Originally Posted by dansus:
“Honda thought they could spin the smaller MGU-H faster at 120k, but never got it working. Lack of e-juice means they use more fuel and have to back off the power to get to the end of the race.”
You know, that's fairly obvious but I'd never really considered it before.
Most fans are now aware that the Honda ERS doesn't provide as much juice as the others but of course that ALSO means that they're almost certainly using more petrol as well so it's going to be a bit of a double-whammy.
There was a rather telling bit of onboard footage during the Austin race too.
Alonso came out of the last corner and nailed the throttle (presumably getting into top gear), went over the start/finish straight and then he changed DOWN a gear as the car began to climb the hill before dropping down through the gears when he reached turn 1.
By comparison, onboard footage of Hamilton showed him coming out of the final turn, going up through the gears and then just accelerated all the way along the start/finish straight and dropped down through the gears for turn 1.
I'm not sure if Alonso needed to make that extra down-shift because Honda engine was struggling with the hill or because he needed to increase the revs to get some electrical charge into the battery.
Either way, it clearly showed that the Honda engine definitely wasn't as "strong" as the Mercedes unit, which could just throw Hamilton down the road without any fuss at all.
And, of course, any time that you're in a lower gear than another car it means you're using more fuel than the other guy as well.
Another thing I was wondering about was whether it'd be possible to build some kind of ERS-H that used more than one generator.
It might be possible to build something along the lines of a rootes blower, whereby one generator is run directly off the shaft between the turbine and the compressor and a 2nd generator was driven by gears also fitted to that shaft.
Of course, a turbo runs at insane speeds and I'm not sure how long the gear-drive would last.
Another idea I had was that you could, theoretically, just fit a pair of turbines (that is, just the turbine half of a turbocharger) into the exhaust system (one for either bank of the vee, perhaps) specifically to drive a pair of ERS-H generators and then have the exhaust continuing on to a regular turbo unit at the rear of the engine.
That would almost certainly work, although I'm not sure whether it'd back-pressure the exhaust unacceptably.