A question for someone who knows more about F1: Is this firmware shared by all cars? Or some local server at the track the cars connect to? Why is F1 able to control individual cars like this? The article is very light on details as to what exactly is going on...
Yeah I was wondering this also. I had no idea they had some shared blob (or maybe they have source code access) that runs in all of their cars. Would love to read more about how this process works if anyone knows!
Wonder if they all get given a thumb drive at the start of the weekend with the latest patch. Release notes saying "library updates and bug fixes, now go drive 200mph around a track! Have fun!"
TLDR: this wet weather mode stuff is FIA mandated because it is basically a rule enforcement around traction control. The loss of traction was related to a weird interaction in low-revving engines, turbos not kicking in, and the rest of the systems trying to do something that anti-traction control stuff would prevent.
During the Sky commentary, Anthony Davidson explained the specific electro-mechanical interactions based on what teams were telling him.
The FIA absolutely do need the ability to enforce regulations, but perhaps they should be monitoring for traction control and then stewarding that, rather than managing parts of the ECU firmware...
In theory: it's not greenwashing, it's so that the humungous amounts of resources they put into developing F1 engines are not completely wasted ... so that some of the tech can "trickle down" to road car engines. Hence, the interest in hybrids. At least they get to learn how to charge a battery really, really fast.
In practice, of course, it's all going to go a bit south when road cars go to 90% EV. There is already a "formula E", of course.
The worst thing is that, whatever they "save" in the hybrid part, is offsetted by the amount of pollution of flying all people and machines around the world.
Someone on reddit showed a graph comparing both, and it's just ridiculous.
I'm an avid F1 fan since 1990s, and think hybrid engines is the wrong way to do it.
Engine performance coming out of a corner perhaps, but using the brakes is the highest G activity in the race, and so every extra kilogram makes the brakes less effective, and makes cornering speeds slower too.
Smaller lighter peaky cars are more extreme, even if their low end torque is lower
Tire performance is the limit; the mgu-k can in theory brake the crankshaft as hard as the tires and power electronics can handle. Lighter is always better if everything else is equal, but that's not really the case with hybrids.
It also depends on what your point of comparison is. Current vehicles are able to go faster with a V6 than the old V10s could, and that compactness is saving weight and adding performance elsewhere, so it's not as straightforward as modern F1 cars being too heavy. Modern cars also have a much bigger focus on safety than the old cars did, which, again, adds mass.
Moved from one of the most fun auto sports to an EV mess.
The fact that they were able to vibe code ( You can't truly deliver a code without testing gates in place, let alone release to production, the cars themselves), tells:
Apollo 14 was one of the original moon-landing missions back in 1971. They had to make an emergency adjustment to the computer's memory to work around an electrical issue where the abort button would intermittently (and erroneously) register as pressed. Turns out they couldn't modify the actual machine code so it wasn't a "software patch" in the exact same sense, but there were certainly no large language models back then.
Seems wild that they can code and deploy an update of a critical-seeming component in the field like that. I thought such a firmware update would need extensive QA in the lab, along with root causing why this bug slipped through their processes anyway.
But maybe that's the difference between shipping a controller for F1 versus shipping one for an industrial or consumer product? shrug.
Yep, the chassis, PU, and aero are all updated almost constantly, with major upgrades a few time per season.
Williams even rolled out completely new chassis (with full homologation/crash) mid-season this year because the first design couldn't come down to minimum weight.
I have no idea if modern-day SV’s “tests pass… idfk, it’s a web app… LGTM I guess” coding ethos was the cause of this particular bug. However, it’s a great, relatively benign demonstration of why it has absolutely zero fucking place controlling extremely dangerous hardware shooting a human around a race track surrounded by people.
> Seems wild that they can code and deploy an update of a critical-seeming component in the field like that. I thought such a firmware update would need extensive QA in the lab, along with root causing why this bug slipped through their processes anyway.
These cars are in a perpetual Q&A state, they are getting modified between races. That's true for the "big teams", small teams don't have the resources, they're just "happy to be there". That's why it's possible to see stories like Brawn GP[^1]. That's what makes the sport fascinating, because the overtakes are not as much as one would hope for a ~2-3 hours race. But every little thing counts. In the last race 1st and 2nd had ~103ms diff or something like that for example, which is something that didn't happen for 15-20 years (maybe more).
