(BiB) To a certain extent, it depends!

My physics is a bit rusty, but won't it be the case that when the fuel/air mixture detonates in the cylinder, part of the chemical energy of the fuel is converted into noise at that point, so if the noise is then muffled by the exhaust system, it's too late in terms of the energy balance? That part of the energy has already been wasted.

As an analogy, an electric heater produces light as the element glows. That's "wasted" energy as what you really want is heat. If you put the element inside a box, it doesn't stop it glowing, so doesn't save that energy. It just means you can't see the energy being wasted!

So, it depends on how much the "bangs" are being muffled by the exhaust system. I'd suggest that a V6 revving at 15,000rpm isn't inherently quiet, so would guess the answer is "quite a lot"! I know Brundle has suggested twin exhausts but that will take some time.

Maybe they should hand the problem over to some spotty Renault Clio owner, because I bet he'd be able to make the engines sound louder!

I can't actually comment on the noise as a whole because I wasn't at the race and the volume on the TV isn't necessarily representative of the "real" volume. Having been to a fair few GP's myself, the noise was an integral part of the experience. The first time I went to a GP, I was totally unprepared and it hit me like a punch in the solar plexus! I could feel the noise ... and it was awesome!

We tend to like noise when raw power is involved. A Vulcan taking off is a hell of a lot more spectacular than an Airbus, and it's not that the Vulcan's going any faster ... it just sounds right! Part of the magic of a Spitfire is the rumbling roar of the Merlin. If a lion put it's head back, opened it's jaws and let out a quiet "miaow", it wouldn't be very impressive!

I can understand the "F1 wanting to be more relevant" bit, but we know we can make the engines on road-cars quiet. We don't need F1 to show us! In fact, as I alluded to earlier, a "push to pass" system which gave an extra dollop of power on an extremely efficient engine would be a lot more relevant to road cars than a DRS system which would only allow you to overtake a slower car between Tesco and the garden centre ... as long as you were less than 1 second behind that car when you went past the chip shop!

All these arguments about F1 saving energy, F1 needs to be 'greener' are total rubbish. This is the pinnacle of car racing, being greener and saving energy should be the last things it thinks about. The 22 cars may save a bit of fuel on Sunday afternoon, however that is insignificant when you take into account the amount of fuel and energy it takes to move the F1 circus around the world. Is there a sport that has a bigger carbon footprint? F1 trying to be 'greener' is a bit of a joke, when you look at the overall F1 picture. There is no getting away from that. If you really want it to be 'greener', then have 20 races in Europe. Think of the amount of fuel and energy you would save. Why go all over the globe? Oh yes, to be 'greener', sorry I mean make money. Being 'greener' doesnt come into it.

For me, F1 should forget about saving energy and trying to be 'greener'. It should produce the fastest cars possible that comply with the regulations.

The amount of fuel and energy used to move the F1 circus round the world is as nothing compared to the fuel and energy used by the punters in going to the events.

I believe that part of the reason for the "greener" approach is to keep the big works manufacturers interested. Mercedes don't take part in F1 because they've nothing better to do. It's important in terms of marketing to be able to sell the idea that the technology used in the F1 cars will filter down to their road cars. So, the Mercedes F1 car has to be relevant to potential Mercedes road-car purchasers. If not, Mercedes will do something else, and if we didn't have the big manufacturers involved, we wouldn't have F1.

Thing is, the engines are still "going bang" so any noise intrinsic to that operation is still happening.

The only reasons why the cars might be producing noises people don't like are either that the turbo's are affecting the noise or that people simply don't like the noise created by a V6 and both of those things would require an "artificial" solution.

Sure, anybody can make an engine quieter by applying some kind of silencer to them but F1 engines don't have any kind of silencers. They're just manifolds, a honking great turbo and then an exit pipe so there's nothing to remove to make them louder. You'd have to actually add something, which is where it all gets a bit silly.


To be fair, I don't think it's as much about "making F1 green", itself, as it is about encouraging F1 to make use of green technologies which allows the engine-manufacturers to get some return on all their R&D which can be applied to their road cars.

TBH, judging by the one race we've had so far, I wouldn't care if F1 cars were powered by daisies and elastic bands. They seem to be supplying perfectly entertaining racing.

You're never going to make it "green" for hundreds of people and container-loads of kit to trek around the planet, racing ridiculous cars around in circles on vast swathes of land that could probably be put to better use, but if they can help develop technologies which can be applied to road cars as well, what's not to like?

The problem is that for increasingly larger and louder "bangs", you're still only achieving around 30% efficiency in a reciprocating combustion engine. So why not try to achieve a similar power output with small "bangs"? Why not try to achieve more efficiency by harvesting as much of that unused energy as possible.

