I have incorporated an emoticon system into the blog, so now it will be possible for everyone to express themselves here symbolically as well as verbally.

The primary means of getting a smiley on this blog is to put the * symbol around the key word. A list of smilies available on the blog is provided in the first comment. Some have alternative methods not shown here, partly because the method of getting them is quite common and partly in case anyone wants to have fun exploring what the system can do.

Today's entry is going to be a relatively short one (cue relief from LCMB's readers ;) )

Before I found out about the F1 blogosphere, or even the F1 fora, I used to use Yahoo! Sport's portal to keep up-to-date with the news. Even afterwards, it was good for brief checks of what the hot topics were before plunging into the detail stuff from sources who were more detailed/closer to the truth/more opinionated [delete/augment as appropriate]. It's been a while since I've done that - Twitter more or less took over the role of telling me what the hot topics were at a given time - but this afternoon I wandered back to Yahoo! Sport for nostalgia's sake.

I was disappointed at what I saw.

The fact that it's a news portal, rather than a direct source of news, meant I was unsurprised with the... ...variable quality of sources used. It was the lack of quality control that truly got to me.

Take this example. The headline indicates it's a rumour, but such efforts to distinguish the type of item are the extent of its strengths. The story is attributed to F1 news site Crash.net in the top-right of the article, Spanish daily sports newspaper Diario AS in the middle of the article and the distinct impression that GMM is involved at some point as a middlesite. The Diario AS article which appears to have started all this is much longer than the versions at Yahoo! and Crash, and the style of abbreviation has all the hallmarks of GMM on it.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the GMM controversy, it is an information-trawling agency that charges money to send metric tonnes of small items of varying levels of veracity, frequently using an online translation service to help make its quota (currently 8-25, but changing every so often). It's the F1 data equivalent of fast food - some like its convenience but many consider the lack of value-added information, rumour quotient, lack of indicated differential between types of item and certain other of its actions unhealthy. Whatever your opinion of GMM, it is proper etiquette for a site to mention a site if used as a middlesite. Proper "breadcrumbing" of information sourcing enables people to find out by what process the information has arrived and what changes may have been made to it along the trail.

Making matters worse is the lack of care in the sentences. This carelessness has been imported from Crash.net, but that is no excuse. Why is "newspaper" abbreviated with an apostrophe when the correct abbreviation doesn't have one? Why have online translator artefacts such as "the Collins" been left? They act merely as symbolic eyesores and serve no useful purpose.

Worse still are such confusing suggestions as "Tonio Liuzzi's management has made contract with Hispania Racing" when the headline itself suggests the two sides are merely in talks. The offending sentence is the very first one in the article. What, exactly, is a reader unaware of the true situation meant to make of this? They might think something's been signed, they might not - but they will think the reportage was rather clueless. Not great for a site that presumably expects people to come back and read more of its articles.

It is a relief to me that the F1 blogosphere and reputable journalists like Joe Saward have taken over as the primary sources of F1 internet information exchange because if they hadn't, computer-using F1 fans would be banging their heads on the wall in frustration every time they logged on.

PS. If I have made any blatent blatant spelling or basic sentence construction mistakes in this entry, feel free to point and laugh at the irony ;) .

This weekend, Viva F1 has organised the third Blogger's Swap Shop. It is a fantastic idea where 15 motorsports bloggers write for each other's blogs. An entry from me will appear at The Formula 1 & Motorsports Archive today. La Canta Magnifico Blog is honoured to host a guest entry by Maverick of Viva F1 (please ignore the entry by-line as I haven't figured out how to get it to change yet).

Formula One has more than its fair share of rules. There's not even a single rule book - please refer to the International Sporting code, F1 Sporting Regulations and F1 Technical Regulations as well as all the attached appendices while not forgetting the Rules of the FIA International Court of Appeal [and the Concorde Agreement - ed]. Undoubtedly the vaguest of all the rules, and quite deliberately so, is Article 151c which concerns "any fraudulent conduct or any act prejudicial to the interests of any competition or to the interests of motor sport generally." In other words, ‘bringing the sport into disrepute’.