Actually there is a budget cap so small teams have the same resources of big teams. However big teams have an advantage. They assembled a better team and a better network. This is from the team principal of Williams, one of the teams at the bottom of the rankings https://www.the-race.com/formula-1/cost-cap-creating-two-tie...
Article you linked is absolutely unreadable. Just rambling „cost cap is not bad, we have sustainable sport but smaller teams are worse off”.
Two important informations are buried like „now smaller teams take podium 5% of time instead of of 10%” and „cost cap administration is a burden” and they there are no clear guidelines on what is in the cap and what not.
> Actually there is a budget cap so small teams have the same resources of big teams.
Not really. The budget cap does not include the salaries of active drivers and the three highest paid non-driver employees, as well as some other odds and ends.
In most major league sports in the US, there is some form of salary cap, but it really only applies to players. Organizations can spend money on other things as they wish. That applies to coaching, front office, facilities, etc.
Players are the most important asset in most sports, especially the ones without tools. All forms of football and I think every game played with a ball shared with the opponents. I assume that every pro player of tennis, golf, cricket, baseball use tools of about the same quality.
In motorsport and in Formula 1 not so much. If a team has a dominant car, let's say half a second faster than the second best, the championship is an internal matter between its drivers. Any second tier driver sitting in one of those two cars can be world champion. The only opponent is the team mate. So most of the money goes into the car.
The Formula 1 cost cap applies to all expenses with few exceptions. Most notably drivers and the (3?) highest paid employees. Of course you must keep the bosses happy, right? Drivers could be subject to the cap in one of the next years. They won't be happy but what can they do? Furthermore teams will always find somebody to drive their cars even at one tenth of what they are paying now.
The link you shared says clearly that budget cap made things worse, with data apparently. But they don't think it's the wrong move, it's the right move but doesn't work in the current form.
> That's true for the "big teams", small teams don't have the resources, they're just "happy to be there".
This isn't really the case anymore. There's a budget cap, and all of the teams are financially sound most of the time. While the poorer teams might bring fewer upgrades in a year, they still bring upgrades all year long, and R&D is a continuous process in every F1 factory these days. Smaller teams also get additional R&D, compute, and testing time compared to the big teams.
The 103ms difference is also due to a software glitch, Russell (the winner) said his car wasn't boosting in the final straight at the last lap, Verstappen (P2) was catching him with an enery boost. And the glitch was probably because there was a yellow flag, because a driver (Bottas) crashed, because his car didn't behave like the previous laps and sent him into the barriers...
I've watched F1 for more than 2 decades, from the paragraph above I realize this year's F1 is basically comparable to AI slop...
I agree. You can watch a lot of the old races on various YT channels and also in the F1 app (assuming you pay for it). There are some great races but most are pretty predicable for the big teams with the money, baring any random engine blow-ups.
The real issue is the cars are just too big and heavy. There was a point in time when you could pass someone even in Monaco.
They didn't, it just needed a restart. From the first reports the first car's software genuinely glitched out because of the new track/rain/etc and had to be restarted, the other cars got anti-traction control triggered because going this slow for this long unspools the turbo, which got so bad the detection software made a false positive.
The initial formation lap was aborted due to the glitch (caused drivers to slow to a crawl or stop). The cars all went back to the pits. Then there was a long delay while FIA/teams/ECU provider figured out what was wrong. And eventually fixed it via a software update.
They did, teams confirmed there was an update being deployed during the delay after the aborted formation lap.
Restarting in Hamilton's case "fixed" it because it removed the condition it was in, if he would have done the lap again, it would have happened again.
It was very unlikely there was actual coding involved, as even the C++ build and test toolchain would run for ages (in my automotive days it would run for 45 minutes and that was just build, link and static analysis). In this case it's probably just a config change.
I believe they likely used software they already had or just changed a software. As from what I read, it removed a certain system and limitions in the software which is used to ensure teams aren't cheating (traction control), which was triggering in error due to the strange conditions of the race. So all they were doing is disabling this system
The problem was that the ECUs went into limp mode due to multiple factors triggered by the drivers driving slowly (slick tires, wet surface, new PU ... ) and the ECUs are programmed to go into limp mode to protect the ICE, since it had no battery anymore and no turbo boost. The update was simply disabling that failsafe.
