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Comment by W-Stool | Hacker News Reader

Think about this scenario for a minute:

You are top designer at an F1 team. You've got an idea that will (maybe) make the car go faster. Say it is a different profile rear wing. So you get the lads to build one up (you have your own carbon fibre maufacturing facility on site) and you mount it on the current car and then arrange for the team to rent (say) Brands Hatch for the day, run the new wing, compare sector times, get feedback from the driver, etc - something any technical person would expect to do.

Problem: this is completely against the rules. Can't just take the car out to the track and run it between races when you want. That's why these insane chassis dynos exist, everything is a simulation now, even wind tunnel time and the number of CPUs in your CFD cluster are being regulated. This is all in the name of reducing expenses of course, but it has the opposite effect.

I saw my first F1 race in 1979, it was really something. The sport I see now has almost nothing to do with those times - in some good ways (safety!) but mostly bad (see above).

I'm out.

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This is unrelated to the OP because Honda exclusively supply engines and do not have a works Grand Prix team.

When the sport was awash with tobacco money about 15 years ago, the big teams all had an entire testing team, completely divorced from their race team, which would spend most days of the year simply hammering around the racetracks of Europe, at astronomical expense. Such things are illegal now because if they were not the sport would be dead within five years.

> Such things are illegal now because if they were not the sport would be dead within five years.

It's already dead. Might as well have the testing.

Grand Prix racing is not dead. Don't hyperbolise.

Well then, how would it be dead in 5 years? That sounds every bit as hyperbolic.

Because only a small set of teams would be able to afford the testing, and you'd end up with a tiny starting grid with only a few cars. It'd be crap.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Formula_One_Grand_Prix...

It's not been interesting for a while. There may be > 10 cars, but there's very few that actually make it to a win, and there's been only one that's mattered each year for almost a decade.

The question I guess is how much less exciting would the race be if it was only the 4 cars that might win racing compared to today where there are those 4 cars + 14 others.

I don't understand why it would kill the sport, could you explain?

I think this is mostly to give teams with smaller budgets a fighting chance against teams like say Mercedes who have an astronomical budget and could finance R&D all year long.

They mentioned astronomical expense. I’m guessing if one deep pocketed team did it and gained an advantage, the others would be forced to do the same. These teams would risk bankruptcy if they didn’t win. And not everyone can win.

Expenses. Currently the top spenders are Ferrari and Mercedes. Both spend somewhere around $330 million (US) per year (and Mercedes has spent a total of $1.4 billion over the course of these current engine regs developing their car -- that's just development, not race expenses.). This is a beyond insane figure, but it's worth it to them for the marketing. Meanwhile smaller teams -- the teams you need to actually fill out a grid so there's actual racing to watch -- are probably around the $100 million/year mark.

F1 is almost purely play-to-win, to use a modern coinage. The aerodynamics involved have been so insanely optimized that teams spend millions per year to employ some of the best aerodynamicists in the world to eke out another 0.005 secs/lap over the competition.

The performance gap between the top and the rest is fairly proportional to the spending gaps. In recent years it's been Mercedes winning every championship, with Ferrari winning a share of races and Red Bull stealing one or two. Those top 6 cars are often a full minute ahead of the pack after just a dozen laps or so. The rest of the cars have no chance at all. This year it's even worse as Ferrari got caught doing something illegal so their engine has been nerfed. Mercedes just drive away at the start and are almost never remotely challenged. Now in this environment, how many sponsors/car companies want to spend hundreds of millions per year just to tool around multiple minutes behind the Mercedes cars? It's just not a good investment.

And many good ideas to counteract this (reverse-grid sprint races on Saturday to decide starting order on Sunday, as opposed to traditional qualy, at select tracks) are lampooned by the fanbase for being untraditional. Unfortunately if the sport continues like this there won't be any traditions left to uphold at all; I understand their complaints but it's a delicate balance.

The latest attempt to restore some modicum of balance is spending caps. The only chance F1 has to survive long term is to encourage new teams to the sport and discourage current ones from leaving, and that means (a) limiting spending across the grid, and (b) not allowing the top engine manufacturers free reign over the formula. Unrestricted research/testing would hasten its demise because it's just another opportunity for the rich teams to spend more. And point (b) above is what killed the LMP1 class; engine manufacturers exercise political sway to make it harder for other manufacturers to enter/win/compete, but then the grid starts dying and those manufacturers pull out, leaving a set of ossified regulations that make it almost impossible for new engine manufacturers to enter.