The ‘disrepute clause’ gives rise to concerns not only about its ill-defined and wide-reaching nature but also about its potential for abuse. So vague is the clause, who is to define what is and what isn't against the interests of the sport? Furthermore, having lost the case, while there is scope to challenge the decision in the Court of Appeal how can you possibly argue that it didn't bring the sport into disrepute? It's an immeasurable concept. Taking a case even further, with notable exceptions, the courts are generally reluctant to intervene in the internal disputes of voluntary associations and not inclined to review the decisions of tribunals.

Last month, the FIA scrapped the team orders rule but with the caveat that "any actions liable to bring the sport into disrepute are dealt with under Article 151c of the International Sporting Code and any other relevant provisions". So are team orders banned? Ferrari's decision to manipulate Michael Schumacher past Rubens Barrichello on the last lap of the 2002 Austrian Grand Prix induced boos from the watching spectators and widespread condemnation from the media. It ultimately led to the banning of team orders, but how would it be dealt with today? It clearly sounds like a case of bringing the 'sport into into disrepute' but at the time, the WMSC "recognised the long-standing and traditional right of a team to decree the finishing order of its drivers in what it believes to be the best interest of its attempt to win both world championships" and hence took no action. Does tradition trump public opinion?

Moving onto 2010 and Hockenheim and this time it was Felipe Massa who was giving way for Fernando Alonso. The stewards acted by issuing the maximum fine allowed to them but the WMSC chose to not extend the penalty, instead going as far as recommending that the ban on team orders be abolished, which it subsequently was. However, what about bringing the sport into disrepute? There was uproar amongst groups of fans and the media, so was there a case for turning to Article 151c? The trouble is that while large parts of the media were unhappy (the Brazilian castigation of Massa being particularly venomous) it certainly wasn't the case everywhere. The Italian media sided with Ferrari, the Spanish media sided with Alonso and the German media, seemingly conditioned by the Schumacher-years, coolly seemed to think that it was business as usual - which in reality it probably was.

Another example from 2010, which might have resulted in Article 151c being brandished in anger, was Ferrari's and Alonso's claims that the European Grand Prix was fixed. If this was football there would have been repercussions - earlier this week, Liverpool's Ryan Babel picked up a £10,000 fine for retweeting a link to a mocked-up picture of referee Howard Webb in a Manchester United shirt after Liverpool lost 1-0 to their rivals. The stewards may have done a poor job that weekend but for drivers and teams at the centre of it all to suggest bias at the FIA could easily be seen as damaging to Formula One.

On the other hand, others may suggest that it was the actual stewarding that was damaging - which begs the question of whether the FIA themselves should be able to be found guilty of ‘bringing the sport into disrepute’? While many fans have been suggesting that for years, the nearest anyone on the inside has come to suggesting such a thing in recent years is in 2008, when Mark Webber accused Max Mosley of damaging the sport following allegations about his private life.

In the end, the Hockenheim result is forgotten largely thanks to a combination of a close-fought Championship and the fact that Alonso didn't take the title thanks to those points gained in Germany. How might the issue have rumbled on down the years if 'Alonso's title' had been questioned by some? Of course, one whole problem with the question of ‘bringing the sport into disrepute’ is that public exposure is central to the accusation and yet, by simply pursuing an issue, the FIA can generate even more publicity for a case, causing further damage. Yet, does it all really matter?

Formula One thrives on controversy, the politics is as much a part of the drama as the racing - an ongoing soap opera. Admittedly, the politics occasionally takes too much precedence over what is happening on the track (Max Mosley and FOTA's wranglings at the end of his reign being a prime example). Yet has any of it really damaged F1's reputation? Renault were found guilty of manipulating a race but fans never stayed away from the subsequent Singapore Grand Prix. McLaren were found guilty of stealing Ferrari information but Formula One is still seen as a glamorous sport. In short, the concept of the ‘disrepute clause’ seems like a misnomer as far as Formula One is concerned. Perhaps it comes down to that image of glamour - a bit of palace intrigue is expected to be part and parcel of the show?

But then maybe Bernie Ecclestone already knows that - a man who could probably earn himself three or four disrepute charges a year.

