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Comment by mhh__ | Hacker News Reader

Tesla killing F1 is a conclusion too far. The success of electric vehicles makes the calculus less good, but it's just another term in the equation for a company doing business in F1. Honda are still in other ICE motorsports.

I think it's worth pointing out that Honda staying this long was a surprise in itself because, to be blunt, they were absolutely awful in their first years and no better than their rivals now.

Also, the issue for a battery powered racing series isn't really efficiency at the moment but actually just being able to actually do the race distance at an acceptable speed. If they could make Formula E cars go fast enough they'd have already switched, or at least put pen to paper.

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I've been watching F1 since the 70's and I still love every minute of it today.

Honda pulling out is completely understandable, and I think F1 should sit up and listen. The dynamic simply won't work with three engine manufacturer teams and the rest being customer teams - especially when Red Bull is a customer team.

It might be radical, but I'd prefer to see F1 return to a simpler naturally aspirated V10 ICE only power unit, perhaps with a completely separate (and simplified) system for brake energy harvesting and short-term energy deployment (exiting corners).

We have formula-e let's make F1 more accessible to niche manufacturers.

No niche manufacturer will be able to make a competitive V10 PU.

If F1 is serious about reducing costs, they have to at least standardize PU, like they did to ECU.

Engines is the least of concerns. Mercedes win, not because they also produce the engine, but because they pour nearly half a billion euros into the car, with engines being a vanishingly small amount of that. They have a car with superior aerodynamics and mechanical grip. Making the engine standardized will not change that.

> Mercedes win, not because they also produce the engine, but because they pour nearly half a billion euros into the car

It takes more than just throwing money at the problem to win. Otherwise, Red Bull (paying for two teams in full) and Ferrari would be doing a lot better right now.

Mercedes, excluding the engine development, outspend both of those teams. All three outspend the rest of the field by quite some margin.

You can't possibly know that? Ferrari's F1 spend is not public knowledge.

According to this source[0], for 2019, Mercedes spent $484MM, Ferrari $463MM, Red Bull $445MM, Red Bull 2 (aka Toro Rosso) $138M.

Ferrari's last driver's championship win was 2007, and last constructors championship win was 2008. If simply outspending their competitors by 5% would make all the difference, I think they would have tried it by now (and infact, if you look at previous years, they have, and failed)

[0] https://www.essentiallysports.com/what-are-the-budgets-for-a...

Mercedes get prize money and sponsor money. On top of that they get revenue from supplying engines to other teams.

The team might spent untold hundreds of millions (of money they have earned) but the parent Mercedes company spend thirty million a year.

For Mercedes this is excellent value for money, equivalent to a billion or so in paid advertising time on television.

Contrast this situation with teams at the back of the grid: no revenue from supplying engines, expenses for getting engines, poor sponsorship money, no income from a parent manufacturer. Oh, and little in the way of prize money. They do get some sponsorship money from their drivers though, either because they are in a Mercedes/Ferrari/Red Bull 'academy' or because the pay driver comes with sponsorship from his wealthy father or country.

Mercedes the F1 team does not get revenue from selling the engines. Mercedes HPP develops and sell those engines to all the teams that use them.

Ferrari and Red Bull also spend half a billion euros a year. But neither has a shot at the championship because of their engine situation.

That is simply not true. Mercedes had a huge head start in 2014 by starting the V6-hybrid engine development from 2012, while their competitors (Red Bull and Ferrari) were busy fighting for the championship with V8 engine in 2012 and 2013.

If you mean their first years of a hybrid engine era, then yes, they were pretty awful. But their early years in the 80s as an engine supplier were very very succesful.

Shouldn't F1 cars be about finding the peak of a X engineering problem. For electiric's it's not as much about speed but battery. Maybe having hyper-miler distance races that aren't speed oriented is the sort of pivot F1 should be doing? I know it's not sexy like a fast car moving nimbly among the pack but if car companies can get their tech focused on getting the most distance from a battery then there's the cross over development that can flow to the mainstream.

