Powerless F1 drivers frustrated by Bahrain F1 software glitch
motorsport.com
motorsport.com
But maybe that's the difference between shipping a controller for F1 versus shipping one for an industrial or consumer product? shrug.
That's... not how it works at all, though. There are no prizes for individual races and the championship money is also pennies to the teams.
Mercedes's Kimi Antonelli is going to win the WDC anyway for sure at this point, given the points difference.
> Isn't that the entire point of a simulator to learn things that are too expensive to learn in the real world?
You're right but this is not those expensive things. Track time is extremely limited, so the primary role of the sim is to develop the car and how it feels to the drivers, mainly so the setup feels perfect to them.
System-level bugs etc must have their own testing but sim is mainly for driver-engineer testing. Many drivers also don't like using the sim at all like Hamilton.
Wind tunnel time and aerodynamics simulator time are included in the cost cap, as are car parts and most staff (but not driver salaries, travel or marketing)
Drivers can spend all the time they want in standard consumer sim racing rigs, practising the tracks. But when it's the type of extra-high-fidelity simulator that lets you make the car better - that's subject to the cost cap.
I assume someone is already offering an extremely high-fidelity CFD simulator (or a wind tunnel) to help companies shoot awesome videos of their cars, for purposes of including them in TV spots, of course.
I worked on engine and powertrain simulations, and my compiler was used for vehicle and driver simulations. This was built for Honda, but Honda left, bought by Mercedes, and won them several championships.
Ah, a student of the old masters....
(For the uninitiated, or those who wish to relive the memory: https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html )
What they probably could do yesterday, on top of checking a ton of telemetry, is understand which inputs were weird and put those into a simulator and get some hints for the FIA to work with. If you’re not aware, the FIA provides the ECU to all teams so that the telemetry used to check compliances and power modes are fair across all teams, and things like traction control are not there. This is why the FIA had to provide the firmware update.
Sometimes we bring down whole services with "just" config (looking at you, DNS).
Every GP is a slightly different car running bleeding edge tech and code.
These cars are in a perpetual Q&A state, they are getting modified between races. That's true for the "big teams", small teams don't have the resources, they're just "happy to be there". That's why it's possible to see stories like Brawn GP[^1]. That's what makes the sport fascinating, because the overtakes are not as much as one would hope for a ~2-3 hours race. But every little thing counts. In the last race 1st and 2nd had ~103ms diff or something like that for example, which is something that didn't happen for 15-20 years (maybe more).
This isn't really the case anymore. There's a budget cap, and all of the teams are financially sound most of the time. While the poorer teams might bring fewer upgrades in a year, they still bring upgrades all year long, and R&D is a continuous process in every F1 factory these days. Smaller teams also get additional R&D, compute, and testing time compared to the big teams.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_cheating_during...
[1] https://gigamonkeys.com/book/lather-rinse-repeat-a-tour-of-t... (the last paragraph, search for "remote debugging" in the page)
It's possible for driver skill to be important without being the only thing that matters.
Every track is the same because all the cars have the same strengths and weaknesses.
In other words, there are too few variables.
Good races are where teams are involved to make the best car, drivers are involved to execute the best driving, strategists are involved to make the best decisions, and luck creates jeopardy for all.
With different cars (any they are remarkably different given the extensive regs) some do well at high speed tracks, others prefer corners and so on.
Current IndyCar is pretty good compared to the IRL years, this isn't an argument to make F1 a spec series. I was IndyCar for close exciting racing, I watch F1 for the engineering battle as well as the drivers. I think for a lot of F1 fans, the off track drama, the development of the teams through out the season, and the cool ideas they come up with to try to push the boundaries are about as good as the on track entertainment.
The spectacle is still very important, there is nothing like seeing F1 cornering speeds in person. IndyCar isn't close, they have their oval thing with ultra high sustained top speeds, but not even close to F1 on a road course. When you see how fast an F1 car can change directions, it genuinely boggles the mind that a human is behind that. And they've really dropped the ball in that aspect this season. The fans aren't happy, the driver's aren't happy. Something needs to change.
Didn't Alonso's first attempt at the Indy 500 (with McLaren?) result in him making it into the final qualification category, and see him leading the race until his car blew up, forcing him to retire? On his first attempt?
F1 has always been about the combination of excellence in driving and in engineering.
The Porsche GT and GT Sprint Cups (911 and Cayman respectively) were a lot more like a procession where the faster drivers quickly ordered themselves and drove away from the rest of the grid. Granted there were fewer cars starting, which didn’t help, but it still didn’t make for exciting viewing.
F1 seems to be the result of a tension between normal people wanting to see the driver in control, and engineering teams wanting to one-up each other in tech. The two ideas don't actually mix, but like with two fluids that don't mix, you can still pretend they do if you keep stirring.
FIA bans traction control so as to place more emphasis on driver skill.
There's some interesting discussion of the history and technical aspects at: https://www.f1-forecast.com/pdf/F1-Files/Honda/F1-SP2_25e.pd...
Manually controlling to the limits of the car is a big part of the skill of racing.
