Comment by bayindirh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bayindirh | Hacker News Reader

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F-1 was really interesting years ago. With no traction control or advanced aerodynamics and less regulations on engine power, it was a real arena for drivers.

It was so fierce that Senna decided to hit his rival in the first corner of a race, taking out both, solidifying Senna's championship.

It was exciting too. Since drivers need to take risks with 750+ HP beasts, Senna battling Schumacher, Villneuve battling Coulthard was fun.

Pit-stop tactics was the cherry on top, not the secret sauce. Engines and drive trains were not regulated. After some deaths, non rational gains (Mercedes 7G-tronic was so quick when paired with their engine. It just accelerated uninterrupted so it got banned. Renault's Open Injection engine was so powerful so it got banned a year later) and hey, it's getting too expensive cries (and Ferrari-Gate), it lost its luster for the audience.

Now the war is behind the scenes. Homologated parts, limited testing and simulation (they have yearly CPU instruction limits!) and some good people rule the sport.

It's no longer about the drivers. It's about the car you drive and the people behind it. If you have the season's best engine and Adrian Newey in your car design team, you can just win.

So it feels like the movie "Death Race" if you have a good car, you have advantage and if it doesn't break down, you win. That's it.

I left watching it the day Ferrari admitted that they're basically financed by FIA (by getting 23% more advertisement revenue cut at the end, every year).

Some more points: Standardized ECU just killed a lot of excitement by limiting remote engine tuning. Ferrari's domination slowly eroded excitement for most people. Drivers being immature and getting away with it eroded its prestige for me. I still miss Jaguar's green/gold cars. Boy, they were handsome.

So its golden era is long gone. No wonder Honda is leaving.

> they have yearly CPU instruction limits

This sounded too ridiculous to me, so I started digging. Lo and behold, [1]. Appendix 8, sections 2 and 3.

The entire thing is a fun read, with pearls such as:

    in the case of an Intel CPU with either the Sandybridge or Ivybridge
    chipset where the competitor chooses not to exploit the AVX feature; the
    competitor must explicitly declare and be able to demonstrate that they are
    not using the AVX feature in the CFD solve process. If the non‐usage of the
    AVX feature is proven to the auditor, the Intel Sandybridge and Ivybridge
    chipset cores can be rated as 4 FLOP/cycle/core rather than as 8
    FLOP/cycle/core.

[1]: https://www.fia.com/sites/default/files/2019_sporting_regula...

CPU? wouldn't f1 teams be using GPU for their CFD work

You should have a quick read through the document, that's just one rule.

The rules seem mostly focused on computations rather than hardware.

I'm not that familiar with the hardware-level stuff they're talking about, but it seems likely that there are situations where a CPU is preferable to a GPU under these rules.

That would be more efficient, but GPUs were banned to level the playing field between extremely rich and slightly less extremely rich teams.

Of course, the people who made that rule probably just looked at the cost of a GPU vs the cost of a CPU without realizing that per operation GPUs are much cheaper to run.

EDIT: I originally heard this on Reddit and after looking I can't find any real sources, so this could be inaccurate.

The limit was on TFLOPs, so you don't get to compute more just by using better hardware.

Wow. The level of detail there is crazy.

They even have an equation governing the supply of car power units.

See Appendix 9, section b.

If you think the level of detail is crazy you need to understand how crazily some teams will cheat.

The details still aren't out yet but Ferrari literally managed to cheat the fuel flow sensor last year - this is probably the most important rule in the sport, for the cars at least.

What stops them from just running simulations at CPUs outside the organization's control? It's not like an engineer can't go to their home computer, open a terminal and SSH to a server, which could be in the opposite corner of the world. Even if all official simulations must be logged, which I suppose will also appear in the rules, running a few rogue simulations and looking at the output will give big hints about which official simulations one should choose to run...

I have connected to supercomputers and ran expensive experiments (not for F1 :)) from all kinds of devices, from phones to borrowed crappy netbooks, and from all kinds of places, like bars, the beach, etc... so I don't understand how that kind of regulations could be enforced unless they physically lock the engineers up for the season.

Same thing that stops them breaking any of the other rules I guess. Fines, race bans, points deductions etc. if it's found out.

Traction control has been banned in F1 since 2008.

There have always been engine regulations. The drivers are fighting as hard as ever against each other when they get a chance.

Pit stop tactics are not a secret sauce. You can predict the pit stop strategy pretty well before the race even starts.

It has always been as much about cars as drivers. E.g. McLaren won 4 years in the row 1988-1991 and then Williams won 3 years in the row. Ferrari won 6 years in the row from 1999 to 2004.

I really don't think remote engine tuning added any excitement.

There have been proposals such as reverse-grid races or qualifications that would have added a lot of excitement but traditionalists are against them. Maybe having a couple restarts would also help. The cars are now much more reliable than in the past so there is less random chance.

Wasn't it banned much earlier? Famously in 94 Senna was under pressure in the Williams which was suffering without the traction control it enjoyed the year before, and he also had raised suspicions after standing trackside that Benetton were using an illegal form of traction control that year.

That was a second ban in 2008. It was allowed starting in 2001.

> If you have the season's best engine and Adrian Newey in your car design team, you can just win.

An Adrian Newey designed car hasn't won the championship since 2013.

That means 2013 was the last season that I've watched attentively.

Traction control was banned quite a while ago from what i remember. That really did take away the skill from driving and make it technical arms race. There is still skill required now.

I do agree rules have killed some of the fun, it seems to be the reliance on aerodynamics as a means to gain an advantage after the limits on engine power and lifetime (top teams having a "qualifying engine" that was destroyed after one qually session, and race engines designed to last one race was crazy though).

Aero being so important means following other cars for an overtake puts the car behind at a real disadvantage, hence the "DRS" hack.

The trouble with F1 is that the "anything goes" environment they had until the 80s/90s will always be more exciting than the rules they have now to stop drivers killing themselves. They did seem to choose rules that disproportionately worked against creating fun races though.

> (they have yearly CPU instruction limits!)

I don't know anything about this sport, but does this mean that you can't buy an off-the-shelf product?

There are a set of “listed” parts that must be designed by the constructor team. There was a bit of a controversy this year because Racing Point used last year’s Mercedes brake duct design. The part was not listed last year, meaning it was ok then, but it became a listed part in 2020 season. Racing Point was penalized a few points in the standings as a result, but allowed to use the design since they couldn’t unlearn how Mercedes designed the brake duct.

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