As for the noise; there's more than just the sound from the bang in an engine. A lot of the noise from the exhaust is not from the bang itself, but rather, the pulses of sound that are generated by flow of gas that happen when the exhaust valve opens.

In a turbo engine, these pulses are interrupted by the turbine blades is a similar fashion to the way that the walls of a silencer interrupts the sound pulses (except that the silencer is designed to that the sound waves are rebounded to cancel other waves out). The gasses being expelled from the cylinder still do most of the work, but the sound is also hitting the turbine and adding *some* momentum to it. In hitting the turbine blades, the sound waves loose some energy, hence the quieter sound.

Don't you still need "big bangs" to produce the power? You can have a more efficient "bang" which uses less fuel, but the actual detonation which causes the sound waves still has to be as big.


We've had small, relatively low revving turbocharged V-6 engines in the past (even a 1.5 litre turbo four-pot) and they were anything but quiet! I remember the early Renault turbos being particularly loud. In fact, I've just slipped into "nostalgia mode" by watching the 1983 British GP which I attended, and that was not what I'd call a quiet weekend!!

I can't help but wonder if the single exhaust, presumably introduced to stop blown diffusers, is the main culprit. If that's the case, I'm prepared to organise a whip-round to buy some fuel that they can chuck into the exhaust and ignite!

I understand your point, and I agree with you as to why manufacturers take part in F1. However they can still use the different gadgets like MGU-K and MGU-H and still use last years engines.

On a side note, the MGU-H is of little or no value to a road car unless its got a turbo fitted. How many of us have a car with a turbo?

Another side note, there are some technologies that arent really practical in a road car, like the flappy paddle gearboxes. To use these you had to have both hands on the steering wheel. How many drive with both hands on the steering wheel at the correct position? I certainly dont.

Generally I do agree, that advancements made in F1, do translate to road cars, and manufacturers can use what they have learnt in F1 to improve their road cars.

Certainly, you need a bang of *some* sort. What I meant to say was, of course, using less fuel. As you've pointed out. Right now, F1 engines aren't allowed to have more than 5 sparks per power stroke, and only using FIA approved spark plugs. No laser ignition, no variable timing on the valves etc.

So there's little room for improvement there. Which is a shame, but I understand the reasoning behind it.



Wasn't the 4-pot the BMW unit? Clever little thing. They were louder, but they weren't screamers like the v12-v8 era engines were, that were designed for high revs. I only have TV and video to go by, as I didn't start watching F1 until I was 8 years old back in 1984/85.

They had a definite low growl about them, I remember that much. Sort of like listening to a Super Stock or a Hot Rod going around Cowdenbeef at full pelt.



Yup, you've pretty much hit the nail on the head there. The older turbo units were higher revving, meaning that there were more pulses of sound from the collision of hot/fast moving gas with colder/slower moving gas. Also there were twin exhausts feeding into smaller turbo units, that weren't driving generator/motor combos - so less dampening of the sound waves.

Not really. But then you would have ended up with unwieldy, bulky engines. And besides, the idea is to drive road car adoption - most people don't have V8's that scream at 18,000 rpm.


Isn't that sport of the point? If a turbo is not so much about having a racy car, and more about being more economical, wouldn't more people want to have one? The drive behind the adoption of various technologies has to come from somewhere. Maybe it will lead a manufacturer to create a small capacity turbo with MGU-H, that's equivalent in power to say, a 1.6 or 2.0 version of its standard engine but burns a lot less fuel.



Maybe the problem is your sloppy driving style then? Many cars have flappy paddle switchers, but they tend to be not the only method for changing gears. The Merc A class can have them, and the company pool car that I drove a couple of weeks ago, a BMW 5 class with and auto box had them.

I reckon around half the country is driving a diesel these days and, unless it's manufactured by Massey-Ferguson, it's probably got a turbo.

I'd bet my house that the MGU-H will be the next bit of F1 tech' to escape into the real world.

I don't think the likes of MGU-H (or, indeed, other F1 technologies) are going to appear en masse in the very near future, but they will begin to filter through sooner rather than later. Manufacturers of performance cars are already downsizing with a shift to smaller turbo-charged engines so, for example, the new BMW M3 is a 3.0 V-6 turbo rather than a 4.0 V-8. That sets things up nicely for MGU-H in the future. I think that the majority of Diesel cars are already turbocharged, so there may be more turbos out there than we imagine! (... and Si_Crewe just beat me to it!)

I know that BMW and Honda have been looking at a version of MGU-H for a road car for quite some time, so I'd say it won't be too long before we see them on the proverbial High Street.