Seems harder to regulate spending in racing than other sports. In baseball, it’s pretty much all in athlete salaries. I bet most (if not all) teams have a single player that makes more than the whole coaching, analytics and scouting staff put together. And all these salaries are public.

But in racing, so much spending is “off the field”. Seems tough to audit and easy to cheat.

The problem here is also the research costs.

Things, that were only in racing cars years ago, appear now in production cars. Basically, Mercedes can afford to try new things in racing, because it will bring them money in the long run, by selling those new features in their "normal" (road) sports cars. Even if we limit the research costs, some other Mercedes team will work with (eg.) engine optimizations for their production sports cars, and those findings will also find their way to racing.

Even with mainstream car makers (which most of the companies there are), it's easier to develop racing stuff, if you then sell a bunch of very expensive, very fast street-legal cars, than if you sell mostly "normal, working people cars".

>>F1 is almost purely play-to-win, to use a modern coinage.

Maybe you meant "pay-to-win".

I absolutely do not discount driver skill. It's still there. But it's primarily a money game.

> I absolutely do not discount driver skill.

That's the thing I always wondered. How much skill vs car there is in modern F1. ATM I'm on the side of car being the biggest factor (subpar F1 driver will win in the best car).

> subpar F1 driver will win in the best car

I agree, Bottas is a living example. But I think any of the current drivers on the F1 grid will start to win races in the Mercedes car. Beating Hamilton is another thing however.

> Ferrari got caught doing something illegal so their engine has been nerfed.

just a clarification, Ferrari has not been caught doing something illegal, they signed an agreement on how to handle the engine in exchange of some kind of assurance by FIA that won't happen again.

The story says someone inside Ferrari told FIA that the Ferrari engine might not be 100% legal, FIA started an illegal investigation that also involved spies inside Ferrari's factory and industrial espionage, but nothing illegal has been officially found, it would have meant for FIA to admit they ran an illegal operation.

That's how the new Ferrari/FIA deal was born.

Problem is every team is doing something the regulation does not permit, FIA has not enough people to check everything and probably not even the know how to understand exactly what's going on, cars have become too complex, but if you go slow nobody cares. See Racing Point breaking system affair. It's illegal for sure, but no fine has been issued because they need racing point to be there and fill up the grid.

On the other side, everybody knows that the "over 1 thousand" horsepower Mercedes engine is doing something not completely legal, the new regulation for this year were made explicitly to avoid having engines too powerful and 1 thousand horsepower was considered an hard limit, impossible to surpass, by FIA engineers, yet Mercedes it's around 1,020 .

But admitting that the multi championships winner is cheating, after an investigation that without informants with very specific insider information could take years, would mean casting a very bad shadow on the entire F1 circus.

> See Racing Point breaking system affair. It's illegal for sure, but no fine has been issued because they need racing point to be there and fill up the grid.

You mean aside from the €400k fine...? (along with the deduction of 15 points in the constructor's championship)

I mean two things

- Mercedes is the real offender here. They knew very well that the brake ducts of RP were illegal, but said nothing.

- it's peanuts, and only because Ferrari kept appealing against legality of RP brake ducts, the only team left taking actions after even Renault, who made the original protest, dropped it. Coincidentally after dropping the protest Renault have started flying

I used the word "fine" but I should have used penalty, RP should not be allowed on tracks for using illegal parts.

Ferrari is not allowed to run with their original engine - even though officially nothing wrong has been found - and it's probably the only "clean" (as not illegal) engine this year.

F1 teams have severely unbalanced finances.

There's a small number of teams that keep winning and have most of the fans. Having the fastest car this year gives you a leg up next year, having the fastest car attracts the fastest drivers, and having the most fans gives you negotiating leverage over the governing body.

For example, Ferrari have so many fans and so much negotiating leverage they get given $100 million every year - a "heritage bonus"

Uncapped spending would mean all the other teams would either go bankrupt, or be completely uncompetitive.

