When did F1 cars start to get slow?

[nitrorocks]

Feel this is a dumb question because i don't know the answer to it. And I know F1 cars aren't slow, but when did they drop from 1,000+ HP? I was wondering how much they had in 2006? Were 2006 cars faster than now? How much HP do they have now? 800 I think? I know all of the records were broke in 2004 with 1005 HP (The Renault) the combo of downforce and power made it fast unlike the 1200 HP Turbos of the 80s with no down force.

 

[Ardius]

F1 cars never raced with 1000+bhp - the only cars ever to grace the track with this much power were qualifying-special enigines.

So F1 cars have nearly always been around the 700-800 bhp mark for a variety of reasons - mostly reliability and safety but also presumably because when you get more power than that, its difficult to engineer the cars and the tyres to deal with that kind of power and allow a drivable, consistent and reliable car for a full race distance.
Pre-2000s, it was a regular sight to see half the field retire from various mechanical failures and engine failures used to be quite frequent. The championship winning teams always had the most reliable cars that not only were fastest but regularly finished. The Renault engine of the 1990s was so highly praised not because it was the most powerful but because it had almost bullet-proof reliability which was un-head of at the time for F1 engines!

The legendary Cosworth DFV was similarly widely used due to its solid reliability.

2006 F1 cars had ~700-750bhp. The figures are pretty much identical today as the engine freeze began after 2006.

People like to talk a lot about horsepower but there are so many more important things for engines. While obviously it severely limits a car's ability to fight for position if it lacks power for the straights, its equally important to have an engine which lasts as well as delivers a nice drivable curve of power.

 

[hawkeye122]

I do think that the cars of the past had a bit more downforce. Look at a 2008 Mclaren next to any of todays cars. The thing is literally covered in wings.

 

[Ardius]

^I'm not sure what you're trying to say there. Are you suggesting the 2008 F1 cars required oodles of tiny wings just to create the same downforce as an 80s car? The extra little wings are not to replace or match downforce - they are there to aid airflow and improve the balance of the car. Its not that they are needed to reach the same speeds, its simply that they are being used to make the car more effecient with its airflow.

The cars of the 80s and 90s (heck even the early 2000s) have barely any downforce compared to today's cars. Aerodynamics have advanced way beyond those days.

The only advantage 80s cars had were ground-effects.

 

[Crushed]

I know over the past few years the rev limit has gone down about 1000 a year! I think in 2007 or around there that the rev limit was 20000rpm. Now its a few thousand lower. I think they are trying to make it safer

 

[nitrorocks]

Oh thanks for the info guys. But Mclaren, and many other people say that Ayrton Senna's 1988 WC winning car had 1200 HP. And I also saw Nelson Piquet's 1983 WC winning BMW Turbo had 1300 HP. But they would last. even the Nissan GTP-ZX Turbo had 1,000 HP and how was that reliable?

 

[Ardius]

Those people are talking rubbish - the cars never raced with 1000bhp. The Nissan Group C cars you refer to also ran qualifying-special engines and didn't run races with that much bhp.

Anyone quoting 1000bhp figures are referring to what the car and engine was capable of but not necessarily the real average race figure. Usually it will be stated as such "the engine was capable of 1000bhp in qualifying spec" or something like that.

In F1, the qualifying engines were designed to last just for one all-out lap and that was it. It was hence quite expensive for teams to keep having to produce not only two engines for each car every race (as it was normal to replace the engines regularly back then) but also two more engines just for qualifying.

I know over the past few years the rev limit has gone down about 1000 a year! I think in 2007 or around there that the rev limit was 20000rpm. Now its a few thousand lower. I think they are trying to make it safer

The rev-limit came into force in 2007 and the record for the revs was set by Cosworth at 20,000rpm in testing. But most cars ran around 19,000. Since 2009 the engines are limited to 18,000rpm and have remained that way.
It hasn't "gone down 1000 each year".

But even these figures are somewhat misleading as the teams run different amounts of revs, bhp even messing with the use of number of cylinders and all sorts mid-race to aid reliability and fuel consumption.

