It's high time the engine/gearbox feature got brought back for 2011, now that people have started changing them.

Engines

1 engine (15):

Both Red Bulls - both Aus/Mal

Both Renaults - both Aus/Mal

Both Mercedes - both Aus/Mal

Both Williamses - both Aus/Mal

Both Force Indias - both Aus/Mal

Both Lotuses - both Aus/Mal

Both Hispanias - both Aus/Mal

Glock  - both Aus/Mal

2 engines (9):

Both McLarens - both 1) Aus/Mal Fri 2) Mal Sat-Sun

Both Ferraris - both 1) Aus/Mal Fri 2) Mal Sat-Sun

Both Saubers - both 1) Aus/Mal Fri 2) Mal Sat-Sun

Both Toro Rossos -  both 1) Aus/Mal Fri 2) Mal Sat-Sun

d'Ambrosio -  both 1) Aus/Mal Fri 2) Mal Sat-Sun 

Gearbox

Fresh gearbox (9):

Petrov (2), both Williamses (both 3), Pérez (2), Alguersuari (2), Trulli (2), both Hispanias (both 3) and d'Ambrosio (2).

Not-so-fresh gearbox (4):

Both Mercedes (both 2), Kovalainen (2) and Glock (2).

Quite unfresh gearbox (11):

Both Red Bulls (1), both McLarens (1), both Ferraris (1), Heidfeld (1), both Force Indias (1), Kobayashi (1) and Buemi (1).

Very unfresh gearbox (0):

Nobody, seeing as there's only been 2 races so far ;)

Contents

In Article 28, "Homologated parts" has been dropped from the title after being added in 2010. Seems quite odd, since I had expected there to be some homologated parts.

Article 16

The stewards have been granted wider-ranging powers under Article 16.2. Stewards may now issue post-race time penalties of any length for an incident under Article 16.2 c). Reprimands, exclusion from results and one-race suspension have also been included, though all three of these powers were already granted to the stewards under the International Sporting Code. The reprimands in particular were already commonly used. However, the one-race suspension has to be for the next event, which was not previously the case (before the suspension could be applied at any time, which was useful because it allowed time for teams to appeal against unfair uses of the power).

The only completely new power is the ability to issue post-race time penalties of any length. However, the new specifics of the suspension power worry me.

Article 20

A dramatic number of additions have been made to Article 20. In 2010, there was only one sentence: "The driver must drive the car alone and unaided". Now there are four paragraphs. Therefore the following actions have been formally banned:

- Actions that could hinder other drivers
- More than one blocking move per straight
- Leaving the circuit boundaries (defined as four wheels beyond the track edges, kerbs being outside the edges)
- Rejoining the track in a dangerous manner
- Rejoining the track having gained an advantage from leaving it
- Ignoring blue flags

Those of you who have been following F1 for a while will notice that all of those things were already prohibited. This is because they are in the International Sporting Code, with the exception of defining kerbs as not being part of the circuit (it's left to the interpretation of individual series). The additions strike me as pointless repetition.

Article 22

It has been decided that "chequered flag procedures must be respected" in testing. Technically speaking, testing isn't subject to the International Sporting Code, but red flag procedures already had to be respected. It's a sensible addition, but not one that's likely to change anything.

Article 23

There have been several changes of wording in Article 23.1 a) - "shall" has been changed to "will", the first "is" becomes the grammatically-improved "will be" and the second "is" also becomes "will be", which not only corrects the tense but also the number. Pedants everywhere will rejoice.

More importantly, Article 23.1 a) now says the "fast lane" in the pits cannot be more than 3.5 metres. In wider pit lanes, this will give the mechanics considerably more room in which to work.

Article 23.1 d) has a paragraph for the order in which cars should queue up out of the pits. They must queue up in the "fast lane" only, in the order they got there, and leave in the same order unless a car is delayed. It does not clearly answer the question of what happens if someone chooses to do a practise start.

The reference for the circumstances in which equipment can be left in the pit lane has been corrected in Article 23.1 h). It's permitted only if a car has to go to the pits between the pit lane closing and the start of the race.

