Wish we could get to them back with synthetic fuel, but of course that won't happen...

[u/epsilon1725]

And after the new regs they won't even produce 550hp :/

[u/boostwtf]

Music straight outta heaven.

[u/DataGOGO]

the V10 era is still the best.

Modern F1 engines are completely shit.

[u/fastcooljosh]

That cosworth in 06 always sounded like it would explode any minute.