Why do people see the new engines as somehow being incompatible with being the "pinnacle" of sport? The cars will be lapping faster than last year within a few races, this is clearly progression. Astonishing engineering as usual from the F1 manufacturers. The usual knicker twisting from petrol heads.

I loved being able to hear the crowd for the first time.

Turbos are being adopted back into petrol as well as diesels a lot these days as a way of upping the power for a smaller capacity and higher fuel efficiency. You can get 2 stage turbos & low pressure turbos. I suspect the majority of new cars will have a turbo of some sort in 5 years time and they will most likely have some sort of ERS to harvest some energy and allow the turbo to spool up and avoid lag. I reckon the new power unit rules will intice a number of other manufacturers back into the sport. As we discussed a few weeks ago, Honda re on their way back, Cosworth have already developed a 2014 engine. I wouldn't be surprised to see at least one other works team come along soon such as BMW returning.

The main reason motor manufacturers are increasingly switching to small turbo charged engines is reduce CO2 emissions to stop them getting fined by the EU.

http://www.theguardian.com/environme...missions-limit

Not entirely sure about that. In 2009 we had 4 Manufacturer teams. They came 4th, 5th, 6th and 8th. The top 3 were all pure racing teams. Of course they need engines, but manufacturers will always provide customer engines to customers.

If you go back 10 years before this, to 1999, the only manufacturer team was Ferrari.

Before the 2000s F1 had always been about the 'Garagista' teams and Ferrari. Works teams had made the occasional foray into the sport and in reality teams like Mclaren and Williams in the late 80's & 90's were in effect works teams through their partnership with the big engine suppliers but the teams didn't inflate to hundreds of people and the budgets didn't increase to £hundreds of millions until Honda, Ford (Jag), Toyota, Renault & BMW turned it into a dick waving competition.

That change was not good for the sport. The teams became massively inefficient financially, making small incremental increases in performance based on huge investment rather than raw ingenuity and trial and error. The sport has never been the same since and even today the big teams are far too big and spend far too much money. An over-all budget cap would be the best thing for the sport in the long run but teams like Ferrari, Mercedes and Red Bull will never vote for it.

I probably over-exaggerated with the claim that we wouldn't have F1, but F1 as it is now still needs the big manufacturers. It's also possible (although I am of course speculating) that the likes of Renault, Mercedes and Honda would be less inclined to even supply engines if the sport wasn't at least giving the impression of going "greener".

I'd also make the point (somewhat tongue in cheek!) that in 2009, Brawn wouldn't have existed if the Honda works Team hadn't been around in 2008!

How can they claim that? The rules are pretty clear and unambiguous. They are not allowed to use their device, they must use one supplied by the FIA. Ergo, they deliberately and flagrantly flouted the rules.

Errm....McLaren are car manufacturers. That said, that was just one year, there are currently five motor manufacturers on the grid and all engines are supplied by motor manufacturers.

I think RBR, will go into the meeting and say your sensor was unreliable so we had no choice but to run out sensor. He is all of our data, and as you can see we never exceeded the limit. Since the only rule we broke was using our sensor, reinstate DR and give us out constructor points and we will pay a fine. Using their own sensor does not warrant DR being DQed, which I think is fair enough.

I think the outcome will be DR gets re-instated, however RBR do not get the constructor points.

... in the meantime, what's going to happen in Malaysia, Bahrain and probably even China?

If RBR feel they have a dodgy sensor, will they do the same thing again? Will any other Teams try it? Will someone momentarily exceed the specified limit in qualifying and have their lap-time scrubbed?

This has the potential to get very messy!

Red Bull 'may quit F1', says owner Dietrich Mateschitz


I can't help but wonder whether he'd still be saying this if Riccardo had won?

Another Team Owner who thinks he can bully his way to the top. If he wants to skedaddle, let him.

He did not seem to mind the tyre change mid season last year that helped Red Bull to domination again.

That's both stubborn and naive in equally large measures.

Obviously, the rules dictate that they must use an FIA flowmeter to ensure compliance with the fuel-flow reg's but if RBR can show that the FIA instrument was faulty then there's no other choice than to rely on something which IS reliable.

Again, since you obviously missed it the first few times around, what'd happen if the end snapped off the FIA's tape-measure?
Would all the teams have to build cars that were, say, 10cm wider and taller so they'd still comply with "the rules" or would it be up to the FIA to, y'know, get a new tape-measure?

Course, the real story, here, is that RBR probably have some vested interest in undermining the FIA flowmeters and, when it comes right down to it, if RBR force the FIA to verify the accuracy of the flowmeters, the FIA are probably going to lose.

I wouldn't be surprised if, as a result of this, the flowmeters are abolished and the teams are left to demonstrate their compliance with fuel-flow reg's via telemetry from their EFI systems.