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Comment by jw14 | Hacker News Reader

I think Formula E is kind of useless. Racing competitions can be a good engine for innovation, but last I heard Formula E has all cars using a standard battery. Isn't the battery the biggest thing we want to improve on EVs?

They hold the races in cities instead of "real" race tracks, which I guess is cool if that's your home town but as a (lukewarm) racing fan I would rather see tracks I know. I wonder if they also want to avoid comparisons with ICE race cars. The Gen 2 Formula E did 0-60 in 2.8s... which is achievable in some ICE street cars. Hopefully the Gen 3 is more impressive.

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I'm not really sure Formula E is big enough yet to put a lot of resources into battery tech like Formula 1 can engine tech.

I believe the biggest reason they are in cities now is that the battery capacity/tech just isn't there yet for something like Spa or COTA for the distance and speeds required for an interesting race. City courses allow for a design that offers a lot of regenerative braking.

Another reason to host them in cities is that cities are great for fans. Lots of hotels, restaurants, people buy tickets, etc. Cities are likely more open to Formula E due to the quieter cars and lower pollution too.

So, not useless, just maybe not interesting to you.

Long term the goal probably includes custom batteries, but Im assuming now they arent included because they want to keep costs lower. Teams do get to design powertrain stuff though, which is why you see car manufacturers in it. Good way to get some advanced R&D, and brand awareness obviously.

For publicity reasons F1 and Indycar/CART virtually never race on the same tracks. Otherwise people would point fingers and say that US series are slower overall, or top speeds in F1 are not as jaw-dropping as in US.

I'd bet FE has similar arrangement - no one wants obvious comparison with an obvious loser by some metric.

Just this weekend Formula E held the Monaco ePrix, using the same layout F1 uses.

As a comparison, the FE pole time was 1:29.839. Last year the F1 pole lap was 1:10.346.

This is basically the same time as Formula 3, which has a pole position of 1:28.893 in 2021

https://formularegionaleubyalpine.com/corsa/monaco-2021/

(This is really Formula 3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Formula_Regional_European... )

Yeah, the current gen cars are (very) roughly equivalent to F3 cars in terms of overall performance. Hopefully the Gen3 cars can push closer to F2 (they're still going to be miles off F1)

F2 is about as performant as IndyCar, except on high speed ovals where IndyCar is better than anything else (F1 is not designed for that.) I believe that's possible to build low cost cars as performant as a F1 but it's not in the interest of FIA to sanction that kind of series because F1 must be the fastest one by definition. The "pinnacle of motorsport."

To back my statement: if you look at the race times for the last 20-25 years F1 cars didn't get any faster at completing a race. They got faster at completing a qualifying lap so we could say that current cars are built to run hot laps and have to enter into a slow mode to run a race. BTW that cost billions of cumulative engineering efforts. If somebody tells Dallara to build 20 copies of a Ferrari F1 car from 2004 (Ferrari won 15 out of 18 races that year) you'll have a v10 series much faster than any IndyCar or F2, only slightly slower than current F1 and it will cost a fraction because of the reasons for IndyCar costs a fraction of F1.

Monaco is special in a way that power does not matter there that much and even downforce is not so important, so comparing different cars over that track does not make much sense.

Just because it's not a typical circuit doesn't mean the comparison is useless. To your point though, Monaco is the best case scenario for Formula E when being compared to Formula 1.

IndyCar pole position at COTA 2019: 1:46.0177.

Formula 1 2019 and 2021: 1:32.029, 1:32.910.

Moto GP 2021: 2:02.781.

In battery design, there's always an energy - safety trade-off. The proper role of racing regulations is to prevent a race to the bottom in safety. So I'm in favor of standardizing the battery.

If I've gathered anything from "innovation" in F1/FE, it's because of heavy-handed regulations forcing the teams to innovate. Just enrol bankrupting fines/disqualification for battery fires/injuries/death (if they don't already) and we'll see innovation there that can trickle into mainstream.

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