The other week Nico Rosberg made a statement that autonomous road cars would be the death of racing. While his observation is overly dramatic the slow decline of motor racing to a state of well supported minority sport, mirroring the fall from the every day to the obscure of equine jollity during the twentieth century, is beyond question.
The questions we should be asking ourselves are; how far and how fast will mainstream motor racing descend to (large) minority status, and who will care when it does?
Here I will dwell more on technology transfers between road and track, rather than the social philosophy, which I pondered at length in "Good-bye Horseless Carriage". We are going to examine this aspect as the technology, manufacturers and money will focus where the financial gains and power remain within the sport. It is when the dollars and prestige drain from Formula One that it will truly be in dire straits. The manufacturers will remain as long as they can justify the expense. Exposure, advertising, and halo-effect are all valid reasons, but is technology transfer and relevance to road cars really such a driver for Formula One?
When upgrading a road car to perform above the levels deemed cost effective by the manufacturer there are a few areas each budding Garagista can target.
In the broad we have engine enhancement (in the old days this would be mechanical, these days it is more often software), chassis/suspension upgrades, wheel and tyre upgrades, and induction/exhaust tuning. Each area can provide benefits from the modest and cheap to the extensive and expensive.
First stop, offering great bang for buck, is a wheel and tyre upgrade to enhance handling. The classic path is to up-size the wheels by an inch, and drop the tyre profile accordingly. The logic being, based on sound physics, that reducing the un-sprung mass (wheel, tyre, hub, brake assembly) and reducing the rotational inertia of each wheel will provide handling, accelerating and braking benefits. Further, a tyre upgrade should provide enhanced traction, including improved cornering via an increased lateral-g limit. Often a modest performance increase can be obtained by running the tyres at an increased pressure to that of the "normal load" recommendation of the manufacturer. Always ensuring that one remains within the tyre's safe operating range.
What do we find within F1? We find no adaptive suspension, no suspension adjustments on race day, control tyres, and mandated tyre pressures. So all the aspects a road going enthusiast would apply to tyre and wheel performance are closed to F1. Well no cross-over there then.
Next we have induction treatments. Both turbos and mechanical super-chargers can give an internal combustion engine a significant output boost. Modern ceramic turbo units, and low friction super-chargers, especially under the control of complex engine management software can generate stunning outputs. Coupled with variable induction tuning, power output can be pushed sky-high.
F1 has very strict limits on the induction system, the turbo used, and the software to control it all. Indeed Toyota was disqualified from having won the World Rally Championship some years ago because of tricky induction. At the mandated test temperature the Toyota air intake, on a fine looking Rally prepped Celica GT-four, tested precisely as specified by the FIA. Then under racing conditions the increased temperature in the engine bay would cause the intake to swell and hence allow far more air into the engine. Post-race, temperatures dropped in the engine bay, and as if by magic, the air intake was back within specification. As an engineer I love this solution. At the mandated test times under the mandated test conditions, the intake passed the FIA checks. That it then threw the rule book out the window at racing speed was a stroke of genius from the boffins at Toyota. Love their work. Clearly those cheeky diesel engineers at VW share my view of meeting the rules precisely as written. Now back to F1, boost levels, induction sizes, rev limits... all strictly set by the FIA to make the playing field level (surely this has worked fine, that's why Mercedes is more or less the same speed as a Sauber... total parity there! Well done FIA). So, again no benefit to road-based drivers.
We've fine new rims and tyres on our road car, we've increased the induction capability. Now to upgrade the software controlling it all. Chipping, as it is usually called, is one of the simplest and quickest performance hikes one can buy. Frequently completed in just a few minutes, depending on the car and computer involved, the existing memory can be flashed or a new chip can be piggy backed on an existing memory or controller chip.
Now it must be said most are set so that the original manufacturer cannot detect the upgrade, so that warranties are not voided, so this upgrade can be viewed as a bit cheeky. However, the original manufacturer is tuning an engine to run successfully for many, many miles under a huge variety of loads and conditions, so a modest level of tune that promotes fuel economy and long life is preferred. If one has no intention of towing a mighty sea vessel, or maintaining 140kph across the Simpson Desert with a double-axle caravan attached, then often a chipped performance boost can be taken with no adverse impact on the working life of the engine.