I really should write blog entries more often. I promised myself I'd write when Force India made its mind up who it was having, but I should have known from past experience that Vijay Mallya and his lieutenants have more patience than me!

One question I was asked in response to my previous entry on The Ecology of Wind Tunnels v Track Testing was from Robf1ction:

Could we scrap both and make the weekends 4 days long?

This struck me as an interesting thought, so I attempted to do some sums. From the previous entry, I dragged over the following:

• 8.280 kg per night to travel to a hotel
• 1.376 kg per component
• 11854.683 components used per day.

To make a four-day weekend work, it will be necessary for the teams to stay a night longer at each race. Assuming that the example used for Spanish testing is a sensible average for distance between track and hotel, we can use the same 8.280 kg figure for each race - 45 is the maximum number of people a team can have in the paddock. There are 20 races in the 2011 schedule, so:

8.280 kg x 20 = 165.6 kg

The other two figures are to provide a component cost for the extra days. Since the fourth day is designed to substitute both wind tunnel and track testing, I will assume it will be run to the same sort of schedule as a test. This is done by multiplying the carbon cost of a component with the number of components used in a day and then multiply the result by the number of races/extra days:

1.376 kg x 11854.683 = 16312.044 kg or 16.312 tonnes

16312.044 * 20 = 326240.87616 kg or 326.241 tonnes.

Now 326.214 tonnes may sound a lot. However, the question was whether it would be worth doing this instead of track and wind tunnel testing. So let's grab the relevant figures and compare:

1 year of wind tunnel testing = 182.706 tonnes

4-day "local" track test = 16.341 tonnes

4-day "long-range" track test =  69.201 tonnes

All these figures are lower than the figure for the 4-day weekend. However, seeing the amount of each that could be fitted into the carbon needed to do 4-day weekends would indicate whether this represents a better path than the one robf1ction proposed or a mere illusion:

326.214 / 182.706 = 1.785 years (representing 24/7 running of one 60% tunnel, a 2-shift pattern on another and 7 days in a 100% tunnel - more than current limits but not as much as big teams used to do a decade ago)

326.214 / 16.341 = 19.963 "local" 4-day tests (this would nearly, but not quite, be one after every race. Would suit Ferrari, but probably not Sauber due to them having no suitably "local" track)

326.214 / 69.201 = 4.714 "long-range" 4-day tests. No contest, having 4-day weekends is better in terms of car mileage efficiency than carting cars to Spain for standalone testing. Unless it's Hispania, of course (being based in Spain, a test there would be "local" for them)

From a carbon perspective, a 4-day weekend scheme is better for F1 than testing abroad. Of that there is no question. It is about equal to a 4-day "local" testing method, except that mandating "local" testing would lead to large and intractable inequalities in the field due to varying access to a "local" circuit.

It is debatable whether the wind tunnel is more efficient than a 4-day weekend; a wind tunnel with no testing at all would be less use to a team than one under the current scheme (where straight-line testing can help triangulate the data). I'd go so far as to say it would struggle to be effective. If it could be made effective, it would be more ecologically sound than the 4-day weekend, but there is a compromise that would allow the best of both.

Right now, we are awaiting four "long-range" winter tests. What if these were replaced with 4-day weekends? Place a 4-day non-championship race in the winter to a) give the teams a little testing to sort out major issues b) stop everyone from getting too bored and c) let one of the Spanish circuits be moved to prevent race event fatigue in Spain.

Back-to-back races wouldn't have 4-day weekends because the 3 days left to travel between races would be asking for cargo or people not to be in place when everything gets going again and also risks people getting over-stressed from having to spend so much time in "work" mode without a proper break. There are 4 such weekends in 2011 (meaning 8 races wouldn't have a fourth day for testing).

It would be an extra 16 race weekend days but 16 test days would be lost, so the carbon used in components would be neutralised. A small amount of extra carbon would be used for the race:

Race fuel carbon usage: (62.5* - 16.221**) / 170 = 0.2722294 tonnes or 272.229 kg

Hotel carbon usage: 8.280 kg

Total: 272.229 + 8.280 = 380.509 kg

I would compare this to the amount of carbon used in the four winter tests and the alternative paths previously explored, but given that they were all in tonnes and this one's in kilogrammes, only pedants and mathematically-minded people are likely to care. I think we can live with the extra race producing a fraction of the carbon of a local test. It would certainly be more carbon-conserving than the modes of testing currently in use.