 

[Seismica]

The cars don't need more power, they're already powerful enough. whilst the cars may not have as much peak power as they did a few years ago it was born out of the need to improve efficiency and to make F1 friendlier to the environment to keep sponsors happy mainly.

In a way it's been a good thing as the various engines tend to be closer together than they were a decade or two ago, and engine manufacturers are forced into other paths of development like how they have improved driveability and played around with the engine maps since traction control was banned.

The downside is that on a lot of tracks the cars are now at a disadvantage because of the lack of torque and peak power of the current generation of engines. But this will only have a big effect on a number of circuits; there are still some circuits where power is not so important (such as Monaco). Here downforce is more important than peak power and pre-2005 cars had it by the bucketload. The cars of 2009-2011 generally had lower overall amounts of downforce than 2004 cars but made up for this with the return of slick tyres, which make a significant difference in the performance and the balance of the cars.

I think if, hypothetically, you were to put a 2004 V10 engine into a Red Bull RB6 (2010 winning car, fastest of the double diffuser cars and of the post 2009 era) it would still get blown away by an F2004 with slick tyres. But it's not really as simple as that as the cars are designed around the tyres and the contact patches they create.

F1 cars are getting slower in the grand scheme of things because of regulation restrictions, that is a fact. Since the big regulation change in 2009 though, the cars have gotten significantly faster. Whether this is down the DRS and more effective KERS, we can't know for sure.

In short, the reduction of engine size/capacity went a long way towards slowing down the cars, but then you have to take into account the effect of the aerodynamic restrictions brought in for 2009, which significantly reduced the downforce that the cars create, which was only offset by the slick tyres. Every year they claw back a little bit of the downforce and as Ardius suggestion, maybe they have even surpassed the 2000-2004 era cars now. But even with slick tyres they're still struggling to beat laptimes even with a decade of engine development, KERS and DRS. Take Australia for example, Hamilton's pole time was around .5 seconds off Schumacher's 2004 pole time and that is with slick tyres, KERS and DRS (DRS is said to be worth 0.8-0.9 seconds per lap, and KERS 0.4. Slick tyres are probably worth a second or two and I doubt there is much difference at all in the speedtraps - I suspect most of the advantage of the older cars was the torque and their pure acceleration, they would destroy todays cars in a drag race).

 

[Ardius]

I think they surely have made significant steps forward in aerodynamics since 2004. If the teams of today designed cars to the 2004 regulations, we would end up with some very different designs.
Stuff like blown diffusers, snow ploughs, ultra-low gearboxes, etc - this is refining aerodynamics and engineering to the nth degree caused by regulations becoming stricter.

So I don't agree that 2004 cars produced more downforce, its simply that the un-restricted V10s allowed that much more power and outright torque.

The reason the records weren't set in 2005 was due to the 2005-only regulation limiting the cars to only one set of tyres for the whole race. Not because regulations changed the downforce ability. And after that, the cars were using V8s and then became rev-limited.
Certainly though the slick tyres have played a part.

 

[daan]

People like to talk a lot about horsepower but there are so many more important things for engines. While obviously it severely limits a car's ability to fight for position if it lacks power for the straights, its equally important to have an engine which lasts as well as delivers a nice drivable curve of power.

Yep. A car with lower drag aerodynamics has a higher top speed than a car with more power. Top speed in F1 since the advent of wings has never been about engine power.

Oh thanks for the info guys. But Mclaren, and many other people say that Ayrton Senna's 1988 WC winning car had 1200 HP. And I also saw Nelson Piquet's 1983 WC winning BMW Turbo had 1300 HP. But they would last. even the Nissan GTP-ZX Turbo had 1,000 HP and how was that reliable?

The thing abut F1 engine power is that we don't really know how much power they have.

1985-'86 F1 cars were the most powerful and F1 car has ever been as turbo boost was unlimited. The BMW engine in the Brabham was reputed to have 1500bhp for qualifying only. They probably raced with about 8-900. In those days they had special qualifying engines that were only in the car for that one session.