But I know, watching a slow race is a big ask.

> watching a slow race is a big ask.

Above non-ridiculously low speed wouldn't the relative speed among cars be more important for entertainment?

The cars are so fast and powerful that they have these boost rules that the drivers can use up like nitro in a video game. If F1 went all electric, slowed down a little, and got rid of this boost stuff I think it would be far more entertaining and easier to follow the action, like it used to be.

The only reason overtaking currently happens is because of ERS (this "boost stuff") as well as the relatively large benefit from the Drag Reduction System in high speed sections, so I have to disagree. It would be even more boring than it's already become with Mercedes domination.

Maybe they could get away with slightly slower. They already have a bit of a problem where the aerodynamics have gotten so good that a lot of the tracks have corners that are just taken flat out now. Lap records are still being broken with the lower powered hybrid engines.

Sure, but current Formula E cars are around F3 speed, which is two steps below F1 cars. Formula E even had to avoid racing on the full Monaco layout to avoid headlines comparing (and ridiculing them) for being slow.

Some fuel efficiency race exists even by honda.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_Eco-marathon

https://global.honda/about/sustainability/environment/face/c...

> Shouldn't F1 cars be about finding the peak of a X engineering problem. For electiric's it's not as much about speed but battery. Maybe having hyper-miler distance races that aren't speed oriented is the sort of pivot F1 should be doing? I know it's not sexy like a fast car moving nimbly among the pack but if car companies can get their tech focused on getting the most distance from a battery then there's the cross over development that can flow to the mainstream. But I know, watching a slow race is a big ask.

I don't think anyone wants to watch a slow race. Hyper-miler distance races sounds like an oxymoron as hypermiling usually involves ridiculous theatrics of going 30-40mph on the freeway to maximize efficiency. It wouldn't even be racing in the traditional sense - it would be akin to a time trial but distance based. There'd be almost no need to overtake, would there?

I'm not a big fan of F1 as it stands (it's rather uneventful at times) but using EVs in this way would kill it completely as far as I can tell.

Plenty of people watch the tour de france, which is basically low powered slow racing. The strategy involved in exploiting aerodynamic gains in the pack is kind of fascinating. Trying to sell it as the same thing is kind of dumb though.

they aren't slow by any standard.

in 2005 Tour De France was completed in 86 hours and 15 minutes at the average speed of ~42km/h

that's very fast for bikes (and probably more dangerous than driving f1 cars, that's what makes it fascinating for cycling fans).

What about full electric F1 cars, but where they switch out batteries four times during the race during pit stops. High speed racing without the need to carry a heavy battery pack.

Switching out batteries in Formula E has been problematic up until this point from a technological point of view, so much so that in Formula E they simply have 2 cars and when the drivers pit they hop out of the first car and into the second car. Batteries are extremely heavy and need to be protected so that in the event of an accident they don't explode or kill the driver. Thus far the battery has been more or less part of the chassis. Its not clear that battery technology is advanced enough to provide the energy density required to propel the cars at racing speeds while also being portable enough to be swapped out mid-race.

They don't swap cars anymore. But the races are shorter than F1 races.

I watch Formula 1 and Formula E and in some ways Formula E is better racing. It's more accessible, the cars are all a lot closer in performance and nobody seems to run away with the points.

The problem? The lack of straight line speed means you have to build smaller tracks and a lot of the drama of Formula 1 is missing. You don't feel like you're watching the fastest cars in the world and it feels like a major compromise. If you put those cars on a track built for current Formula 1 cars it's going to be a complete snooze-fest.

What makes racing so attractive to fans is the perception (hopefully not that reality) that these drivers are defying death and/or major injury in pursuit of victory. Even if they're relatively safe, the speed itself triggers the lizard brain inside all of us that keeps most of us from attempting to travel at 200+ MPH.

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