If every driver drove exactly the same way, then the race would be 100% down to basically just team strategy and the car itself. For fans of strategy that might be fine, but I think most people would find it much less interesting.
Why not allow traction control? To increase crashes?
Why not allow "lane keep assist"? To increase drivers crashing into walls?
Why not allow "automatic braking"? To increase drivers slamming into walls and other drivers?
Why do we still have the human in the car when a brick on the accelerator could do the same job? So when the cars crash people feel there are real stakes?
(Presumably they've decided they want the sport to be about the drivers to some extent.)
Aside from that it’s preposterous to think the FIA wants crashes or less safety. A large chunk of regulations are for safety and historically the drivers fight against many of the safety measures (in other words, FIA is historically not the ones blocking safety measures).
I think the drivers have some extraordinary capability for trust, because the chain of people who need to have got their job correct for that brake pedal to work in that moment is in the dozens, and the consequence for any of them getting it wrong is a particularly violent crash.
[1] it was a wet race so the race start was delayed after the initial recon lap.
Would this be safety-related, something like "going this slowly through a sector indicates a problem, kill the throttle"? Still seems heavy-handed since the cars were moving, if dangerously slowly.
Wonder if they all get given a thumb drive at the start of the weekend with the latest patch. Release notes saying "library updates and bug fixes, now go drive 200mph around a track! Have fun!"
During the Sky commentary, Anthony Davidson explained the specific electro-mechanical interactions based on what teams were telling him.
The FIA absolutely do need the ability to enforce regulations, but perhaps they should be monitoring for traction control and then stewarding that, rather than managing parts of the ECU firmware...
Things have been changed.
The standardized ecu was introduced as a cost savings and fairness measure in 2008. The contract was won by McLaren Applied (which was part of the same McLaren that is the current reigning champion but is now spun off and owned by private equity).
The teams basically get an sdk and are largely responsible for the software the cars run at pretty much everything above the hardware layer of abstraction.
As a weird piece of history, McLaren applied was not the original winner of the contract for the first standardized ecu in 2008. When it was announced, in 2006, Microsoft was.
Better engine design, for one. For example, if you have a truck division which is making very high end turbos for high endurance applications, you can build a "split turbo" with a very long yet precisely balanced shaft between the compressor and the turbine, and route the piping the most efficient way to reduce penalties of routing air via bendy pipes, and have a more powerful engine than others.
This is what Mercedes did, back in the day.
Ref: https://hackaday.com/2021/04/06/mercedes-split-turbo-was-a-g...
It is primarily the hardware to software interface. It runs every feature in the car that converts software code into an out out voltage to do a thing. It is also how everyone interfaces with the car - teams, drivers, f1 tv, and even the race track itself.
I want to remind a Slashdot comment from that news entry:
> Gentlemen, restart your engines.
For original story, see https://slashdot.org/story/06/07/05/2357227/microsoft-to-sup...
But the human fireballs, deaths and suffering of gasoline-related accidents are no proof that F1 should move away from gas-power?
It seems he doesn't want ANY electronics, which is frankly ridiculous. The steering wheel has looked like the one from a flighter jet for decades now. There is electronics in everything, even the helmets.
At end of the day, it is a motorsport and it will always have its risks.
Look at Moto GP. The crash speeds are much slower, because they happen during cornering, and because bikes don't have that much aero downforce even with all the power ranger wings on them now, the riders have to brake a lot more.
Instead of trying to push hybrid tech, which will never be that good for racing, Id like to see F1 focus more on actual ICE engine refinement, because ICE isn't going anywhere even in the age of evs. Something like no front/rear wings, no pitstops, ICE only, standard ECU for power delivery, no ABS, but you can run AWD with electronic suspension and torque vector as much as you want.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31RZ5wU-Fg0
There are typically at least two deaths every year. The last time there were no fatailties was in 1982.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Isle_of_Man_TT_Mountai...
To me F1 shall go back, remove all the crappy rules made in the last 20 years, return to pure gasoline V10 engines, no turbo, no hybrid, minimal electronic, no closed park, no limit in consumption of fuel, tires, etc, return to refueling during the race, and let the better pilot with the best car and the best team win.
These F1 is too sophisticated, at this point to me makes very little sense even racing, just race the car in a simulator at this point, everything is decided by the electronics and algorithms anyway, seeing talented pilots like Max Verstappen or Lewis Hamilton struggle to race because the electronics of the car doesn't let them show their potential, because they have to "save battery" or "save fuel" or "save tires", doesn't make a good show to me.
At a startup I worked at, we jerry-rigged Pi 5's with commercial of-the-shelf environmental sim software to achieve this. Very cost effective, lol.
I'm sure there's also all kinds of other HIL testing but it comes down to thinking about all conditions and having models and tests that are realistic enough for those conditions. It's impossible to have perfect coverage.
It's probably kind of lucky that enough cars were impacted so that the issue was revealed instead of having a just a few cars knocked out of the race.
It’s frankly because Motorsport software guys are pretty arrogant. They look down on road car and truck engineers, but reality is they develop stuff with virtually no processes and they usually have only very basic engineering skills, yet every day they are told Motorsport is at the forefront of technology.