Thank you for the great idea, robf1ction. Hopefully one day the F1 team bosses will agree to this sort of thing and thank you too :)

Warning! Long entry alert!

This blog entry was prompted by TEF20's comment in Formula 1 Blog, which in turn was about Ferrari opposing the 4-cylinder engine concept mooted by the FIA for 2013. About a third of the way through replying, I realised this "comment" was not only too long for a comment (2549 words are too many, even by my reckoning!) but only tangentially relevant to the topic. Therefore, it was moved to my blog.

TEF20 was considering in his comment how reducing the amount wind tunnels are used in F1 could allow more testing to happen, therefore making a lot of fans happier because they can see more of the cars (among several other benefits). It certainly sounded an intriguing idea, so I decided to try mathematically test it - with mixed results.

Firstly, it is true that wind tunnels consume colossal amounts of electricity (thus carbon) whenever they are used. We are not talking hairdryers pushing air through plastic sweet tubes onto miniature models here. The vast and vastly powerful variety used in F1 use enough energy that the electricity companies demand to be told before teams turn them on so that demand can be planned. The two tunnels in Brackley (for Mercedes and Force India) probably consume more electricity than everything else in the 12.848 km between Brackley and Silverstone put together (I have no data to confirm this, but if the steelworks in Sheffield, working at full blast, can consume more electricity than the rest of the city put together, then it is surely reasonable to suggest that two powerful industrial energy-guzzlers can use more electricity than the sum total of a few villages).

Secondly, none of the foregoing means that track tests are minor consumers of carbon either. It takes a lot of equipment to conduct a test.

Test teams take at least three lorries with them, alongside cars or buses capable of carrying 45 staff. The lorries would use 17.082 g/km per ton. If the team went in buses (probably the most ecologically sound way of taking that many people), each bus would use 10.249 g/km per passenger.

The Ecology of Test Travel

If we assume that the lorries are 20 tonnes each including their loads, then that gives us 683.28 g/km for the lorries and 461.205 g/km for the buses - or a total of 1144.485 g/km.

So taking Mercedes as an example, quartered the relatively short 12.848 km away from Silverstone. They would need 29.409 kg of carbon emissions to get to the test and back, assuming the test got rained/frozen off.

If a team like Mercedes wishes to avoid that fate (frozen/rained-off testing being completely useless in terms of data collection), it is likely to go to Spain. That means sending everything through the Eurotunnel, down the length of France and down part of north-east Spain to reach the nearest track (Barcelona). I will assume for the sake of ecological sensitivity that nothing is flown. And then return, of course. The distance is 1752.608 km, therefore the carbon emissions would amount to 4011.667 kg, or 4.012 tonnes. Again, before running or indeed the travelling between hotel(s) and test track/travel routes that would be required to make a road-only test work.

If we assume the team must go to a hotel if they wish to stay overnight in Spain, and that (as is common) they stay at the cheapest nearby hotel (Hotel Ciutat at the moment), they need to travel 17.952 km extra per overnight stay. If this is done in buses, that's another 8.280 kg per night. They also need to stay there before and after each test so that they don't waste the first few hours of testing and/or risk total collapse trying to return to the UK. This makes a typical four-day Spanish test (as generally practised in F1 these days) 4.053 tonnes per team.

This mounts up. Each F1 team used 62.5 tonnes on average for fuel in races and tests in 2009. but most of them went to Spain for 4 tests prior to the season beginning and then did 8 local tests in-season. That would be 16.221 tonnes just for the current testing regime (races are more efficient because one Bernie Air plane can take multiple teams' stuff - even though the method of transport is more wasteful per item, less fuel is needed overall due to the airborne equivalent of carpooling).