It’s frankly because Motorsport software guys are pretty arrogant. They look down on road car and truck engineers, but reality is they develop stuff with virtually no processes and they usually have only very basic engineering skills, yet every day they are told Motorsport is at the forefront of technology.
“Motorsport grade” auto components usually means crappy, and everything requires a software patch to work correctly.
Not surprised there was a bug, and not surprised they were able to develop and deploy a patch in 1 hour without V&V testing it or anything.
Preach; I worked with a couple guys who left the F1 software industry and my experience matches yours. They wrote JavaScript like it was old school C, didn’t know version control etc, and refused to learn anything different.
Similar HFT and quants, they are elite in a very specialized niche: aerodynamics and CFD. The rest is extremely outdated.
Keep in mind that when James Volwes become the team principal of Williams in 2023, he was horrified to realize Williams operated everything in Excel spreadsheet, and to track the progress of how parts are made, they emailed Excel spreadsheet to each other (and remember, we are talking about a car with 100k parts). And the first thing he did was to onboard Atlassian / Jira and redesigned the process of communication / car production from the basics.
I have a friend who has worked in aerodynamics at several of the F1 teams. The parts themselves are pretty high tech, but all of the management of the data, the processes, the software to produce them etc is pretty shoddy.
I wouldn't be surprised if many of the motorsport software engineers you mention come from mechatronic/electronic/aero backgrounds. Don't get me wrong, I've seen an analog electronic engineer perform software wonders; 10,000+ lines of bash, custom C macro libraries, and a PHP runtime older than I am have taught me that programming can be closer to art than science. But relying on that cursed bundle of chaos felt deeply violating and unsafe lol.
Nowadays, I mentally place any engineer without production software experience into a 'research' box. Any resulting code may break the laws of physics, and should be tested as such ;).
I have a chuckle every time the Williams is on the screen with its Claude sponsorship. Why don't they simply ask Claude to make their car fast, are they stupid?
Yes, there are definitely trends in which sectors sponsor F1. Most famously perhaps, the tobacco companies. Cryptocurrency was in vogue for a few years. Now it's AI companies.
I just finished watching the race. The start was certainly a callback to the start of the season when cars were dropping like flies and having constant odd problems.
For anyone not aware, this was the Bahrain Grand Prix held in Malaysia. The FIA allowed Bahrain to host their Grand Prix at a circuit which isn’t normally used for F1 any more in Malaysia because of the geopolitical situation in countries around Bahrain.
Therefore this was the Bahrain F1, it just happened to take place in Malaysia.
When such complex and powerful machine is doing the actual run, and it has complex logic circuitry, capable of making some decisions, it is similar to horse racing and the machines should be awarded (same as horse), not the jockeys.
They do. There are two parallel championships. The drivers and constructors championships.
That’s why when Hadjar was off with an injury the Red Bull team got a replacement driver (Liam Lawson from Racing Bulls), because they still want to get as many points for that car in the constructors championship as possible :]
Oh yes, the insanity of the new F1 power units! The goal was 50/50 Electric/ICE split... but why go hybrid when the cars use fully synthetic fuel and have essentially no runtime carbon footprint? Well for car makers to signal their virtue of course! Did they worry about the mega tons of goods they ship around the globe to race in 24 different countries... or perhaps the armada of VIP private planes that follow... or the 1M fans that drive to each venue?
Ok, so hybrid... but where will the E energy come from? Clearly from the brakes, the rear brakes... the same ones that get only a fraction of the braking energy because all the forces move to the front under deceleration. Where is the energy stored, in the battery of course... which is so small it runs out halfway down a single straight. So you basically have a big complicated heavy car with half the power it should...
And naturally you have lots of software controlling "deployment" of your meager E reserves. It even guesses where you are on track based on time/speed, because GPS is illegal for that. Sigh...
Because electric engines are more performant than gas ones so you can in theory have better driving perfomrance? I.e., high, flat and predictable torque curve, re-use braking energy (so it adds up to ICE), extremely high energy density of the engine unit.
All that, yes. But they don't work too well if the battery runs out halfway down the straight... and there is too little charging.
