Frank Williams said for him the WCC is more important.
I think the second WCC introduced in 1958, is here because of Ferrari's threats and dislike for the WDC only championship.
When Fangio described his Ferrarii days he said Enzo wanted victory for his cars (not his drivers) and the Scuderia staff where believers in the their car wins the races philosophy.
The Ferrari contingent/phenomenon is the link with the past, with the days of true GP racing when such phenomenons where rule not the exception. Mercedes, Bugatti, Auto Union, Maserati, Alfa and Co. all generated great enthusiasm brought great crowds.

How many tickets do they buy?

For a start, we are talking about the R&D budget of an F1 team - if there was no racing, there would be no R&D budget.

We are not discussing the R&D budget of an auto maker or Tech Co or any team sponsor for that matter. F1 sponsors including auto makers get their return in the form of exposure, so the dollars they spend in F1 is marketing budget not R&D.

There is no-one on Earth who could predict the relative aero performance of two F1 cars solely by looking at a picture of each.

So why are the mentioned auto makers investing billions? They know that emerging technologies always carry a cost premium (remember how expensive EFI was when it first appeared) and equally they know that R&D, production scale and TIME will change all that.

There was a famous horse named Clever Hans who could do simple arithmetic by stomping his hoof. Ask him what is 5 minus 3 and he would stomp his hoof twice, etc. But for some strange reason Hans could only perform these feats when his trainer was holding his bridle.

You obviously don't spend any time in the RCForum do you? Did you want to know the exact results of Spa 2013?






Because they are being forced to by vote seeking Governments trying to look green.

Not anytime soon. Automotive supplier Bosch expects that battery powered cars will sell around 350,000 in 2015. At the same time they expect that 3 million cars sold that year are hybrids while 12 million cars run on biofuels, 55 million cars run on gasoline and 24 million run on diesel. If the battery powered car should be able to compete with cars powered by combustion engines the battery costs must decrease from the current levels of about 700 euro/kWh to around 200 euro/kWh and that is not expected to happen in the near future. But hybrids can probably accept a bit higher battery costs.

All auto makers must carry out some sort of research in possible future technologies, but today it's hard to say what technology that will be successful in the longer term. But this kind of research is today also often backed by state subsidies and state backed loans. Some of the technologies developed for these electric and plug in vehicles can also be useful for conventional cars, or ordinary hybrids and that can be even more important for the manufacturers than the use these technologies was originally developed for. That is often the case with research and development.

EFI was expensive when it first appeared, but unlike batteries EFI didn't cost as much as a small car and it didn't require large amounts of expensive raw materials. The high costs associated with EFI was more related to production scale.

Hey McGuire! How many duplicate posts is 5 minus 3?

Exactly my point! Too soon to decree electric cars won't be the successful solution. 2015 - that's tomorrow! The real panic on fossil fuels won't be starting till after then.


- Chrysler Electrojecter option $400.
- VW Beetle $1280

Fixed. Can't fix your math for you though.

There's still one there! You must have deleted the original.

Exactly right. Building six racing chassis has little to nothing in common with building 50,000 production cars. Totally different set of requirements. Just because it can be made to work in racing does not make it practical or even useful for passenger cars in volume production, active suspension being a pretty good example. At most racing might serve as an additional proof-of-concept phase, a very expensive and inefficient one.

Is that ever true, have spent the last few years finding out all about that - people don't understand just how easy it is to make an expensive race or sports car, especially in limited numbers.

My respect for Hyundai (ilk) has gone way up and for Porsche (ilk) it has gone down.

Quite right. When you are building a handful of cars, items like screened cables and approved suppliers are not significant issues, but in volume production they are critical.

The location of a single self-tapping screw might not seem like an existential dilemma to you, but at the global OEs five or six different departments may need to study and sign off on it before it goes to the line because it affects them directly. A system of process and procedure is required to make this happen effectively. A bureaucracy, in other words.

Sometime things are so obvious that they become invisible.

Since the late 50's the model for racing has been aerospace, probably even more specifically, military aircraft.

Design techniques, maintainability, lifing, all are concepts brought from mission planning not automotive production or use, even sporting use. AS the teams got better at racing they moved farther away form the automotive industry and users.

Similar examples in relevance where braking and cornering exceed 5 g's have no connection to the motoring world where 0.3 g's is deemed by the great majority of motorists to be an emergency sitation.

Racing has no longer any relevance to daily driving and the automotive industry. It is all marketing and entertainment.

But electric cars aren't a replacement for fossil fuels, you still need the fossil fuels to produce electricity for the cars.



Battery for a Golf class electric car: approx. 14,000 euro (actual manufacturing cost, not customer option cost)
Golf class car: 17,000 euro (customer price incl. sales tax)



Most of these cars are also build using other peoples money. Building expensive sports cars is almost never profitable. Bugatti spent something like 250 million euros of Volkswagens money developing Veyron, even with a price of 1 million euros each and a production of 300 cars they never get that money back.