Isn't F1's unbalanced finances nothing compared to other sports though? i.e. tennis. federer has completely different opportunities compared to a top 75 player.

did it kill the tennis sport and/or is it killing the sport? you could argue that way given that it is always the same folks winning the big tournaments

But Tennis isn't dictated on who has the most billions to invest in new technologies, its pretty limited to the amount of money you can spend on coaching.

kind of. coaching is probably peanuts compared to the rest.

physios (and all other folks) that fly with you. first class and private flights (hilarious that the top players are flown on the tournament dime to the tournaments), perfect nutrition (potentially with personal chefs), nutritionists, drugs or drug therapies, surgeries, preventative medicine etc. staying in a topnotch hotel for two or three weeks prior to a grandslam tournament to get accustomed to the location and time zone.... the list goes on and on.

federer can spend 5 million on it per year without notiicing it. the world number 100? probably 20k.

Cool, now take ALL of those things you listed and now include the fact that in F1 they have to develop and build an entire car as well

i was talking about the ratios though. the unfair advantage for the top guys in a winner-takes-all system is just that. top guys/teams always snowball themselves into the next big thing easier than lower rated guys.

Any tennis player could get the best racket and shoes from any sponsor, or buy it themselves.

The costs to have a F1 is incomparable. Any single part alone is astronomical and many have to be changed between races. Having a car at all for training is a miracle!

Again, the ratio matters, not the total cost. Obviously a single player sport isn't comparable to a tech sport in terms of total financial costs...

the racket and shoes don't matter in terms of expenses, at all. RF's cost is in the millions and you are comming up with rackets... he is drawing a completely unfair advantage that only maybe 3 or 4 other tennis players can afford.

thats like saying the F1 team only needs to purchase tyres.

Many sports have regulations to prevent huge money from stealing the sport from the humans competing: thinking of swimsuit regulations in swimming, budget for football teams, ...

Sport should be more about individual qualities of the sports-man/woman than about money buying them some more advanced technology.

Because smaller teams could not afford it. Thus you'd end-up with a handful of teams competing which would probably translate to half the cars you see on track now. Diversity in any sport is what brings in fans and sponsors. Three to four big names competing with each other with no one else on sight could kill F1, or any sport for that matter.

on the other side, if there were only 5 top teams with 4 car each, competition would be much closer than it is now...

Look at how it is now: Mercedes has one official team, one unofficial (racing point) and a third "hidden" team, the former Williams. Where is Toto Wolff going after the announcement that he will leave Mercedes? and why you say Williams? (Wolff has bought shares of both Aston Martin - former Racing Point - and Williams)

That's 6 Mercedes cars, but only 2 allowed to go fast and win.

Ferrari-Alfa Romeo are in a similar situation.

I say let them race and see what happens.

Put the human factor back by having less cars, but with similar performances.

> This is unrelated to the OP because Honda exclusively supply engines and do not have a works Grand Prix team.

Honda had a works team and pulled out at the end of 2008. They sold the team to Brawn which won the 2009 title with a low budget by exploiting a loophole in the rules. The other teams couldn't catch up soon enough. Brawn had no money left and sold to Mercedes. Red Bull won the next four titles and Mercedes all the other titles up to now.

> They sold the team to Brawn which won the 2009 title with a low budget by exploiting a loophole in the rules.

Williams and Toyota started with a double diffuser as well. Also to be clear Honda had planned for double diffuser on the 2009 car before being bought by Brawn.

And, do not forget, a lot of people died during racetrack tests due to lack of man assistance. Elio De Angelis and Michele Arboreto for example, but I’m sure there are a lot more.... (both of them would be alive if there was someone to take their bodies from the vehicles in time)

> When the sport was awash with tobacco money about 15 years ago, the big teams all had an entire testing team

So, we just need companies with a lot of money that are interested in technical advances and advertising and don’t care about RoI like banks might? What about Google, Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, ... any takers?

This video highlights some of what you're talking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnIjQC08qKk

Little out of the box innovations that are pretty cool and then banned. The mass dampener in the video is really what gets to me. FIA just loves to ban random things. Like, I get some forced regulations according to safety. The Halos, for example, I get that they must be to a specific standard. But a simple mechanical device that helps keep the car stable, gripping the road? Ban that? We're not talking about group B rally level of innovation.

Kind of feels like the FIA adopted the principle, "If it's fun and/or interesting, ban it."

Fresh blood is needed too.

