A grand tectonic divergence is at work in world motorsport, a critical crossroads between entertainment and road relevance. The FIA has long sought to legitimize the rather lavish but undeniably entertaining art of flying across the world and extravagantly burning fuel by framing motorsport as the leading edge of automotive R&D. F1’s current generation of hybrid power units was a fitting response to the automotive industry’s hybrid zeitgeist.
The only problems with F1’s hybrid experiment is that the power units are so expensive they have contributed to the failure of two teams, produce a thoroughly uninspiring soundtrack, routinely butcher the grids with absurd penalties and even some four seasons into their development – as Renault’s Mexican nightmare showed – remain horrendously unreliable.
They have also contributed to one of the heaviest spells of single team dominance in F1 history, and despite this, have plainly contributed nothing to the rather perverse aspiration to be ‘road relevant’.
In the wake of the Singapore Grand Prix, Red Bull team principal Christian Horner quite unequivocally argued that there is “zero” road relevance in the current batch of F1 power units.
And it should come as no surprise: F1’s blinkered performance-minded approach to design has no overlay with the needs of the road user. The only iteration of F1 hybrid technology that will get anywhere near the road will be in the back of the Mercedes-AMG Project One hypercar.
FIA president Jean Todt has sought to frame any instinctive revival of yesteryear’s high-revving, naturally-aspirated engines as simplistic, arguing:
“We have a responsibility to run an organisation monitored by global society. And global society will not accept that. I’m sure if you said, ‘let’s go back to engines from 10 years ago’, many manufacturers would not support such a move. I’m convinced a minimum of three out of four would leave.”
And yet, even in a series where the hybrid revolution has been largely warmly received – despite the fact that none of the five hybrid cars who started Le Mans this year finished without significant mechanical maladies – three of the four manufacturers who entered the World Endurance Championship’s hybrid division have since pulled the plug.
Such is the complexity of developing a competitive and reliable hybrid powertrain that Nissan’s GT-R LM never amounted to anything more than a whimpering parade at the 2015 24 Hours of Le Mans.
If the FIA seeks to present motorsport as a platform for industrially relevant technologies, Nissan’s hybrid horrorshow and recent decision to enter Formula E is perhaps the ultimate example of the FIA’s turbulent efforts to predict automotive vogue.
The fact that Formula E offers a road relevance nirvana that takes manufacturers in a direction that F1 cannot follow appears to justify any attempt to cast off the constraints of ‘road relevance’. F1’s apparently audience-minded new administration has also expressed a wish to rectify many of the ingrained structural problems that have their roots in F1’s hybrid venture.
Ross Brawn’s commitment to strategically sculpting Liberty Media’s technical vision for the future of F1 around consensus and evidence-based analysis has long been met with great anticipation by the paddock.
The question for the most rigorous factfinding mission ever undertaken in the wake of a regulation change is whether the hybrid cars can be tailored to redress their current intrinsic issues and whether the powertrains can meet the needs of Liberty’s commercial ambitions.
Yesterday’s joint announcement from the FIA and FOM outlined a blueprint for a power unit in 2021 that theoretically promises to fulfil many of those ambitions. A 3,000rpm increase in the rev-limit targets improvements to the sound and more stringent prescriptive parameters with some component standardization strive to constrain the extravagance of development costs and mitigate extreme, unreliable designs.
In abandoning the MGU-H, and allowing the driver more control over the harvesting and deployment of a more powerful MGU-K, there is the potential to target LMP1-style boost-assisted racing (a scenario that might even open up the possibility of an end to DRS).
The proposals that Brawn and his technical conclave have set out in no way undermine Ross’ reputation as a formidable logician, however, if one was to be critical you might argue that the measures are verging on the conservative. 2021 could have been an opportunity to explore new engine formats and new power sources, and in choosing to continue down the tramlines of the current V6 turbo hybrid power units F1 is arguably committing to a blueprint that has already failed.
For many fans, anything short of a return to the screaming V8s of the past will be a failure. And yet, there are no Luddites in F1. On the Saturday of the 2014 Brazilian Grand Prix, during the first season of the hybrid power units, Nico Rosberg’s pole lap came within two-tenths of breaking Rubens Barrichello’s outright lap record set almost a decade previously despite having four fewer cylinders, almost 100 kilos of additional weight and whilst using around 35% less fuel.
It was an underreported accomplishment at the time, but even now that the hybrid cars are routinely setting lap records, it serves as a pithy snapshot of the sheer technical brilliance at work in the team’s power unit designs.
To strip away such a thick layer of technology, to roll back on such extraordinary technical achievements would arguably run counter to F1’s innovation and development-oriented doctrine. It would also likely result in job losses and the possibility of provoking manufacturer disengagement, as Todt has argued.
And yet there is a halfway house. Just as Mercedes would be dismayed by the prospect of an end to a hybrid era in which it has reigned supreme, there are doubtless other manufacturers perturbed by the technical complexity and investment requirements. Just as F1 lost Cosworth to the eye-watering price tag of hybrid development, Honda’s incessant maelstrom of bad press, internal acrimony and on-track frustration could perturb even the most deep-pocketed manufacturer.
Happily, Aston Martin, a marque who has been making promising overtures to F1 via its Red Bull proxy, appear enlivened by yesterday’s announcements. In a statement, Aston Martin CEO Andy Palmer told Autosport that having attended the meeting in Paris, and having made submissions to Brawn’s taskforce, the British carmaker was “encouraged” by the plans. He said, “the key will be how development costs are controlled to make participation by independent engine suppliers a viable possibility.”
Of course, with the exact parameters of those controls still theoretical, and the exact numerical cost on the very distant horizon, it is of course too early to say how Brawn’s plans will be received by the manufacturers. And yet, it is not only the manufacturers with whom F1’s powertrain blueprint must win favour. It would ease the fans’ passage if F1’s next technical precipice went hand-in-hand with a comprehensive rebrand of hybrid power units.
Just as the world’s car manufacturers are turning to hybrid powertrains to perfect combustion engine performance and build 900bhp monsters like the Porsche 918 or the McLaren P1; F1 now must tell the fans that the sport is persevering with the hybrids, not out of sustainability or out of strange a wish to be ‘road relevant’, but to remain on the edge of technology and performance where F1 belongs.