An important change has been made to Article 23.1 j). Teams must provide a way of knowing when a car was released from a pit stop. This must be visible from the front of the car (implying that both the driver and the on-board camera must be able to spot this indicator). As a result, expect many fewer near-collisions in the pits and less work for the stewards to do when it comes to deciding who was wrong in the remaining cases.

Article 23.2 allows the pit lane to be closed for safety reasons. An example of when this might be done is if a car has broken down in such a way as to block the entire pit entry. Cars can still enter the pits, but only for essential and obvious repair work - perhaps to replace a puncture or a broken front wing. How that would work with the above example is unclear, but the power may still prove useful.

Article 25

Article 25.1 has been updated to indicate that the current tyre manufacturer (Pirelli) will be the sole supplier until the end of 2013.

Tyres will be considered used once they've left the pit lane according to article 25.4. Since that was already being applied in F1 on an informal basis, nothing will change, but codifying informal rules into demonstrable regulations is generally a good idea.

Articles 25.4 a) and b) have been reworded to give the FIA technical director responsibility for allocating tyres to drivers in practise sessions.

A paragraph has been inserted to deal with those situations whereby a race ends prematurely but some drivers haven't used both compounds of dry-weather tyre (assuming that driver also hasn't used a wet-weather tyre). Any driver in that situation will receive a 30-second time penalty, which is the equivalent of a stop/go penalty. Completing a normal-length race while only using one dry-weather compound (and no wet-weather ones) still means exclusion.

Article 26

Cars in Q3 will no longer be weighed during the session due to a modification to Article 26.1 a) 2). It's not clear any cars were ever weighed in the 10-minute version of Q3, but it's a good safeguard.

The reason cars in Q3 definitely won't be weighed is because Article 26.1 a) 5) makes it compulsory for all cars in Q3 to be weighed at the end of the session, either with the driver on board (as per Q1 and Q2 weighings) or separately (as per post-race weighing).

Article 28

Gearboxes must last five races instead of four due to a slight change in the wording of Article 28.6 a).

If a driver cannot start a race, does not have a substitute starting the race for them and the reason is not a penalty from the stewards, that driver is allowed to have a new gearbox next race, just the same as they would have done if they had started but failed to finish. Several parts of Article 28.6 have been modified to account for this, but it is Article 28.6 a) which rules the change in.

Dog rings on gearboxes may be changed if a gearbox changed is required during the first day of practise. This will give a little bit more flexibility to teams in the latter part of the season because they can use different gearboxes for the first day's running that are not part of the main sequence.

Article 28.6 f) will allow one additional change of gearbox outside the permissions granted without penalty. This is similar to the exemption granted for the first engine change in 2007 and could signal a transition to the "X gearboxes a season" system currently in use for engines.

Importantly, Article 28.7 has gone. Teams are now allowed to change their survival cell, wheels and crash structures whenever they like after the first race of the season, subject to normal crash testing if it's a survival cell or crash structure. Hopefully, this will prevent a repeat of the F-duct situation, where the inability to modify the monocoque meant teams were using any old hole anywhere in the cockpit for the devices, to the detriment of usability and potentially safety. Also, large differences in the handling of the wheel specifications should be easy to resolve - Ferrari got an advantage on other teams from having a particularly unusual wheel psuedo-fairing that could not inspire any improved efforts from elsewhere all season.

Article 29

Article 29.3 has had the indent removed for consistency reasons. No difference to anything on track, but much more pleasing to the eye.

Article 30

A new Article 30.3 has been inserted. Unnecessarily slow, erratic and dangerous driving is banned at all times. The International Sporting Code already bans all of the above, but this echoes and emphasises the wording used for the Article 40.5 regulation covering proper driving conduct behind the Safety Car.