I wasn't politicizing E vs ICE... but commenting on the particular specifications these rules mandate for F1. Specifications that are not fit for purpose.
There's no reason the battery should run out on the straight, though. You can charge at any point while driving, not just during braking. Obviously you're taking torque from the engine to do so, but that's a strategic consideration.
> Obviously you're taking torque from the engine to do so, but that's a strategic consideration.
but drivers dislike do not being in control the harvesting and deployment (which apparently would be too complex to be manual), while fans dislike cars clipping out on straights.
Regenerative brakes (maybe even on front wheels!) would be great, but they are not enough to charge the battery given the current split. MGU-H was also a great invention, but was phased out apparently for complexity.
Next year the power output split will be tweaked to make clipping less extreme, but won't solve allt he issues.
Regeneration happens directly on the crankshaft via the mgu-k, not the wheels. The mgu is essentially a governor, so you can set it to add or sink (absorb) torque however you like. If you're adding torque, you're draining the battery, and if you're sinking torque, you're charging the battery. Because everything is mechanically connected, sinking torque also wants to brake the car (i.e. regenerative braking).
In terms of power balance, on average, the draw needs to match generation for the system to work. Since this a race, the battery should be flat when you cross the finish line, because you don't want to leave power on the table. When cars are clipping out on the straights, they're trying to claw back some power for the battery so they can deploy it at a more impactful moment in the race. Maybe it's frustrating for viewers, but part of that is that the vehicle has a maximum sustained power, and a maximum total power, and those aren't the same thing.
The mgu-h was cool, but I believe the teams when they say that it was too difficult and too expensive to get right.
F1 is a constructors championship, and the constructors are interested in developing electric power trains. Nobody wants to spend 100 million to tweak the last 0.1% performance out of a turbo-charged V8.
Quite right, on the constructor part... that is very much the appeal for us techies. But they do spend 100 million tweaking the last 0.1% of aero advantage and tire-deg management. a) They could just homologate a common engine, like in F2 and concentrate on the chassis or b) make a properly designed hybrid PU. By (b) I mean have an E component that gets adequately charged... the MGU-H (E-Turbo) of the last generation seemed to work fine. The current specs is nuts, definitely NOT advancing technology.
Banning teams like Ferrari or Mercedes from competing with their own cars (including the engines) would be the end of F1. The current regulations are extremely ambitious such that constructors can get a significant advantage from developing better tech. And it's working, the Mercedes powertrain is clearly dominating, even though the Ford V8 is more powerful.
My understanding is that the switch to hybrid was to get rid of needing to refuel during a race, since that is dangerous. The 50/50 split is new this year, but they're already working on fixing that for next year. But even then, they had to reduced the number of laps because otherwise they would need to re-engineer the entire car to allow more fuel.
It’s not virtue signaling. It’s research. Pushing the limits of hybrids has downstream benefits for consumer cars, presumably.
I agree the current design is pretty dim-witted. But I think the high-level goals are sensible. It’s certainly more than just appealing to the green crowd, because that obviously is misplaced for this audience.
> "It's just horrible. I don't know, it just proves that we shouldn't have any of that stuff, the electronic side," Norris said
It seems he doesn't want ANY electronics, which is frankly ridiculous. The steering wheel has looked like the one from a flighter jet for decades now. There is electronics in everything, even the helmets.
Which is indeed ridiculous and that's not what he said. The electronic side refers to the hybrid part. Most drivers have spoken out against that this season.
In the first race of the season, his team-mate was taken out before the race started because his car gave him more power than he was expecting all of a sudden. Similar things have happened multiple times this year.
Last fuel related death was in 1986. The incident in 2020 with Grosjean's fireball was a 67g impact. If the car were to only have one big EV battery, which it almost is in current regulations, then in such a crash would very likely get punctured and be even riskier fire. So to answer the question, no.
At end of the day, it is a motorsport and it will always have its risks.
The issue is of why deaths happen isn't due to gas, its because F1 is simulatenously "build the fastest car that can hold incredible speeds in corners", and "we are going to put restrictions on when you can use technology to make racing fair"
Look at Moto GP. The crash speeds are much slower, because they happen during cornering, and because bikes don't have that much aero downforce even with all the power ranger wings on them now, the riders have to brake a lot more.
