Curing the noise issue.

[Greg_D]

As a (very) casual observer of F1, i hear a lot of negative comment about the extremely average noise characteristics of the modern power plants.

I acknowledge that for marketing reasons manufacturers need to align their offering with modern road cars, hence small turbo engines and energy recovery electronics. got it...

However, with road cars going increasingly battery electric and range extender hybrid, surely the turbo bit isn't as crucial as previously considered.

can the manufacturers not have a small, high revving NA v8/v10/v12 and all the existing electric gubbins as a nod to development of road car systems. that way you keep marketing happy, make the racing technical and interesting and noisy as well as chop the legs off the rise of Formula E by having an 'electric' race series that is also noisy and fast?

Too simplistic???!?!

[StevieBee]

Greg_D said:

Too simplistic???!?!

'fraid so. By some margin.

Formula E will develop and evolve in parallel to F1 regardless of what F1 does and we're already seeing manufacturers begin to migrate that way.

Personally, I think the noise is a red-herring. I was at the British GTs on Sunday and surprised they were not louder. Didn't in any way lessen the thrill watching them or lessen the racing - which was very good.

Whilst it's nice to hear a full chat V10 or DFV blast up the hill at Goodwood or through the streets of London, it's easy to forget what a painful experience it often was hearing a grid of 25 plus of them race for two hours.

[Greg_D]

StevieBee said:

Greg_D said:

Too simplistic???!?!

'fraid so. By some margin.

Noted, could you expand please. i'm particularly interested in any further comments regarding why turbos are 'de rigeur' as opposed to a power plant that gives the emotion the general public clearly crave from top flight racing.

[geeks]

I have to say I still don't mind the noise of the new engines...

[RigbyE61]

In person they actually sound very good, just quiet. Which for initially the lack of noise is bad but for a whole weekend its nice.

[StevieBee]

Greg_D said:

StevieBee said:

Greg_D said:

Too simplistic???!?!

'fraid so. By some margin.

Noted, could you expand please. i'm particularly interested in any further comments regarding why turbos are 'de rigeur' as opposed to a power plant that gives the emotion the general public clearly crave from top flight racing.

Well, it's worth noting that the whole Hybrid thing is more to do with resource efficiency than saving polar bears. In other words, achieving the same power (ideally more) using less fuel. The ICE component is tiny - 1.6L, V6. The most efficient way to extract maximum power is by forcing air into the cylinders rather than rely on 'suck' alone. A turbo is the best way to achieve this.

I believe I'm right in saying that the current F1 cars are as fast as the V10s from a decade or so ago but capable of achieving this using half the amount of fuel. That's a pretty impressive achievement.

Many, in fact almost all road cars these days are powered by an engine with a turbo. Hence the migration of tech into F1.

It's not new. In the 80s, F1 cars ran 4 cylinder, 1.5 Litre turbo charged engines producing earth moving amounts of power in full quail trim. But they drank fuel at an equally colossal rate.

The engines themselves are capable of generating the same volume levels as the more traditional engines of the past but excessive noise is a consequence of energy lost (partly) and the engineers have simply worked out how to harness more of this energy. Hence, quieter engines.

The emotion you mention is subjective. Most people watch F1 on the telly and the impact of the noise is never going to be as great and is worth noting that the period that had (arguably) the nicest and most exciting sounding engines coincided with a prolonged period of the dullest races F1 has endured.

At this moment in time and in the foreseeable future, F1 needs to accommodate the manufacturers and they are only interested in market-relevant technology. Remember that they are working on development cycles of 8 to 10 years; developing cars and engines now that we will be buying in 2027.

[Vaud]

RigbyE61 said:

In person they actually sound very good, just quiet. Which for initially the lack of noise is bad but for a whole weekend its nice.

I agree... I like hearing/feeling an old school V8/V10/V12 fire up (especially close up) but I don't want to be near it for 2 hours.

[Allyc85]

I am yet to hear a modern F1 car live, but I quite like the fact you can hear the crowd on TV when something happens. From the outside the tone of the engine is ok'ish but the noise onboard is so flat and boring!!

[daidark]

Run the cars on burneys urine that's bount to make some noises.

[lord summerisle]

Allyc85 said:

I am yet to hear a modern F1 car live, but I quite like the fact you can hear the crowd on TV when something happens. From the outside the tone of the engine is ok'ish but the noise onboard is so flat and boring!!

The very first GP I marshalled was the 2010 race, I was at Chapel.. flagging, wearing my ear-defender radio headset.

That was the year that Mark Webber got the jump on Vettel off the start, and Vettel punctured his tyre on the Copse rumble strip: The noise of the crowd at becketts as Vettle wobbled off the track was clearly audible above the sound of 23 v8s howling past. Those engines you felt through the ground and in your chest rather than hearing them without ear protection when at the track side.