Formula One and the FIA? McLaren technology and Microsoft provide standard engine controllers, with tightly controlled user programmable parameters and data collection points to ensure no one does anything super clever to boost performance, so nothing interesting, clever or useful for the road happening here then... let's move along.
Exhausts! What young petrol head has not listened to an Aston Martin, Ferrari, or other deep breathing beast being floored by a cheeky owner (or thief to be fair) to have waves of wild powerful sound echo endlessly down the canyons of the city? Transfixed our young enthusiast dashes home and immediately starts saving to put stainless steel exhausts the size of the channel tunnel on his Korean wonder-beast and have that delightful sound for himself, if not the speed, power, and artistic majesty of the dream machine.
Now this is a case of Formula One mimicking real life. The dear FIA, bless them, mandated exhaust length, position, bore, etc. to ensure no naughty performance gains. Result? Well first Mercedes spent a King's ransom on other tiny performance gains, but that's a gripe for another day, but the result as predicted by people such as Christian Horner (actually Adrian Newey but he's too polite to say rude things about the FIA), was a dull, quiet, and frankly embarrassing, exhaust note that also had a huge negative impact on ear defender sales around the motor racing world.
Result? Like the teenager seeking the sound, if not the actuality of speed and power for his Korean sportster, the FIA now seeks an exhaust upgrade that sounds good, while doing nothing for performance! Dear me... the Staatliches Bauhaus design school in Germany, so amazingly inventive during the 1920s and early 1930s told the world that form was function. So here we are a century later, and the pinnacle of motor sport is faking it. So sadly, no lessons for the road here.
Finally we come to the most expensive road going upgrades, suspension, chassis, and brakes. Now for all those with a car built around a carbon fibre monocoque with mandated suspension pickup points we can learn much from Formula One. Oh, like me, your car is not built of aerospace grade carbon fibre. Well there goes that bright idea. Brakes!? Ok, here some cross-over is possible. Ceramic brakes and new brake pad materials all benefit from racing to prove the idea, and some of this knowledge filters down to road cars. But anti-lock braking, traction control, stability control, four wheel drive... all banned in Formula One, so no benefits to be gained there.
Suspension? Well the Williams a few years back had a trick adaptive setup that perfectly adjusted the car based on a mass of sensors allowing millimetre perfect adjustment hundreds of times a second. Brilliant! Lexus, range topping GM muscle cars, Ferrari, Jaguar, and a host of others now have electronically adjusted road-going suspensions derived from those early racing systems! Great News! Oh, except they've been banned in Formula One for years now. Back to springs and rubber bump stops for the big boys.
Hybrid energy! Surely we've found a winner here? Well maybe. The Tesla and the Prius, some Porsches, the ever so exciting Nissan Leaf... all have hybrid power, as do a growing number of others, BMW i8 anyone, oh wait, they stopped racing in Formula One years ago. Road and race have crossover here. The issue being the road cars are far more closely linked to FormulaE than they are to Formula One, where the hybrid technology is vastly more complex and expensive than the Tonka-toy insert batteries approach taken by road cars and FormulaE.
Which leaves us with not much really. So why worry about an artifice of relevance to road cars? Do we worry about the relevance of the Olympics to every day walking and sitting? No. We enjoy it for the amazing spectacle and challenge it is. Cheering heroes for achieving feats we can only dream of. We want the excitement, the thrill, the bold risk taking, and the drama of a close fight. We want modern day gladiators, but without all the blood and mess to wash away afterwards.
And that's what we want from Formula One. Driver and machine on the edge of the possible, dancing wildly on the fine line between high speed genius and madness, offering thrills, drama, and passion in equal measure. And make the artfully designed cars beasts of form and function please! Road-going relevance be damned!
If Formula One provides these things, then like the Olympics has zero relevance compared to running for the bus or walking across a cricket pitch, then the rise of autonomous cars poses no more risk to Formula One than paper airplanes do to AH-64 Apache attack helicopters.
Hang the relevance! Give me the heroes and the passion!
Max Noble.
Learn more about Max and check out his previous features, here
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