Why do you find it 'beyond strange'? Disappointing, even heartbreaking I can understand, but Massa's engine was only 3 laps short of it's intended lifespan when it failed, 3 laps short of what Colin Chapman would have described as the perfect race engine.

To me, it would be strange if one engine lasted significantly more that two races.

An unreliable engine design/construction would be when the engines repeatedly fail before the end of their intended life.

if engine X produces more bhp than engine Y, does that mean engine X is illegal? I don't think so.

But if engine X produces more power than engine X itself after rules have been frozen, it's quite likely that it's illegal.

no... using better lubricants can make the engine to produce more bhp... while the rest is the same... (that is just one area of development)

^^ So what exactly is frozen about the engines if not their power output?

performance development

it would mean that there was a lot more in the engine, maybe he could stress it more, or maybe some parts could be made lighter for further performance.
it's a tricky game, the ideal engine, as mentioned lasts exactly the distance required.

This is what wikipedia says on formula one engines:

2006
For 2006, the engines must be 90° V8 of 2.4 litres maximum capacity with a 98 mm maximum circular bore, which imply a 39.7 mm minimum stroke. They have two circular inlet and exhaust valves per cylinder, are normally-aspirated and must have a 95 kg (209 lb) minimum weight. Previous year's engines with a rev-limiter are permitted for 2006 and 2007 for teams who can't obtain a competitive V8.

Pre-cooling air before it enters the cylinders, injection of any substance other than air and fuel into the cylinders, variable-geometry intake and exhaust systems, variable valve timing are forbidden. Each cylinder can have only one fuel injector and a single plug spark ignition. Separate starting devices are used to start engines in the pits and on the grid.

The crankcase and cylinder block must be made of cast or wrought aluminium alloys. The crankshaft and camshafts must be made from an iron alloy, pistons from an aluminium alloy and valves from alloys based on iron, nickel, cobalt or titanium. The complete rules are available from the FIA Formula One world championship regulations.[9]

This is leading to a power reduction of around 20% from the three litre engines, However in many cases, performance of the car has been improved. In 2006 Toyota F1 announced an approximate 740 hp (552 kW) output at 19000 rpm for its new RVX-06 engine, [10] but real figures are of course difficult to obtain.


2007–2008
For 2007 the engine specification has been frozen to keep development costs down. The engines which were used in the 2006 Japanese Grand Prix, will be used for the 2007 and 2008 seasons and they will be limited to 19000 rpm.


... it doesn't say a cap on bhp...

Which goes to show: it is a big loss than it was never decided to keep the turbo's, and use pop off valves to controll the horsepower. Perhaps we would have had a field with turbo's and non-aspirated engines (and more, cheaper engines!).

Blow off valves cannot 100% control horsepower in a forced induction engine unfortunately. Also I can spend the same on a Turbo engine as I do on a atmospheric engine, more in-fact.

The engine freeze was doomed like all the other half-baked attempts to reduce costs. What happens when the freeze ends? Answer: any manufacturer who's scaled down their engine facility has to spend all the money they've saved starting it up again. And in the meantime the others spend their money on lubrication, "reliability" mods or whatever they can; if they've got it they're going to spend it.

Engine freeze was a lame idea.

Just reduce the aero by like 70%, and be done with it, and get our racing back.

I don't know I think it was about as fair as it could have been, there are 6 engine manufactures in F1 at the moment, some of them are more than willing to spend $50mil per year and others are not.

At least this freeze reduces the margin. I'd say there is, at most, a 5% power differential from the most powerful to the least powerful engines in the field, and all the engines have different advantages and disadvantages. If the freeze were not in place that margin could be a LOT more.

It's very easy to criticize the FIA, but, even with hindsight it's not an easy job to do. I mean what would you suggest, bearing in mind that the manufactures have different ideas on what is acceptable to spend on engines and engine development, and also thinking about the independent teams?

One of the teams was quoted (in this week's Journal I think) as saying that in the whole year so far their aero work had only increased downforce by 3%! Add that to your figure of 5% for engine power, and it does fit perfectly with what we see, that the lap times are closer than they've ever been before, about 2 seconds instead of 5+ in previous eras.

BUT although the midfield is competitive and the top is competitive, there is actually less scope for a midfield team to break into the top, because there is so little scope for innovation. Progress is ground out by endless refining, which is extremely resource-intensive, and so size is everything now. It used to be the case that a rich team could be beaten by a clever garagiste, that's not the case any more.

We'll see next year, maybe the big rule change will allow a reshuffle, and demonstrate this point, but KERS might spoil that by the look of it.

Anyway to answer your question, I would liberalise the rules to allow innovation back in. The number of rules should be halved, at least, so that not every little aspect of the car is defined - maximum brake duct size, minimum engine cover width, what are these rules there for? And there are a hundred others that should go in the bin.

The gaps between teams would widen, but there would be hope again for the inventive engineers to compete and lift their team to the top. Otherwise we'll carry on with the situation that if you have less than 1,000 personnel you're absolutely confined to the midfield.

The simple truth is that if a team has the money, they'll spend it; what the sport needs is more scope for some teams to spend theirs better than others, to make up the difference.

