your f1 tech grey/black areas ideas

[slipstream 1985]

what cheats or bending of the rules do you think you could come up with?

1 I thought of was extremely heavy wheel nuts. On a two stop strategy start with the heavy ones on say a kilo or 2 each then at the pit have lighter ones ready and swap them out. Thus running underweight for a stint and then swapping back on the next stop to bring the weight back up.

[AWRacing]

I expect anything you think of has already been thought of or already carried out in past races.

[chunoo]

Running underweight for any part of the race is completely illegal.

Can't remember who, but a team tried that years ago. I think they had water that they started with (allegedly for cooling), which they dumped later in the race.

[slipstream 1985]

chunoo said:

Running underweight for any part of the race is completely illegal.

Can't remember who, but a team tried that years ago. I think they had water that they started with (allegedly for cooling), which they dumped later in the race.

did brawn not have a second fule tank that allowed them some options ont his too refilling at at a later stop to bring the weight back up.

[S0 What]

chunoo said:

Running underweight for any part of the race is completely illegal.

Can't remember who, but a team tried that years ago. I think they had water that they started with (allegedly for cooling), which they dumped later in the race.

That would be the 84 Tyrrell, with water-cooled brakes , they "topped" the water tank up at the last pit stop.

[CocoUK]

Christian? Is that you?



If I was a fat Italian businessman who made my money flogging overpriced colourful jumpers with a history of bending/breaking/cheating in F1... who was in charge of a Caterham/Marussia team - i'd be very tempted to build a car just for Monaco or Spa/Monza.
Developed, balanced, mapped, boosted, geared & aerod just for this one race.

Multi-race engine reliability? PAA! It's built for the weekend only.
None of this fuel saving business either, oh no, set the fuel map to Oliver Read and churn out super lap after lap. Concerned that your unable to do the distance? Fear not! For your team-mates car is about to have a 'stroke of Mark' & shart its insides on the track leaving a few laps of safety-car clean-up to bring your economy back in line...

Those B-teams are going to be finishing most races at the back anyway, so you may as well roll the dice for this one race & see if you can smash & grab a few points.

[vojx]

i'd make the suspension & diff settings, brake balance, fuel maps programmable and they'd change to the optimum settings based on GPS data rather than having to manually adjust from the steering wheel. Or does this happen already?

[zac510]

slipstream 1985 said:

did brawn not have a second fule tank that allowed them some options ont his too refilling at at a later stop to bring the weight back up.

That was Honda.

[poppopbangbang]

So many!

Auto-upshift is banned but gear dependant shift lights are not. Use an opto-isolator as the paddle switch and feed the last shift light into the paddle input. Result is auto upshifts but with no evidence in software. Pot the steering wheel up well and no one will ever find it.

Automatic brake bias control based on counting throttle, brake and steering inputs.

Traction control via "harvesting" when under throttle with the push rod load cells as an input to the strategy so bumpy street circuits become much more manageable from a throttle on point of view.

etc. etc. etc.

[numtumfutunch]

In a hallucinatory moment I dreamed the following:

Adding lead ballast at final pit stop to get the car up to the min weight
Switching the rear wing to a heavy steel/lead one before scrutineering to do the same
Water cooling my brakes but "accidentally" letting the water boil off in race and topping up to get up to weight again
Hooky software in the ECU to provide traction control
Weird suspension tweaks to lower the car on circuit - coupled with a superfluous metal box with wires coming out of it to put everyone off the scent
Dodgy fuel
Engines built to last 1 qualy lap
Fiddle brakes

All totally off the wall and never likely to be tried I reckon

[zac510]

CocoUK said:

Christian? Is that you?

If I was a fat Italian businessman who made my money flogging overpriced colourful jumpers with a history of bending/breaking/cheating in F1... who was in charge of a Caterham/Marussia team - i'd be very tempted to build a car just for Monaco or Spa/Monza.
Developed, balanced, mapped, boosted, geared & aerod just for this one race.

Multi-race engine reliability? PAA! It's built for the weekend only.
None of this fuel saving business either, oh no, set the fuel map to Oliver Read and churn out super lap after lap. Concerned that your unable to do the distance? Fear not! For your team-mates car is about to have a 'stroke of Mark' & shart its insides on the track leaving a few laps of safety-car clean-up to bring your economy back in line...

Those B-teams are going to be finishing most races at the back anyway, so you may as well roll the dice for this one race & see if you can smash & grab a few points.