The Ecology of Wind Tunnel Testing

The entire electricity consumption of the average team for 2009 was 365.412 tonnes. This includes the vast amounts necessary to power the CFD systems currently in place and all the manufacturing equipment as well as the windtunnel situation (teams are only allowed to use one less-than-60%-scale tunnel at a time apart from 16 hours of full-scale tunnel time per year, but there's no rule saying a team can't use one of its tunnels while the other one's going through a maintenance/calibration procedure, for example). If CFD, manufacturing and other non-wind tunnel uses for electricity are assumed to take up 50% of the electricity teams use, that puts wind tunnels on 182.706 tonnes/year. Unfortunately, the data does not exist to tease out how much wind tunnels specifically use.

Provisional Comparison Between Wind Tunnels and Track Tests

Local tests are pretty efficient uses of carbon dioxide. A team could test in its backyard every day for an entire year and not use up half as much carbon dioxide as it would doing one test in Spain. Unfortunately most teams are British and the neighbours would complain.

Testing on the continent when a team is based in England is much more of a problem. Large teams used to do three-day tests every fortnight in-season with a test team that was almost completely separate from the team that went to races, which would clearly be far more expensive than the amount used in factory testing procedures. Even if it were more ecologically efficient, it would not be possible to transfer to such an arrangement in the current climate.

How many four-day long-range tests could a team do with the carbon it would save from relinquishing the right to use a wind tunnel for six months of the year (this would allow the team to still use the tunnel to create its cars, but not to develop them)?

Six months of windtunnel on my back-of-blog calculations would be 91.353 tonnes. Divide that by the 4.053 tonnes each long-range test takes and you get 22.53. Which means that you could do just over twenty-two-and-a-half four-day Spanish tests for the price of having the wind tunnel on for 6 months.

How convenient. That's one for every race of the season with a little bit left over.

Or it would be had FOTA not set themselves a 15% carbon reduction plan to be reached by the end of 2012. So let's take 15% off that and see what we have.

19.15.

Still almost enough for one four-day test after each race of the season. Which would be an interesting idea for enhancing development while massively cutting carbon emissions. CFD-only development would be more efficient than CFD + wind tunnel development in terms of carbon and could be a step towards removing wind tunnels from the equation entirely. Fans would love to see their heroes honing their cars carefully for a relatively low fee, teams and circuit are already set up to accommodate them and it also cuts a lot of the expense connected with travelling because they're already there.

The Villain of the Piece

There is one carbon-related problem though. To test, one must have extra pieces to test. They have to be manufacturered and transported.

There are two forms of carbon source to be considered. In-house consumption of electricity for manufacturing comes from the same 365.412 tonnes of CO2 as the wind tunnel. We've already removed the wind tunnel through a back-of-blog guesstimate of 182.706 tonnes. There are three things using up the rest of that carbon dioxide - CFD, manufacturing and sundry expenses such as lighting and heating. If we say that CFD is 60% (there are some powerful computers used in design work) and the sundry is 10%, that leaves 30% of the non-wind tunnel expenditure - or 15% of the whole - as manufacturing expenditure, making it 54.812 tonnes per team. Materials manfacturing is 613.892 tonnes per year for the average team - just over 50% of the total carbon consumption. So the total carbon used for components per team, on average, is 668.704 tonnes. These do all the races as well as testing and also counts manufacturing errors that never make it to the car in any capacity whatsoever.

That Which Is Obsolete and Useless

Every non-homologated item on the car can be expected to change at least once in a year for those teams that can afford to do so and see some point in the attempt. Some teams' wings changed 10 times in 2010, but that's an extreme. Probably more accurate is to assume for the sake of calculation that everything changes an average of twice a season. When testing enables it, all of these changes will be tested.

Not everything that gets tested makes it onto the car. At the moment, it seems to be accepted that most teams bring along 4-5 major upgrade packages per season to have one of those fail, giving a minimum of 20% failure rate. Extra testing would enable teams to tease out which bit of the package is failing easier, perhaps dropping the failure rate to 10%. The problem comes when one considers the amount that can be tested in a particular test - and therefore rejected.