In recent years Porsche have been more like a hedge fund with car manufacturing on the side.



An engineer working for GM recently said that it wasn't uncommon that they had a list of hundred names that needed to approve a change to a single part. In racing you can design a part on the computer on monday and race it on sunday. In that time frame you haven't even got an answer from all those hundred people on the list. Bureaucracy to maximize volume and minimize production costs.

Come on J. We both know there are two seperate issues there. The first to bite will be finding a high-energy-density alternative to liquid hydrocarbons. Regardles of which solution(s) we end up with, they all rely on converting base-load energy into the portable energy required for personal transport. (neither biofuels nor solar vehicles have the potential to fully replace liquid fossil fuels)

Base load energy is the second issue. Supply problems don't affect this sector untill well down the track (although greenhouse issues are already stacking up against coal). Base load will (must) eventually be sourced from other than fossil fuels - including solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, nuclear (fission and fusion)

Why are you going to replace liquid hydrocarbons? What are the benefits? Liquid hydrocarbons are 'energy carriers', and where you need a high energy density like in the transport sector there aren't really any good options. Liquid hydrocarbons are easy to handle, there is an existing infrastructure, they can be made to have low toxicity and they can be used by different processes. Replacing hydrocarbons is really not an issue.

The real issues is in improving the overall efficiency of the energy chains and find energy sources which are capable to replace coal, oil and natural gas. Biofuels can replace fossil fuels for tranportation use, but in order to do so we need to improve the efficiency of the energy chains and we must also find ways to produce biofuels so that they can compete with fossil fuels on a cost basis. The latter is often the big issue these days. It's the same problem that solar and windpower has too. If we want to produce electricity it's simply cheaper to do that with a coal fired power plant than building wind turbines. If we build coal fired power plants and the coal is cheap there is also little reason to invest in expensive technologies to improve the efficiency of the plant. The same is true for cars, cheap gasoline means there is little meaning to invest in expensive technology that reduce the fuel consumption. Is cheap gas availible, well, then nobody cares about biofuels. Cheap heating/cooling availible for your home, no need for better insulation then, and so on.

"Since the late 50's the model for racing has been aerospace, probably even more specifically, military aircraft."

Not really. Well, unless you tell me that racing car companies write FMEAs and do System Engineering up the wazoo. It takes a military aircraft company about 3-4 years to change a fastener.

Approved supplier lists are critical in volume manufacturing. If a vendor is not approved he could be some guy building parts in his kitchen for all the OE knows. Capacity, capability, and credibility for each component supplier must be established or you don't have a production timeline. Could be six months, could be 36 months. Could be not in our lifetimes.

Screened cables were a major headache 20+ years ago and still raise an eyebrow in production engineering even today. The presence of a shielded circuit indicates a sensitivity to interference that the shielding may or may not fix. Non-senstive circuits don't require screening. From what I know about it, signal noise was one of the problems with the Active that was never quite solved. That and it added $35,000 and many hundreds of pounds to the car without an equivalent performance benefit.

When the vendor can build three units that work and the client builds three that don't work, yes, that is a problem. Mainly for the vendor. Only natural that the guy who created the gizmo ought to be able to make it work. He knows where to kick the case and wiggle the wires, metaphorically speaking. But if the technology is reasonably mature it should be reasonably portable. All of which raises the question: if the active system was viable and ready, why didn't Lotus put it in production? It was a much better fit for the Lotus product and buyer demographic than any GM vehicle, including Corvette.

Sorry for wandering off topic but all this is by way of illustrating that race cars and prototypes are one thing; volume production cars are another.

[quote name='DaveW' date='Aug 31 2009, 19:29' post='3830416']
Thank you, bigginge. The problem with F1 as of last year was that it had become an increasingly expensive, & therefore exclusive, club, so change was required. The alternative to freedom within an overall spending limit is detailed regulations such as those that were proposed by the FIA (e.g. 9-5 W/T testing, limit on computer clusters, no track testing, etc. with, no doubt, more such nonsense to follow). Personally, I think it makes more sense to allow the freedom to deploy limited resources in the most effective way to solve issues of the moment.

Whoa! Hey there,thanks for the info actually i would love to be a member but my income just wont fit in




Regards,
pinikiso

Fossil sourced liquid hydrocarbons are going to run out one day.



That will happen for sure as technologies mature - perhaps cellulose to ethanol, algae to biodiesel. Don't forget fossil derived hydrocarbons will be going up in price. Supply shortfalls in the long term and carbon tax/emissions trading in the shorter term.

Something needs to change dramatically for biofuels to become the complete answer however. There is not enough arable land on earth to replace our hydrocarbon needs with biofuel. The efficiency improvements you mention would need to be more than dramatic.



Yep, coal is cheap and emitting CO2 is free (for the emitter at least).