Forget everything after. The 1986 turbo Formula One cars... really were rockets. And to handle them, I think, you had to be a man.

For '87, the turbos were limited to 4.0 bar which meant that they were limited to about the 8-900 all the time.

For '88, the limit was brought down to 2.5 bar. The turbos were then reduced to about 600bhp all the time. That was done to give the atmospheric engines a chance, and they would have won races if it hadn't been for the brilliance of Senna, Prost, McLaren & Honda. Due to the restriction on boost for '88, there is absolutely 0% chance of Senna's McLaren having 1200bhp in 1988.

 

[PeterJB]

The cars were at their fastest in 2004. Since then their have been continuous efforts to slow them down. The discovery of ground effect was when they started to reach modern speeds. It's all in the aerodynamics. Past about 600 bhp increasing power makes less and less difference as you need more and more to make noticeable speed differences. Theirs some kind of formula which I can't remember off the top of my head which explains it.

 

[XoravaX]

I recall the 2004 V10 3L Honda engine being the most powerful in the modern F1.
It was said to have reached 925 BHP maximum output, but used at around 900 BHP outside qualifying.

Also, the speeds at straights were the highest in 2004, McLaren clocked 380+ km/h at Monza.

 

[Pupik]

The thing abut F1 engine power is that we don't really know how much power they have.

1985-'86 F1 cars were the most powerful and F1 car has ever been as turbo boost was unlimited. The BMW engine in the Brabham was reputed to have 1500bhp for qualifying only. They probably raced with about 8-900. In those days they had special qualifying engines that were only in the car for that one session.

The funny thing is, the numbers for the BMW turbo engine went up from a reputed 1100hp to 1300hp, and then 1500hp. Most of it is totally unprovable, because we only hear claims. If BMW had really run even 1300hp in qualifying, they would have really smoked the field, which they didn't. Piquet did have 9 poles in 1984, only winning two races from the dominant McLarens, but he never put a whole second up on the rest of the field.

I think nobody ever ran more than 1000hp, even in qualifying, unless they used some rather tall gears.

For '87, the turbos were limited to 4.0 bar which meant that they were limited to about the 8-900 all the time.

For '88, the limit was brought down to 2.5 bar. The turbos were then reduced to about 600bhp all the time. That was done to give the atmospheric engines a chance, and they would have won races if it hadn't been for the brilliance of Senna, Prost, McLaren & Honda. Due to the restriction on boost for '88, there is absolutely 0% chance of Senna's McLaren having 1200bhp in 1988.

Even at max boost, they only ran about 650hp in 1988, probably 600 in race trim; the NA engines were topping out at roughly 500-550 or so. Whereas the max turbo figures in 1987 were roughly 700-800 at the most circuits, another 50-100 for the open circuits...Interestingly, most pole and lap records still fell in 1987, compared to 1986's bests, and my guess is that cars became slightly more aerodynamic and less bulky, and engine computers were a little more fine-tuned towards further reducing lag.

Of course the real answer is 1953, when they went from 4.5L NA engines or 1.5L supercharged engines to F2-spec 2.0L engines making roughly 150-200hp.

The formula used from 1954 to 1960 called for 2.5-liter NA engines, with a tiny 750cc engine okayed for supercharged specs. For 1961 (though 1965), 1.5L NA engines were the order of the day. Drivers from that era generally said they kept those little motors at WOT most of the time.

 

[GTPorsche]

1995 was slowest in recent history due to Senna's death the year before.

Unless every version of the 1995 season I've played has been off.....

 

[MatskiMonk]

The Brabham BMW BT52 would run at about 780hp(imp) in race trim (3.5 bar I think)... there are many rumours about what it could achieve. BMW quoted it as in excess of 1280 because that's where their dyno scale maxed out, and the engine was still going. I think anything beyond that is only speculation.


I thought Toyota ran a 1000hp engine at Suzuka before the engine freeze?