Key F1 stakeholders and team bosses have a shared desire to shelve plans to reintroduce V10 engines for the time being to focus on making a success of the 2026 regulations, but is that the right call to make?
Key F1 stakeholders and team bosses have a shared desire to shelve plans to reintroduce V10 engines for the time being to focus on making a success of the 2026 regulations, but is that the right call to make?
The electric motor has been around longer than the combustion engine, there’s no major breakthroughs to be had there either. The only piece that to innovate on are batteries. Currently batteries are not energy dense enough for f1, fe cars are slower than f3 cars.
I guess I wasn’t precise enough. I know the electric motor has been around. There are huge gains to find in energy storage and the real world applications are enormous. I’m not saying that they should switch to all electric tomorrow but maybe in the next ten years. Maybe swapping batteries during the race could be an option? I know it’s not trivial but we’re talking about F1. I’m sure they can figure it out. Comparing F1 and FE is not very interesting imho, team budgets are way smaller, around 10%.
It’s not lack of resources that causes FE cars to be so much slower than F3 cars it’s the batteries. F1 budgets are a tiny fraction of the R&D being spent on batteries.
If you told teams they had 200kg min for fuel, engine, motor, and battery and left the rest up to them teams would not be using motors and batteries. From a racing pov they slow the car down.
Yes, I know. But F1 has never been purely about building the fastest car possible. It’s always been a balance of speed, rules, strategy, and spectacle.
Fast cars are spectacle, slow heavy ones are not. It’s why semi truck racing ia less popular than f1.