Instead of trying to push hybrid tech, which will never be that good for racing, Id like to see F1 focus more on actual ICE engine refinement, because ICE isn't going anywhere even in the age of evs. Something like no front/rear wings, no pitstops, ICE only, standard ECU for power delivery, no ABS, but you can run AWD with electronic suspension and torque vector as much as you want.
Your comment clearly indicates that you have absolutely no idea what you are trying to talk about. Norris's comment is perfectly clear for anyone who has any inkling of what is going on currently in F1. Why even bother making such a comment when it is a complete waste of bytes?
yeah im pretty big into the eco side of things too and id much rather the cars return to just pure gas or as minimal of a hybrid systems as possible ( i just want small cars again lol) sports racing is the least of my concern in terms of fuel. hell the biggest polluter with racing like this probably comes down to the travel needs. plus the 2026 season is the first season to run on non-crude based fuels.
This F1 is shit, I've lost interest in it. When the race winner is not determined by the pilot skills, or the team, or the car itself, but by some software, battery power, excessive ruling, lawyers, etc. it's to me not at an interest to be seen.
To me F1 shall go back, remove all the crappy rules made in the last 20 years, return to pure gasoline V10 engines, no turbo, no hybrid, minimal electronic, no closed park, no limit in consumption of fuel, tires, etc, return to refueling during the race, and let the better pilot with the best car and the best team win.
These F1 is too sophisticated, at this point to me makes very little sense even racing, just race the car in a simulator at this point, everything is decided by the electronics and algorithms anyway, seeing talented pilots like Max Verstappen or Lewis Hamilton struggle to race because the electronics of the car doesn't let them show their potential, because they have to "save battery" or "save fuel" or "save tires", doesn't make a good show to me.
Back in your supposed golden age of the early 2000s the cars were purely aero-limited, there were only a handful of overtaking moves for the lead during the entire season, and Schumacher would simply lead a procession to the finish in almost every race.
People moaned and moaned and said things were so much better in the days of active suspension, traction control, automatic transmission, and launch control. (But, of course, when those things were current people said life was better in the good old days with ground effect and massive turbos...)
Everyone always hates the current regulations, no matter what they happen to contain. But if you were to run a truly open formula the cars would be way too fast for any conceivable track and you'd see a casualty rate that would make the Isle of Man TT races look like a children's birthday party.
This is my first year paying attention F1 and I've noticed some major themes:
1. It's all very complex.
2. It's legitimately exciting to watch much of the time.
3. The favorite pastime of passionate F1 fans is complaining about F1.
This is also portrait of how embarrassing, fake, boring and not-racing F1 has become. Even the "boring" low overtaking 00's were orders of magnitude more exciting than this clown show.
This is also one of the consequences of the FIA Emperor being a complete power hungry fool and many competent people being pushed out of the FIA. Congratulations.
What they didn't write is that a seperate company Ilmore provides the ECU's for all cars, for decades. Ilmore most likely caused this bug, and they simply turned off this buggy config setting. Ex-F1 technician
The standardized ecu was introduced as a cost savings and fairness measure in 2008. The contract was won by McLaren Applied (which was part of the same McLaren that is the current reigning champion but is now spun off and owned by private equity).
The teams basically get an sdk and are largely responsible for the software the cars run at pretty much everything above the hardware layer of abstraction.
As a weird piece of history, McLaren applied was not the original winner of the contract for the first standardized ecu in 2008. When it was announced, in 2006, Microsoft was.
Amazing to learn on this thread. Does anyone know what they would use to simulate ECU problems like this? Im a firmware engineer in the industry and kind of seeing a problem like this and this thread really opened up my eye to what it looks like under the layers of Media in F1
With something safety-critical like an ECU, I'd be surprised if they left formal proof out of their software design and testing. This would make unexpected hardware behaviour much more likely imo. I guess I'd get around it by setting up automated hardware-in-the-loop simulators for testing every possible environment and input. Surely the cost would be worth it for F1 as a whole.
At a startup I worked at, we jerry-rigged Pi 5's with commercial of-the-shelf environmental sim software. Very cost effective, lol.
I looked it up yesterday and they have the ECU in the loop for the driving simulators (the ones the drivers practice with and that are used for checking mechanical changes). But these use empirical models, they can't simulate everything. You would have to get a lot right in the models and top of that know where to test edge cases and then simulate all inputs correctly for those. You can surely input yesterday's weather conditions but whatever model is there might not predict an output that goes to the next model and so on..