“Motorsport grade” auto components usually means crappy, and everything requires a software patch or constant maintenance to work correctly.
Not surprised there was a bug, and not surprised they were able to develop and deploy a patch in 1 hour without V&V testing it or anything.
Keep in mind that when James Volwes become the team principal of Williams in 2023, he was horrified to realize Williams operated everything in Excel spreadsheet, and to track the progress of how parts are made, they emailed Excel spreadsheet to each other (and remember, we are talking about a car with 100k parts). And the first thing he did was to onboard Atlassian / Jira and redesigned the process of communication / car production from the basics.
Ah, that explains the incredible results Williams has had since then!
The amount of times I had to turn off and on again my dad's Skoda because the screen was stuck on "loading user profile".
Nowadays, I mentally place any engineer without production software experience into a 'research' box. Any resulting code may break the laws of physics, and should be tested as such ;).
Edit: It's also a minor crime to look down on automotive software engineering! The stakes of mass-manufacturing have forged some seriously awesome software. Top-of-mind for me is CAN support in Linux and safety-critical contributions going into ROS2.
Gentlemen, a short view back to the past. Thirty years ago, Niki Lauda told us ‘take a monkey, place him into the cockpit and he is able to drive the car.’ Thirty years later, Sebastian told us ‘I had to start my car like a computer, it’s very complicated.’ And Nico Rosberg said that during the race – I don’t remember what race - he pressed the wrong button on the wheel. Question for you both: is Formula One driving today too complicated with twenty and more buttons on the wheel, are you too much under effort, under pressure? What are your wishes for the future concerning the technical programme during the race? Less buttons, more? Or less and more communication with your engineers?But yes, they completely made the powertrains to opaque for the viewer, and they definitely missed the ball on the sound aspect.
I get that they need to look environmentally conscious but let's be honest: it's maybe one decade - two tops - until F1 is electric. Until then, why not just skip the hybrid bits and do loud and simple engines?
I was at a GP in september, something you do very much for the noise and spectacle - the race you follow best from your couch. And it was astonishing just how much better F3 and F2 sounds, compared to F1. And that surely can't be good for FIA.
Maybe 30+ years ago. Carbon fiber parts, motors made of Beryllium alloys, the hybrid tech was interesting for a short while etc.
But then, either you want fun for the fans of the fossil engines OR you want advancement in technology. I don't think it can be combined anymore. My feeling is it will go the way of horse races, completely irrelevant to the broader transport technology, and won't go electric at all.
>I was at a GP in september, something you do very much for the noise
Why spend all that money when you can goto the local farmyard and watch them shuffle tractors around, if you close your eyes they're indistinguishable
They might as well not do it at all.
You cannot greenwash auto racing as "sustainable" when by its very nature it need not exist. It's done for sport.
It's like people who hunt exotic animals agreeing to put suppressors on their rifles as if that somehow makes it more acceptable.
In practice, of course, it's all going to go a bit south when road cars go to 90% EV. There is already a "formula E", of course.
Someone on reddit showed a graph comparing both, and it's just ridiculous.
I'm an avid F1 fan since 1990s, and think hybrid engines is the wrong way to do it.
That said, its still dumb since consumer cars are moving on from hybrids it seems.
It looks like it will be mild-hybrid V8s with turbos from 2030: https://www.motorsport.com/f1/news/first-details-of-2030-f1-...
This is also portrait of how embarrassing, fake, boring and not-racing F1 has become. Even the "boring" low overtaking 00's were orders of magnitude more exciting than this clown show.
This is also one of the consequences of the FIA Emperor being a complete power hungry fool and many competent people being pushed out of the FIA. Congratulations.
2000 PRs per day btw.
Ok, so hybrid... but where will the E energy come from? Clearly from the brakes, the rear brakes... the same ones that get only a fraction of the braking energy because all the forces move to the front under deceleration. Where is the energy stored, in the battery of course... which is so small it runs out halfway down a single straight. So you basically have a big complicated heavy car with half the power it should...
And naturally you have lots of software controlling "deployment" of your meager E reserves. It even guesses where you are on track based on time/speed, because GPS is illegal for that. Sigh...
To be clear... I am not arguing ICE is good or E is bad. Just that F1's current specs for the ICE/E mixture is horrible.
I wasn't politicizing E vs ICE... but commenting on the particular specifications these rules mandate for F1. Specifications that are not fit for purpose.
but drivers dislike do not being in control the harvesting and deployment (which apparently would be too complex to be manual), while fans dislike cars clipping out on straights.
Regenerative brakes (maybe even on front wheels!) would be great, but they are not enough to charge the battery given the current split. MGU-H was also a great invention, but was phased out apparently for complexity.
Next year the power output split will be tweaked to make clipping less extreme, but won't solve allt he issues.
Therefore this was the Bahrain F1, it just happened to take place in Malaysia.
My wife is tired of this joke.
Tons of AI (and adjacent) sponsors!
That’s why when Hadjar was off with an injury the Red Bull team got a replacement driver (Liam Lawson from Racing Bulls), because they still want to get as many points for that car in the constructors championship as possible :]