I think ATM Andy brings up a very good point.

The major manufactuers (Ferrari, McLaren, Toyota) will always try and spend as much on engine development as they did before the engine freeze. That was always going to happen.

What was also abundantly clear was that Renault would not remain in the sport if they had to keep spending $50m a year on engine development. The compromise was an engine freeze.

2 years down the track and we are starting to see the reality of engine development under an engine freeze.

I agree with ATM_Andy that the freeze was a good idea.

My argument is that engines are still being developed when they should not be. We do not have an engine freeze in the way that it was intended. It appears that the FIA is weak and is being given the run-around by manufacturers when we find out that bhp is being increased. I am not sure what safety issues surround engines these days, I do not work with them day in and day out as Andy does. It does appear to be a nonsense though when engines are modified on safety grounds and there is a performance improvement. I have no way of either determining or measuring what dangers an engine poses. If we talking about the threat of catastrophic failure in the proximity of engineers, then I agree there is a safety issue. I would not fancy being close to a lawnmower that was spewing its guts never mind an F1 engine.

you confuse safety with reliability...engines are allowed to be changed for reliability.....so the teams take it from there

I don't think it's coincidence that Briatore, usually known for knowing where to get the best ROI, is making a little fuss about bending the rules. And Sir Frank Williams pragmatic continuation of what Briatore said shouldn't be a surprise.

There are valid arguments for the engine freeze.

But when Mosley comes in and wants to see fuel efficient engines in future, then it's again obvious that the engine freeze rules were an idea delivered by the FiA in a half baken way.

After all teams tune engines to make them more efficient. The goal for them is to save fuel, or make them more powerful without introducing a handicap of having to add an inappropriate amount of fuel.

Now teams spend millions to get more power from the brakes...

And all the while I yesterday read a newspaper that introduced a technology from Ford that they hope to have ready in 3 years that saves up to 10% fuel. That actually make a real difference. Not to mention that a prototype has been tested for many years. What is Ford doing? Currently about 60%-70% of the fuel one put's into any car engine will be wasted. Ford created a device that generates from the exhaust heat electricity. Effectively being able to eliminate the need for an alternator in a car and use the otherwise wasted exhaust heat for something purposeful. Removing a thing that creates heat, instead of adding stuff that creates more heat can only be good, instead of FiA approach. What I hint at obviously is KERS. Flywheels do generate heat too. We should never forget that heat in a car is an unwelcome byproduct (except for the heating when it's cold), and is energy waste.

Now since Ford's technology itself has been tested for years, to introduce such things as mandatory for F1 would make much more sense than an engine freeze, KERS. What the FiA seems not to understand is that when one forbids certain things, very intelligent people emplyed by F1 teams simply have no time to think about improving things significantly, that they are not allowed to tinker with. And for me that is the ultimate waste of human resource and money of course.

Just think about it. Ford took the right approach here, and we all might be thankful for it in a few years. We will save money on fuel, and don't use the oil resources up quickly.

An engine freeze however locks doors for teams to think hard and good about how to reduce engine heat. All the while the manufacturers have government pressure to look at ways to make cars more environmental friendly. So a manufacturer needs all the engineers for improving engines anyway, but most of what they invent, they can't apply to F1, because the rules forbid it. Strange. The only rule that makes environmentally sense is the one about engine and gearboxes needing to last 2 or 4 races. The rest is going mostly down a wrong path.

Finally, congrats to any team that improves their engine within the rule framework laid out by the FiA. They seem to have gotten the idea. The end product desired for F1 is obviously a better engine. A better engine is also a more efficient one. And in recent years, it also meant a 'cleaner' one.

If the regulation does reference reliability and not safety then you are right. I still feel that the FIA engine freeze is being undermined. I suppose that teams can make cases for engine failure by using telemetry data and then interpreting it in any way they wish. It feels fundamentally wrong that engine performance is improved when there is no evidence of cars failing to finish races through engine failure. I do not have any F1 engine failure figures, but engine failures in F1 cannot be very high.

You seem to have the strange notion that F1 teams regard rules as something sacrosanct. Whilst there's no-one as radical as Colin Chapman around these days, I would suggest to you that any decent designer sees rules as a challenge to their creativity and ingenuity. A starting, rather than an end point.

Which is precisely as it should be.

I know where you're going but this is a poor example - engines are limited to 19,000rpm by the regs. It's always possible of course that this is the source of Renault's problems. Last year, engines were going to 20,000rpm, possibly higher. The 19,000rpm rev limit was introduced to help reliability but the engines needed to be re-optimisation for the new limit and this was permitted under the "freeze" regs.

I can't help thinking that Renault were a little too enthusiastic in down-sizing their engine department. Things like getting the engine to work properly with the SECU, the lack of traction control, lower rev limit and so on all take a lot of work.

In the general spirit of what you're saying, that's the area Frank had in mind when talking about pushing the boundaries - F1 has always been about creative interpretation of the rules

What would be a jolly wheeze right now is for the FIA to increase the rev limit, but not allow the teams to beef up the components they have no doubt been slimming down. That would put a cat amongst the pigeons.

I'd vote for that