I'm sure there's also all kinds of other HIL testing but it comes down to thinking about all conditions and having models and tests that are realistic enough for those conditions. It's impossible to have perfect coverage.
It's probably kind of lucky that enough cars were impacted so that the issue was revealed instead of having a just a few cars knocked out of the race.
It's all because of the bad idea of artificially limiting the regenerative breaking powered boost. Why even have that limitation, lift it and allow all the teams to a roll their own software, work on their batteries and electric motors and regenerative breaking. Make it just another field of competition like the rest of the cars engineering, sure you can have minimum and maximum specs but putting in place electronic controls to nerf performance flies in the face of the spirit of the sport.
isnt the regen neutered due to a veto from the bigger teams with the fear of audi. since they have well ran and tested r&d on regen for wec and some of the other E series they run?
This must be related to how Toto turns off George Russell’s car if it’s looking like he’s still a potential threat to the golden child, Kimi. Kidding. Kind of.
I like that George seems to be in a better headspace. He was like that posh brit talking others down with a know it all attitude, but since the summerbreak he has been way more relaxed and less antagonistic.
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[ 0.16 ms ] story [ 12.8 ms ] threadWonder if they all get given a thumb drive at the start of the weekend with the latest patch. Release notes saying "library updates and bug fixes, now go drive 200mph around a track! Have fun!"
During the Sky commentary, Anthony Davidson explained the specific electro-mechanical interactions based on what teams were telling him.
The FIA absolutely do need the ability to enforce regulations, but perhaps they should be monitoring for traction control and then stewarding that, rather than managing parts of the ECU firmware...
vs https://openrouter.ai/anthropic/claude-opus-5.5#providers
They might as well not do it at all.
You cannot greenwash auto racing as "sustainable" when by its very nature it need not exist. It's done for sport.
It's like people who hunt exotic animals agreeing to put suppressors on their rifles as if that somehow makes it more acceptable.
In practice, of course, it's all going to go a bit south when road cars go to 90% EV. There is already a "formula E", of course.
Someone on reddit showed a graph comparing both, and it's just ridiculous.
I'm an avid F1 fan since 1990s, and think hybrid engines is the wrong way to do it.
That said, its still dumb since consumer cars are moving on from hybrids it seems.
It also depends on what your point of comparison is. Current vehicles are able to go faster with a V6 than the old V10s could, and that compactness is saving weight and adding performance elsewhere, so it's not as straightforward as modern F1 cars being too heavy. Modern cars also have a much bigger focus on safety than the old cars did, which, again, adds mass.
It looks like it will be mild-hybrid V8s with turbos from 2030: https://www.motorsport.com/f1/news/first-details-of-2030-f1-...
Moved from one of the most fun auto sports to an EV mess. The fact that they were able to vibe code ( You can't truly deliver a code without testing gates in place, let alone release to production, the cars themselves), tells:
1: The teams no longer own the car
2: F1 has become Formula E 2.0
But maybe that's the difference between shipping a controller for F1 versus shipping one for an industrial or consumer product? shrug.
Every GP is a slightly different car running bleeding edge tech and code.
Williams even rolled out completely new chassis (with full homologation/crash) mid-season this year because the first design couldn't come down to minimum weight.
These cars are in a perpetual Q&A state, they are getting modified between races. That's true for the "big teams", small teams don't have the resources, they're just "happy to be there". That's why it's possible to see stories like Brawn GP[^1]. That's what makes the sport fascinating, because the overtakes are not as much as one would hope for a ~2-3 hours race. But every little thing counts. In the last race 1st and 2nd had ~103ms diff or something like that for example, which is something that didn't happen for 15-20 years (maybe more).
[^1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jd3miTpvUmI
Two important informations are buried like „now smaller teams take podium 5% of time instead of of 10%” and „cost cap administration is a burden” and they there are no clear guidelines on what is in the cap and what not.
Not really. The budget cap does not include the salaries of active drivers and the three highest paid non-driver employees, as well as some other odds and ends.
In most major league sports in the US, there is some form of salary cap, but it really only applies to players. Organizations can spend money on other things as they wish. That applies to coaching, front office, facilities, etc.