More importantly, all driving between the pit exit and pit entry (defined by their respective Safety Car lines) must now be done in 145% of the fastest whole-lap time set in the first day of practise. In practise this will typically mean that nobody can do a lap in more than 150% of the time the fastest driver lapped. This appears to be designed to prevent people from trying to get severely damaged cars to the pits, doing particularly thoughtless mass blocking or doing really slow in- or out-laps (or really slow formation laps, for that matter). Laps in wet-weather running are also affected but the margin is so big that an honest lap that was too slow would indicate the session should be stopped for wet weather reasons. Note that if a slow lap is due to a problem on the main straight or in the pits (such as stalling), that delay wouldn't influence anything because of the pit straight being ignored.

Between 10 and 4 hours before the start of first and third practises, nobody from any of the teams may be at the circuit. Each team is allowed four individual exemptions per year (that is to say, four people can work overnight for one race each, or at one race a four-person squad could be present at night). It is difficult to work on a car with only four people, so all but the most urgent and straightforward all-night shifts for mechanics have now been banned. Finally people associated with teams can (usually) be assured of a half-decent night's sleep!

Article 34

Under Article 34.1, wheel fasteners may be attached and removed in parc fermé. Pitot tubes may be covered and uncovered in parc ferme but only if a change in the weather has been declared.

Article 35

The compulsory autograph signing session is now at a time and place determined by each individual promoter and does not have to happen on the first day of practise. Procedures will also be determined locally. It will be interesting to see what is done with the new freedoms.

Article 36

The 107% rule in qualifying can be found in Article 36.3. Drivers whose fastest qualifying lap is more than 107% off the fastest time set in Q1 will only be allowed to start at the discretion of the stewards and no appeals (either way) will be permitted. The stewards are at liberty to decide the order if multiple people miss the 107% benchmark and get re-admitted in the same race.

Article 38

Drivers on their formation lap will have to keep to the pit lane speed limit until they pass the pole position slot, according to Article 38.6. It's not entirely clear to me why - wasn't "greatly-reduced speed" precise enough?

An entire paragraph has been removed from Article 38.8. Cars delayed on leaving the grid may now overtake at any time prior to the pit entry in order to resume their original starting position.

Article 40

Article 40.5, which used to ban slow, erratic and dangerous driving behind the Safety Car, has been re-worded... ...but is still redundant in the face of the new Article 30.3 (and, technically speaking, the International Sporting Code that preceded both). The only difference is that behaviour that "could be deemed" dangerous is banned behind the Safety Car, while at other times only driving that is dangerous is banned.

Article 40.7 has had a couple of clauses reworded with no apparent change to their effects on the racing.

The phrase in Article 40.9 requiring the Safety Car formation to be kept as tight as possible after the Safety Car has left the scene has been deleted. This may be due to the massive pile-up in China.

Article 40.11 continues to have the clause whereby last-lap Safety Cars are not followed by green flags for the last few metres of the race.

The last two paragraphs of Article 40.14 have been modified to account for drivers being allowed to resume their previous positions on formation laps (and condensed into one paragraph in the process).

Article 42

The second paragraph of Article 42.6 has been modified to take into account the new permission to resume previous position on formation laps.

Conclusions

Most of the changes made this year are minor and repeating what already exists in the International Sporting Code. However, some important changes are hidden among them. Wider pit lanes will be nice but the mechanics will be happier with the fact that most of them won't have a single "all-nighter" all year.

Methods of identifying when a release was done should increase pit lane safety. Minimum lap speeds on track through all sessions could get interesting. However, the change I like the most this year is that the horrible homologated survival cell regulation has been thrown away.

Hopefully future years will feature less cosmetic alteration and more of the type of red-tape paring seen with the removal of certain homologated components.

I am very happy right now because Force India has extended its partnership with both McLaren and Mercedes until the end of 2012. This means that there will be more stability at a time when it really needs it (given the instability in staffing of late) and will continue to be supplied with arguably the best engine/gearbox/hydraulics package on the grid. The quality of the new-generation KERS is unknown, but McLaren had the best one in 2009, so it is likely to produce a very good one again this time around.

Now, if Force India continue to perform well and Vijay Mallya remembers to pay at the right moments, this excellent relationship should make it through to 2013 and beyond ;)

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?