From a safety point of view, the tuned mass damper was a nightmare. A small heavy object that must move freely in the car is hard to secure if a crash happens, and they do happen at very high speeds every single year. It's the same story with the skirts - they make the cars produce very efficient downforce, except when they don't work for whatever reason and the car continues in the state of motion is was in, almost always into a barrier.

Into a barrier is the good outcome for loss of downforce. The car may make a backward somersault and fly over a barrier or land on top of another car.

Loss of downforce does not necessarily mean it goes tumbling. Skits basically means it's easier to create the suction that provide the downforce. Loss of that means it lacks the grip it would otherwise have, not that air gets under the car in a way that send it flying. The front wing and rear wing would still produce some downforce that keeps with the wheels on the ground.

Not necessarily, but it does make it more likely; that’s why I wrote “may”. If the design has skirts to generate more downforce, designers will decrease downforce generated elsewhere.

Having said that, I think skirts were forbidden more because they make driving a car through corners too easy and races too dull than out of safety concerns.

The FIA has made a rule now that any new/innovative finding on a car gets banned the next season.

So if a team develops something, they can run it for one year after which it's banned from the sport.

All of this is to cut cost for the smaller teams; take the DAS system of Mercedes (Double Axis Steering). If the FIA doesn't ban it all teams need to be running it next year, or they fall behind. However its a complex system and the small teams (Haas, Williams, Alfa Romeo for example) might not have the money to research and build it.

So if you don't have massive amounts of engineers and test equipment to invent / develop new things that give you a performance boost for one year then you don't have a chance of winning. Doesn't seem like a very clever way to cut costs to me... Well, maybe it does cut costs, but it also prevents any small team from ever winning.

> The FIA has made a rule now that any new/innovative finding on a car gets banned the next season.

Or in some rare cases, it becomes compulsory instead...

This is all in the name of reducing expenses of course, but it has the opposite effect.

I always thought it was more like, Ferrari will always spend gobs of money and a small player can only spend a tenth as much- the amount of money spent will not change- but how can we narrow the gap between the high budget & low budget teams, such that a really awesome low budget team has a chance of catching a high budget team napping.

That is precisely the reason budget cap will come into effect from 2021.

Ferrari is currently #6 out of 10 teams so whatever they're spending it's not working.

https://www.formula1.com/en/results.html/2020/team.html

For those who are not following - Ferrari "cheated" last year with their engine and have a secret "agreement" with FIA to cut out thr cheat which also meant apparently rebuilding a lot of the PU. They should be back on pace in 2022.

But then Mercedes cheated THIS year and nothing happened. Ferrari simply lost the politics game.

How so? Do you mean there toe in steering setup? If so I don't think that's really cheating as it's a loophole in the rules rather than a contravention of the rules.

Yeah, and exploiting loopholes in the rules is as old as F1. You follow them to the letter, gain an advantage, hopefully win a championship, and then the FIA specifically bans what you did for future years.

For me this is F1. If someone wants to create a competing racing class with standardised chassis and engines then that's fine too. But it isn't F1.

If you are talking of DAS - they spoke with FIA through development process and was ok'ed.

And DAS is made illegal from next year.

Are you saying Ferrari worked with FIA for their sensor cheat last year as well? BTW, none of us on the outside even know what they even cheated on and what the agreement is etc. The theory is that FIA knows there was cheating with the sensors but doesn't have the necessary evidence to prove it.

To me this is the main problem with F1 as a sport. In football and basketball you can see most of the important strategy play out on the field.

In F1 you are always left guessing which hidden aspect of the engineering is affecting the outcome of the race.

Making everything open source wouldn’t change anything, but at least from a fan perspective you could really delve into those cool engineering bits. Right now we are left guessing at what the Ferrari engine was doing and how it worked.

The things that are actually resulting in the wins/losses are not even not visible, they are secret! What other sport is like that?

They are not really secret, there is specualtion, there is copying and eventually there is details.

The whole thing came to this end because RedBull guessed what Ferrari were doing.

Perhaps that is why I love F1 over any other sport. I love the technical aspects, the need to push into gray area etc.

Part of the agreement is that Ferrari engineers are helping the FIA to police the other engines.

The engineers on the payroll at the FIA don't have the time/resources/knowledge to judge the legality of these insanely complex powertrains.