In motorsport and in Formula 1 not so much. If a team has a dominant car, let's say half a second faster than the second best, the championship is an internal matter between its drivers. Any second tier driver sitting in one of those two cars can be world champion. The only opponent is the team mate. So most of the money goes into the car.
The Formula 1 cost cap applies to all expenses with few exceptions. Most notably drivers and the (3?) highest paid employees. Of course you must keep the bosses happy, right? Drivers could be subject to the cap in one of the next years. They won't be happy but what can they do? Furthermore teams will always find somebody to drive their cars even at one tenth of what they are paying now.
This isn't really the case anymore. There's a budget cap, and all of the teams are financially sound most of the time. While the poorer teams might bring fewer upgrades in a year, they still bring upgrades all year long, and R&D is a continuous process in every F1 factory these days. Smaller teams also get additional R&D, compute, and testing time compared to the big teams.
I've watched F1 for more than 2 decades, from the paragraph above I realize this year's F1 is basically comparable to AI slop...
F1 has been unsatisfying since the move to hybrid power trains.
Lewis vs Nico was at least crazy entertaining. Then there was a Vettel threat one year, then there was the Max vs. Lewis era...
The real issue is the cars are just too big and heavy. There was a point in time when you could pass someone even in Monaco.
The initial formation lap was aborted due to the glitch (caused drivers to slow to a crawl or stop). The cars all went back to the pits. Then there was a long delay while FIA/teams/ECU provider figured out what was wrong. And eventually fixed it via a software update.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_cheating_during...
Restarting in Hamilton's case "fixed" it because it removed the condition it was in, if he would have done the lap again, it would have happened again.
[1] https://gigamonkeys.com/book/lather-rinse-repeat-a-tour-of-t... (the last paragraph, search for "remote debugging" in the page)
It’s frankly because Motorsport software guys are pretty arrogant. They look down on road car and truck engineers, but reality is they develop stuff with virtually no processes and they usually have only very basic engineering skills, yet every day they are told Motorsport is at the forefront of technology.
“Motorsport grade” auto components usually means crappy, and everything requires a software patch to work correctly.
Not surprised there was a bug, and not surprised they were able to develop and deploy a patch in 1 hour without V&V testing it or anything.
Keep in mind that when James Volwes become the team principal of Williams in 2023, he was horrified to realize Williams operated everything in Excel spreadsheet, and to track the progress of how parts are made, they emailed Excel spreadsheet to each other (and remember, we are talking about a car with 100k parts). And the first thing he did was to onboard Atlassian / Jira and redesigned the process of communication / car production from the basics.
Ah, that explains the incredible results Williams has had since then!
The amount of times I had to turn off and on again my dad's Skoda because the screen was stuck on "loading user profile".
Nowadays, I mentally place any engineer without production software experience into a 'research' box. Any resulting code may break the laws of physics, and should be tested as such ;).
My wife is tired of this joke.
Tons of AI (and adjacent) sponsors!
2000 PRs per day btw.
Therefore this was the Bahrain F1, it just happened to take place in Malaysia.
That’s why when Hadjar was off with an injury the Red Bull team got a replacement driver (Liam Lawson from Racing Bulls), because they still want to get as many points for that car in the constructors championship as possible :]
Ok, so hybrid... but where will the E energy come from? Clearly from the brakes, the rear brakes... the same ones that get only a fraction of the braking energy because all the forces move to the front under deceleration. Where is the energy stored, in the battery of course... which is so small it runs out halfway down a single straight. So you basically have a big complicated heavy car with half the power it should...
And naturally you have lots of software controlling "deployment" of your meager E reserves. It even guesses where you are on track based on time/speed, because GPS is illegal for that. Sigh...
I wasn't politicizing E vs ICE... but commenting on the particular specifications these rules mandate for F1. Specifications that are not fit for purpose.
but drivers dislike do not being in control the harvesting and deployment (which apparently would be too complex to be manual), while fans dislike cars clipping out on straights.
Regenerative brakes (maybe even on front wheels!) would be great, but they are not enough to charge the battery given the current split. MGU-H was also a great invention, but was phased out apparently for complexity.
Next year the power output split will be tweaked to make clipping less extreme, but won't solve allt he issues.