The cheating aside, gaming the system like this is a good idea, working out the probabilities that best fit the regulations has been very well done in Cricket and Baseball in the last decade or so and I've thought about applying this to F1 a bit based on learning about it in those two sports. I agree that Monaco is an outlier but I think you want to exclude it rather than include it.. let me explain..

First thing we do is calculate how many points are required to win the championship. On a very rough average it is about the equivalent to 10 race wins. I think what you'd want to do is build a car for all tracks except for Monaco, Canada and Italy. In the vehicle engineering sense they are outliers that require weird engineering solutions. By excluding the tracks that are outliers from the design process you can get a car that is superior most of the time and slightly deficient on the statistically insignificant track types. As the changes for these races might involve really core changes like wheelbase, fuel tank size, etc they are ones that should be baked into the car (or out of the car, as my point is) from an early stage of design.

That leaves you to aim to win 7, podiums in 8 and then just get a points finish in the 3 outliers. Contingency for 0 points scored in 2 races. Of course this grossly oversimplifies it.

I think that prior to 2013 this is what RBR did. There were a couple of cases where they got even better points in these races than they might have anticipated. and of course sometimes a team just makes a car that's better on every track (88, 94, 02, 04)!

In your case you'd want to calculate whether the cost of this one-off car was not more than the extra return from getting a few extra points and this cost might compromise you in results on

[CocoUK]

Jeepers - if we're going for absolutely off the wall ideas that fly in the face of being sporting and are designed to offer a team an unfair advantage how about... double points in the final race?

Baa, probably a step too far that one.

[Auntieroll]

numtumfutunch said:

In a hallucinatory moment I dreamed the following:

Adding lead ballast at final pit stop to get the car up to the min weight
Switching the rear wing to a heavy steel/lead one before scrutineering to do the same
Water cooling my brakes but "accidentally" letting the water boil off in race and topping up to get up to weight again
Hooky software in the ECU to provide traction control
Weird suspension tweaks to lower the car on circuit - coupled with a superfluous metal box with wires coming out of it to put everyone off the scent
Dodgy fuel
Engines built to last 1 qualy lap
Fiddle brakes

All totally off the wall and never likely to be tried I reckon

You forgot.. running off the track on the slowing down lap and writing off your lightweight front wing either at the end of qually/practice/race, coincidentally just before any weigh-in was done, a super heavy replacement was fitted
before weighing, replaced for the race so you could run grossly underweight for the race duration.
Oversize transmission cooling fans.
Huge oil tanks, "the engines used a lot of oil", topped up before weigh-in
Over capacity engines for your home GP, IIRC Italy.

These would never be tried, or would they?

[RichardM5]

Heat sensitive suspension geometry that lowers the car when hot and raises it to pass scrutineering when cool. RB did that with the T tray last year, but why not use the heat from the brakes to adjust the entire ride height?

[zac510]

That's a good one. Usually material that expands with temperature is undesirable but in this case maybe it could be used to an advantage!

[motorizer]

slipstream 1985 said:

what cheats or bending of the rules do you think you could come up with?

1 I thought of was extremely heavy wheel nuts. On a two stop strategy start with the heavy ones on say a kilo or 2 each then at the pit have lighter ones ready and swap them out. Thus running underweight for a stint and then swapping back on the next stop to bring the weight back up.

Wheelnuts are unsprung weight though, would probably be better off carrying the weight for the whole race somewhere more advantageous

[pozi]

vojx said:

i'd make the suspension & diff settings, brake balance, fuel maps programmable and they'd change to the optimum settings based on GPS data rather than having to manually adjust from the steering wheel. Or does this happen already?

Active suspension is banned but the rest can already be done.

In fact they were doing it pre GPS based on the distance the car was into the lap, for example if the turn 4 hairpin starts 450 metres after the start lap trigger and finishes at say 475 metres it is easy to set the diff accordingly especially for this area.

Obviously that is a simplistic explanation because there are checks in place if the driver spins off and recovers at turn 2 etc.

[Lost soul]

chunoo said:

Running underweight for any part of the race is completely illegal.

Can't remember who, but a team tried that years ago. I think they had water that they started with (allegedly for cooling), which they dumped later in the race.

back in the original turbo days no doubt

[dr_gn]

zac510 said:

slipstream 1985 said:

did brawn not have a second fule tank that allowed them some options ont his too refilling at at a later stop to bring the weight back up.

That was Honda.

BAR actually, in 2005.

Ironically Tyrrell were excluded for cheating w.r.t. fuel/water/ballast in '84, and Tyrrell later morphed into BAR.

[zac510]

dr_gn said:

BAR actually, in 2005.

Right you are, my apologies.