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Comment by Rinzler89 | Hacker News Reader

Formula-E is also known as "Formule No-Engines therefore nobody watches it". Sad but true.

One of the big reason people pay to watch motorsports is for the noise and rumble of ICEs. It's no coincidente that Formula 1 kept loosing viewers and money the more cylinders they were reducing for the sake of "environmentally friendliness", even though the carbon emitted by their V12-V10 ICEs was dwarfed by the gargantuan amount of carbon released to move that circus across the continents all year.

So unless you ban ICEs in motorsports as well, I don't see how you can convince investors to spend big money in Formula-E development, considering how little viewership it generates, in oder for it to spawn cutting edge tech that can later trickle down to road cars like it was with F1 decades ago.

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>Formula-E is also known as "Formule No-Engines therefore nobody watches it". Sad but true.

What absolute rot. Last year had 334 million viewers, putting it above NASCAR in viewership.

A lot of people think F1 is a snoozer since there often isn’t any question about who is going to win. If I was to bet on something it would be how many tires they will shred. (They have trouble finding tire vendors because what tire vendor wants people seeing their tires explode?)

You're comparing it to a sport that's US exclusive.

You said no one watches it. I pointed out that's categorically not true. It has hundreds of millions of people watching it. That's not no one. That's a lot of people. More people watched formula e than watched the super bowl. More people watched Formula E than watched the Le Mans 24 hour (nearly 3x). More people watched Formula E than watch Supermoto last season. etc. etc.

Your whole point was grounded in the idea that it's a sport no one watches, and that's just fundamentally not true. It's not only got a solid viewership base, it's growing at a phenomenal pace, with 2023 seeing a more than 50% growth over the 2022 season.

And refuting the point with which you started off – "nobody watches it"

Fine. Nobody watches Nascar and more people watch FE.

I used to feel the same way until I actually watched a Formula E race. The racing is incredibly close at times (I think last race had a 3 wide finish for the podium), and features like Fan boost make for a really engaging overall experience

Agreed, I’ve been to two formula e races in past years, and have tickets to another two this year. I’ve been to Formula 1 which was definitely something, but still enjoy FE for the racing.

I strongly disagree with your assessment of ICE vs EV but I don't watch FE either for different reasons - it's a driver series, not a constructor series like F1.

Give us a constructor battle and let the teams go nuts on power and drivetrain. If you're going to constrain anything beyond safety, make it aero to keep things affordable, but then let them make fuckin WACKY powertrains and let's see what EV can do!

I just want the engineering marvel of fast cars going fast, I'm not that tied into vroom vroom sounds and I'd rather be able to hear the grip of the tires than the sound of exploding dinos.

Formula-E cars used to look weird to me. Now F1 cars are starting to look like them.

At least now the cars recharge their batteries rather than swap car/battery mid-race which didn't seem like 'true racing' to me.

There will come a time when combustion engines aren't appealing to viewers, similar to how smaller turbo ones came into use. In particular if Formula-E cars are doing faster laps and is more challenging/competitive. One way to preserve F1 status is to artificially keep FE slower.

I'm surprised that the FIA + FOM haven't clocked on to this, the 2026 power unit regulations could have been a good chance to bring back V10s combined with synthetic fuel.

A comparison of the current V6 turbo hybrid against V8/V10/V12: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ul8ZUBdHCPA

> could have been a good chance to bring back V10s

Not possible. We're in the cost-cap era of F1 and teams spent way too much time and money on those turbo hybrid V6 engines to suddenly bin them and start developing hybrid V10s along with new chassis that can accommodate them.

It would have been cool though, but not economically viable in the current era. The sunk cost fallacy.

I'd argue sticking with the turbo hybrids in 2026 is the outcome of a sunk cost fallacy: FIA have already acknowledged the complexity has been unsustainable by dropping the MGU-H; Red Bull successfully campaigned for the engine freeze just so they could get RBPT set up for 2026; Renault have been totally unable to catch up even taking full advantage of the reliability loophole and moving to split-turbo. Surely dropping turbos and electric propulsion would save more than going back to more cylinders would cost.

They could easily change the cost-cap to exclude engines (if they arent already).

The big teams who actually develop the engines aren't actually short on cash

They already dropped the MGU-H from the 2026 V6 engines in order to convince Audi and GM to enter as engine manufacturers since that component addend extra cost and had no applications in road vehicles so we can assume that they wouldn't have been thrilled to enter if they had to developed V10s now.

Yeah, maybe Ferrari had unlimited moneys for V10 development, but for Mercedes Daimler already is skeptical about the benefits of the F1 program, and Renault's engines just suck this season, and Honda left the F1 program in 2020 then decided to not leave just for Aston Martin but would have probably nto been the case had they needed to switch to V10s.

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