In terms of power balance, on average, the draw needs to match generation for the system to work. Since this a race, the battery should be flat when you cross the finish line, because you don't want to leave power on the table. When cars are clipping out on the straights, they're trying to claw back some power for the battery so they can deploy it at a more impactful moment in the race. Maybe it's frustrating for viewers, but part of that is that the vehicle has a maximum sustained power, and a maximum total power, and those aren't the same thing.
The mgu-h was cool, but I believe the teams when they say that it was too difficult and too expensive to get right.
I agree the current design is pretty dim-witted. But I think the high-level goals are sensible. It’s certainly more than just appealing to the green crowd, because that obviously is misplaced for this audience.
But the human fireballs, deaths and suffering of gasoline-related accidents are no proof that F1 should move away from gas-power?
It seems he doesn't want ANY electronics, which is frankly ridiculous. The steering wheel has looked like the one from a flighter jet for decades now. There is electronics in everything, even the helmets.
At end of the day, it is a motorsport and it will always have its risks.
Look at Moto GP. The crash speeds are much slower, because they happen during cornering, and because bikes don't have that much aero downforce even with all the power ranger wings on them now, the riders have to brake a lot more.
Instead of trying to push hybrid tech, which will never be that good for racing, Id like to see F1 focus more on actual ICE engine refinement, because ICE isn't going anywhere even in the age of evs. Something like no front/rear wings, no pitstops, ICE only, standard ECU for power delivery, no ABS, but you can run AWD with electronic suspension and torque vector as much as you want.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31RZ5wU-Fg0
There are typically at least two deaths every year. The last time there were no fatailties was in 1982.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Isle_of_Man_TT_Mountai...
To me F1 shall go back, remove all the crappy rules made in the last 20 years, return to pure gasoline V10 engines, no turbo, no hybrid, minimal electronic, no closed park, no limit in consumption of fuel, tires, etc, return to refueling during the race, and let the better pilot with the best car and the best team win.
These F1 is too sophisticated, at this point to me makes very little sense even racing, just race the car in a simulator at this point, everything is decided by the electronics and algorithms anyway, seeing talented pilots like Max Verstappen or Lewis Hamilton struggle to race because the electronics of the car doesn't let them show their potential, because they have to "save battery" or "save fuel" or "save tires", doesn't make a good show to me.
People moaned and moaned and said things were so much better in the days of active suspension, traction control, automatic transmission, and launch control. (But, of course, when those things were current people said life was better in the good old days with ground effect and massive turbos...)
Everyone always hates the current regulations, no matter what they happen to contain. But if you were to run a truly open formula the cars would be way too fast for any conceivable track and you'd see a casualty rate that would make the Isle of Man TT races look like a children's birthday party.
1. It's all very complex. 2. It's legitimately exciting to watch much of the time. 3. The favorite pastime of passionate F1 fans is complaining about F1.
This is also portrait of how embarrassing, fake, boring and not-racing F1 has become. Even the "boring" low overtaking 00's were orders of magnitude more exciting than this clown show.
This is also one of the consequences of the FIA Emperor being a complete power hungry fool and many competent people being pushed out of the FIA. Congratulations.
https://youtu.be/e1bPfbNn_TU?is=zrTGCKm_6klH0JwZ
The standardized ecu was introduced as a cost savings and fairness measure in 2008. The contract was won by McLaren Applied (which was part of the same McLaren that is the current reigning champion but is now spun off and owned by private equity).
The teams basically get an sdk and are largely responsible for the software the cars run at pretty much everything above the hardware layer of abstraction.
As a weird piece of history, McLaren applied was not the original winner of the contract for the first standardized ecu in 2008. When it was announced, in 2006, Microsoft was.
At a startup I worked at, we jerry-rigged Pi 5's with commercial of-the-shelf environmental sim software. Very cost effective, lol.
I'm sure there's also all kinds of other HIL testing but it comes down to thinking about all conditions and having models and tests that are realistic enough for those conditions. It's impossible to have perfect coverage.
It's probably kind of lucky that enough cars were impacted so that the issue was revealed instead of having a just a few cars knocked out of the race.
https://share.gemini.google/bwoJ65BshQkQ
Signed, a bitter George Russell fan.