I miss that noise tho these days. it was great having the 2 seater running around this year - the screaming F1 engine is such an evocative sound

[Hungrymc]

To me (just an opinion, and a minority one at that) the V8/V10 era became white noise with lots of cars at high revs and wide open throttles. It may have been incredibly loud, the loud that you feel, but I didn't find it a pleasant sound. It's nice hearing a tuned multi cylinder engine fire up, and it's nice to hear them from idle and through the rev range, but less so (for me anyway) only exercising a couple of thousand rev range up near the red line.

It is however a huge change for F1 so I do appreciate why it has bothered so many people.

Be interesting to see where we are in 10 years time.

[budgie smuggler]

lord summerisle said:

The very first GP I marshalled was the 2010 race, I was at Chapel.. flagging, wearing my ear-defender radio headset.

That was the year that Mark Webber got the jump on Vettel off the start, and Vettel punctured his tyre on the Copse rumble strip: The noise of the crowd at becketts as Vettle wobbled off the track was clearly audible above the sound of 23 v8s howling past. Those engines you felt through the ground and in your chest rather than hearing them without ear protection when at the track side.

I miss that noise tho these days. it was great having the 2 seater running around this year - the screaming F1 engine is such an evocative sound

I was sitting in Becketts that year, one of my best F1 memories was the massive cheer drowning out the cars when that happened. Superb.

[anonymous-user]

Unfortunately as mentioned above we are stuck with the engines whether we like it or not.

I went to Silverstone this year for the first time in a long time. I was very lucky to get free tickets through work which was a shock. Getting your wage is normally hard enough

The speed of the cars is very impressive. These things are clearly amazing when you are the only car on the circuit but watching cars trying to follow others through the corners really showed how much aero is damaging any chances of seeing two cars battling wheel to wheel.

If this was a time trial it would be great but something really needs to be done.

As far as sound is concerned I would only guess that anyone saying they are not that bad or they sound pretty good clearly did not attend a GP back in the 90's.

Again the performance is amazing and these modern cars would destroy a F1 car from the past but it is not just all about performance. The cars have very little soul and they do sound like hyped up hoovers.

Back in 1994 I decided to buy tickets to Silverstone and hearing the cars coming was a real shock. So much so your body and the ground shook with the amazing sounds. The Ferrari V12 was just nuts but this was F1.

Now as fast as it is I just don't get that raw emotion.

Please don't tell me the modern cars are this good when it comes to sound.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAgSzhkt1Vc

[anonymous-user]

StevieBee said:

Well, it's worth noting that the whole Hybrid thing is more to do with resource efficiency than saving polar bears. In other words, achieving the same power (ideally more) using less fuel. The ICE component is tiny - 1.6L, V6. The most efficient way to extract maximum power is by forcing air into the cylinders rather than rely on 'suck' alone. A turbo is the best way to achieve this.

I believe I'm right in saying that the current F1 cars are as fast as the V10s from a decade or so ago but capable of achieving this using half the amount of fuel. That's a pretty impressive achievement.

Many, in fact almost all road cars these days are powered by an engine with a turbo. Hence the migration of tech into F1.

It's not new. In the 80s, F1 cars ran 4 cylinder, 1.5 Litre turbo charged engines producing earth moving amounts of power in full quail trim. But they drank fuel at an equally colossal rate.

The engines themselves are capable of generating the same volume levels as the more traditional engines of the past but excessive noise is a consequence of energy lost (partly) and the engineers have simply worked out how to harness more of this energy. Hence, quieter engines.

The emotion you mention is subjective. Most people watch F1 on the telly and the impact of the noise is never going to be as great and is worth noting that the period that had (arguably) the nicest and most exciting sounding engines coincided with a prolonged period of the dullest races F1 has endured.

At this moment in time and in the foreseeable future, F1 needs to accommodate the manufacturers and they are only interested in market-relevant technology. Remember that they are working on development cycles of 8 to 10 years; developing cars and engines now that we will be buying in 2027.

Clearly then the 2017 Honda unit is from the 1986 season.

It loves a good drink

[48Valves]

I love the sound of the new engines over the old v8. You can now here much more of what is going on rather than just noise.

[Krikkit]

48Valves said:

I love the sound of the new engines over the old v8. You can now here much more of what is going on rather than just noise.

Agreed - the old cars were nice in isolation, but on a full grid they were a bit much imo, and the quality of noise was minimal once you got past the shock of how loud they were.

They definitely got louder after their first year, and at their current levels it's a good volume for me - you can just about have a bit of conversation over them, and don't really need ear protection all day like you used to. With the old cars you couldn't have a chat about the race goings-on while it was on, you were in an isolation tank for sound for 2h.