All manufacturers were forced earlier this year to provide detailed info about their Energy Recovery Systems, rumors are that Ferrari suspects the Mercedes ERS to make use of loopholes so Ferrari lends their engineers to the FIA to research the data provided on all engines.

Close some of those loopholes with a Technical Directive (Basically a clarification of the rules, which takes immediate effect) and you can slow down your opponents with immediately.

Source? I find it hard to believe FIA would give Ferrari privileged access to other teams data.

Teams give FIA the data and Ferrari gives pointers and other help. The sensitive data is not shared with Ferrari.

Budget cap kicks in next year heading into new regs for 2022.

Ferrari and Merc spend $500m approx. Budget cap is $175m with exceptions like driver salary, top leaders salary, PU.

Wow. What are the outlays of other sports teams for a season? NFL, in what, mostly player salaries?

No idea about the NFL, but top football (soccer for you Americans) clubs (Barcelona, Bayern München, etc.) have budgets in the 0.5B EUR range.

NFL averages about $250m/team. That’s just player salaries and not coaches/trainers/physios etc

And this has resulted in teams spending silly money this year and last to "beat" the new caps.

New wind tunnels, new factories, expensive software projects. All ploughed ahead this year so they don't have to go on the books after 2022.

"but it has the opposite effect." - so you think the reduction of engine/power units usage from 2 to 3 per race to 3 per season had an opposite cost effect? Or limitation of tire sets that could be used over a race weekend had an opposite cost effect?

Or do you want to remove the regulations and have only 4 or 6 cars (Mercedes, Ferrari and possible McLaren) racing for 21 races instead of 20 to 22 cars for the same amount of races every season?

In a way, yes. Racing slicks are cheap in comparison to the kind of budgets we’re talking about here - and that cost per unit would go down if they were making and using more.

Engineering out the last infinitesimal bit of rain out of something is expensive.

F1 was much more interesting when things like the Tyrell P34 were allowed to exist

>F1 was much more interesting

Yes, and when they were pushing for absolute speed. With a similar 1.6L engine being used in 2022, I could only hope there are areas left for more innovation in the Engine.

Absolutely agree. My first job out of college was working for a company that was a minor sponsor of the Tyrell P34. We briefly had one of the cars in reception.

I am a casual motorsports fan. F1 and Nascar have become boring with cookie-cutter cars. Would love to see a new racing series that allowed real innovation again. Just impose a team budget cap and some basic rules for track safety (no active aerodynamics, fuel load limits, etc). Otherwise do whatever you like whether it's a 16 cylinder engine or all-wheel drive or a giant wing or something totally nuts.

Mercedes this year has a steering wheel that moves vertically to change the angle of the front wheels.

RedBull, Ferrari and Mercedes have different philosophies in their aero, car length, front wing etc.

The cars are far from cookie cutter, and 2022 regs already show different ways people could design the car. That's before we see how the teams do it. It's exciting times ahead for F1 in the shirt term. The 2026 engine reg is what matters.

"real innovation" - to you it's visual changes? there's massive amounts of developments in F1, but you don't see it.

sounds like you're looking for some unregulated junkyard challenge, where everybody shows up with something they welded together in their garage.

and when there are no regulations, somebody shows up with astronomical amounts of money, they start winning every time, the sport becomes boring, people stop losing interest, sponsors pull out, sport dies down.

I believe you missed the "fixed budget" part of the parent

> This is all in the name of reducing expenses of course, but it has the opposite effect.

You might not like it, but it certainly does reduce expenses.

Then why the new proposed budget caps? Seems like all these restricted technology rules would have taken care of this.

Is this a serious question?

Because they want to reduce them more.

> Can't just take the car out to the track and run it between races when you want.

Yes, this has completely ruined the sport. My life used to revolved around F1 starting from the late 80s (did not miss a single race in 25 years), but two years ago I gave up and have not watched the past two seasons.

With rules preventing engine and car development once Mercedes locked in the advantage, it's game over. Sure F1 has had plenty of dominant teams for short time windows but it was engineering-driven and could (and was) overcome by better engineering by other teams. Now that the advantage is locked in by the rules, there is no hope.

To me there's no entertainment value whatsoever in watching Mercedes lap a second faster than everyone year after year. Let's watch some paint dry instead.

There are karting videos on youtube and that's actually far more entertaining than modern F1

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