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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

Is that limitation to reduce the cost of competing for those who don't have big GPU farms?

Everyone has tons of resources / big GPU farms / etc in F1. It's one of many limitations to stop the cost to be competitive from going to infinity.

Typical contender teams spend $300m/year.

What is a typical team? Biggest teams spend $450m, smallest spend $130m. The resource difference is very real, and the mean hides that.

As another comment mentions above, there are now budget caps, which affect every decision a team make. For instance, one of the Mercedes drivers had a really nasty crash recently and the cost to build him a new car is putting budget pressure on Merc.

This reminds me of the invented sport Paced Badminton. It’s badminton, and also the players have pacemakers and are only allowed a fixed number of heartbeats per match.

Since this year the budget cap for the teams is set to $145m/year.

Yes, but that comes with a pretty heavy asterisk - driver salaries are not included in the cap for example (which will be extremely significant for the top teams), nor is marketing. Still, I think it's a step in the right direction for the sport - having a cost cap in place now lays the groundwork for tighter restrictions in the future.

IIRC it was mostly to reduce overall expenditure on aerodynamics. Before FIA restricted resources, teams would use wind tunnels 24/7, up to 70 days per year. This was crazy expensive so the restrictions were implemented (and they happened to include CFD limits too).

How much did wind tunnels cost to build and run? I'm surprised the teams (or at least the parent company) didn't have their own dedicated wind tunnel.

A car size wind tunnel that can do 250 mph will be moving 400kg of air each second, and requiring a 2.5 megawatt fan. That costs ~$500k in electricity annually to run half a working day. That motor from China costs $30k. Imagine it's the same again for the fan, same again for wiring and control systems, and double that for fiberglass moulded side panels, foundations etc. We're talking £150k, and that's for a very budget wind tunnel.

Working back from the $500k number gets me to 19 cents per kilowatt hour which seems a trifle high for industrial usage with a predictable 2.5MW load.

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/gas-and-...

It looks like 14-17 cents per kilowatt hour is about the going rate as of Q3 - Q4 2020.

I’m a little surprised this doesn’t lead to more such facilities being strategically located based on availability of cheap power, e.g. by building near to hydro, and where power costs can be ~2c/kWh. See: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/technology/sunday-buzz...

I’m forced to conclude the power costs are a marginal expenditure versus other costs involved in running such a facility, and benefits from having R&D, testing and validation, and production all on the same campus?

Most teams have their own dedicated wind tunnels and they are fairly expensive installations. As an example, the artificial lake you see in front of the McLaren Technology Center at Woking [0] is the cooling liquid reservoir for their wind tunnel.

Check out this 8 part YouTube series from Sauber about their wind tunnel installation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBVgwpYUp18

These are big industrial installations which need highly specialized staff to run them. Even if the facility exists, keeping the "wind on" costs a lot of money per hour.

Ironically, as a response to the newly introduced cost cap measure, the teams are building new facilities like crazy right now, with many teams building a bigger wind tunnel so they can have it in the books before the accounting for the cost cap starts.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McLaren_Technology_Centre [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBVgwpYUp18

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