[24lemons]

ELUSIVEJIM said:

Unfortunately as mentioned above we are stuck with the engines whether we like it or not.

I went to Silverstone this year for the first time in a long time. I was very lucky to get free tickets through work which was a shock. Getting your wage is normally hard enough

The speed of the cars is very impressive. These things are clearly amazing when you are the only car on the circuit but watching cars trying to follow others through the corners really showed how much aero is damaging any chances of seeing two cars battling wheel to wheel.

If this was a time trial it would be great but something really needs to be done.

As far as sound is concerned I would only guess that anyone saying they are not that bad or they sound pretty good clearly did not attend a GP back in the 90's.

Again the performance is amazing and these modern cars would destroy a F1 car from the past but it is not just all about performance. The cars have very little soul and they do sound like hyped up hoovers.

Back in 1994 I decided to buy tickets to Silverstone and hearing the cars coming was a real shock. So much so your body and the ground shook with the amazing sounds. The Ferrari V12 was just nuts but this was F1.

Now as fast as it is I just don't get that raw emotion.

Please don't tell me the modern cars are this good when it comes to sound.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAgSzhkt1Vc

Pretty much echoes my feelings. Some of my fondest memories of F1 have been when the cars weren't even in sight. The approaching wail of a v10 through the trees of Spa, the crackle and reverberations of the 2005 cars through the streets of Monaco and of course the first time I ever experienced an F1 car, at a soggy British GP in 1998. I'll never forget standing at Abbey as the first practice session started. The excitement of the approaching wall of sound was overwhelming for a 14 year old me.

Yes the current cars are quick but that isn't the whole story. A large part of the experience and draw has gone for me.

[Doink]

It would be interesting to know what sort of decibels the current engines are producing, drive by and static, being involved in karting for 20 odd years now it's ironic that in every other series or category noise reduction is a very real, locals complaining, 4.30pm curfews, no engines to be fired up before 9am, I live about 10 miles from donington and I can still hear cars and bikes racing and testing, I don't mind it as I'm a motorsport freak, I could probably even tell you what make of car, bike or engine it was lol, I remember racing long circuit superkarts there with a 98db limit, backing off on the straight or getting black flagged for exceeding it, microphones dotted all around donington village measuring noise with the local council coming down hard. The same happened to Mallory park although they were exceeding the maximum allowed meetings per year i believe, darley moor circuit, chasewater kart club when it was operating all had to abide by noise restrictions, i just find it funny and ironic that we've had to go as fas as to set up a bloody 'how to make it louder' working group FFS, it's like the overtaking working group, what's the friggin point when they still design the rules that dont aid overtaking when they were told numerous times limit top surface aero and increase underbody aero through active suspension thus creating less wake and therefore allowing cars to follow closely through corners and on exits...........so what do they do!

By all accounts it looks like the popular solution is to stick with the V6 but have twin turbo and some form of spec KERS albeit more powerful than last time, so with all that extra power from a turbo and extra KERS what will they do............reduce the maximum revs no doubt or lower the fuel flow limit even more, there's already talk of limiting engines to 3 a year from 4, by crikey the teams will start telling the drivers not to rev them too hard next, yet less noise!

Curing the noise issue, ok V6 twin turbo, no heat recovery, increase fuel flow so they can be made to rev as revs = noise, they're only revving to 13,000 out of the allowed 15,000 due to fuel flow limits, increase that to 20,000, scrap the limit or increase it to allow them to rev, scrap heat recovery meaning we get flames back as well noise, and scrap the allowed limit on engines, it's dearer to make an engine that last 7 races than it is to have new one for each weekend

[Vaud]

Doink said:

i just find it funny and ironic that we've had to go as fas as to set up a bloody 'how to make it louder' working group FFS, it's like the overtaking working group, what's the friggin point when they still design the rules that dont aid overtaking when they were told numerous times limit top surface aero and increase underbody aero through active suspension thus creating less wake and therefore allowing cars to follow closely through corners and on exits...........so what do they do!

I think the key is that the "they" has changed.

[GCH]

So glad I got to hear the V12, V10 and V8 era......


Hearing those V12s screaming down the (original) pits straight into copse, then still being able to hear them through maggots and becketts was something else..
Certain engines actually used to hurt your ears with no protection - the Ferrari V12s in particular were bad - and you needed earplugs or ear defenders, but it added to the atmosphere, being able to hear and feel them coming by.


In all honesty it sounds rubbish now - and being able to hear the crowd over the engine noise was never a problem with the old ones if something major happened (or in the case of Mansell every time he came round for another lap).

Edited by GCH on Monday 14th August 18:25