The amount varies massively from test to test because the agenda could be anything from back-to-back testing of a complete new package against the current one - a process that generally results in one package or the other being fully rejected - to incremental honing and systems checks, both of which involve negligible part rejection. In the most through version of the procedures, it takes three back-to-back runs - 9 laps or about 15 minutes excluding analysis and preparation time - to ascertain whether a component worked. Of course the teams do quite a bit of analysis before accepting or rejecting components, but usually other things would be tested during at least part of that analysis. However, there's simply no way round the fact that parts take time to fit and remove, or that the car will need a wipe-down at the very least after each run to maximise data parity. The preparation figure ranges from about 5 minutes if it's simply a wipe-down plus fitting a new front wing to the best part of half a day for certain combinations of internal component (especially if removal requires the fuel tank to be adjusted in any way). Half an hour average preparation is probably a reasonable ballpark figure, with the caveat that it varies massively according to the components involved.

There are about 80,000 components in a F1 car, but that's not the best figure to use for this set of calculations. Some things (like the engine, which accounts for many of the components) are homologated and therefore can't be modified by the teams. Also, some components (such as fuel tanks) couldn't meaningfully be tested by the teams in this way - they'd be tested using other methods, most often by the third-party suppliers who produce such specialised kit. Finally, some components are typically tested in clusters (come on, have you ever heard of a team taking a gearbox, putting in a different 4th-gear dog ring and then running the car again just to see if the new dog ring is an improvement on the last one?)

Time Is Carbon

Taking another angle, if it takes about 45 minutes to do the running and preparing to test a typical component/cluster and a test typically runs for 7 hours (9-5 am excluding an hour of lunch), then it would be possible to test 9 components/clusters in a day, or 36 per 4-day test. 3.6 of these will prove failures (in that they won't be better than the previous versions).

It's not so simple to derive the average carbon cost of a component because it's not clear what proportion of manufactured components don't make it onto a car. However, if a 1% failure rate is assumed for manufacture (probably an underestimate) and it is considered that teams typically use six chassis in a season, replacing an additional component every 20 minutes a car runs, then a rough estimate can be derived.

The six chassis would be 480,000 components. There were 17 races in 2009, 4 four-day "long-range" Spanish tests and 8 one-day local tests. A race consists of 4 hours of practise, 1 of qualifying and up to 2 hours of racing, so it would be fair to say it has the same mileage as a one-day test, just spread over a longer period of time. So that would be 41 days equivalent of running, with 369 components/clusters tested (and therefore 36.9 proving "failures") and 861 components needing replacement - on top of the components already on the cars. That's a minimum of 481,230 components produced per season excluding failures, meaning at least 4812 components which failed at manufacturing. So the total amount of carbon used in manufacturing must take 486,042 components into account.

From this, the average carbon estimate per component is 668.704 / 486,042 = 0.001375815 tonnes/component or 1.376 kg/component. To put this into perspective, each extra component needed for a F1 team is just under a third of the carbon consumed for travelling to a local test.

This is significant.

The Components of (Climate) Change

If you assume that the six chassis and associated extra components were meant to do exactly the 2009 season and no more, then an adjustment to the carbon figure of extra testing becomes possible.

486,042 / 41 = 11854.683 components used per day.

11854.683 * 1.376 kg/component = 16312.044 kg/day = 16.312 tonnes/day.

16.312 + 0.029 = 16.341 tonnes/test (for a local test)

16.312 * 4 (for a 4-day "long-range" test) = 65.248 tonnes/4-day test.

65.248 + 4.053 = 69.201 tonnes/test (for a long-range test)

So how much testing can now be fitted into that six months of wind tunnel time (in terms of carbon emissions)?

91.353 / 69.201 = 1.320 four-day "long-range" tests. Let's call it 1 and a remainder to see if we can get any local tests out of the remainder:

22.152 / 16.341 = 1.355 local tests. That would be another 1.

At this point, converting windtunnel usage into extra testing time ceases to make much ecological sense.

Conclusions

We've established (albeit with rather more back-of-blog calculation than I'm entirely comfortable with doing) that wind tunnel testing is more efficient carbon-wise than track testing and that the reason is not, as one might suppose, travel, but the manufacture of components to enable that testing to occur. The average team, under normal circumstances, surely gets more out of six months of wind tunnel testing than five days of track testing. The question is: do we, the fans, get as much out of those five testing days as out of the six months of wind tunnel work?