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Never going to happen, but it would be great to have the cars look like late 90s CART chassis with roll hoop and that bulky black thing sticking out in the open.

More realistically, I hope they will be able to hide that under the current engine cover, and that we won't get those fugly hunchbacks like in the mod-2000s F1 cars.

That engine is very a small unit and I have to wonder how actual that top part is. With the engine being so small and there no longer being a requirement for air being induced through the roll-over hoop, this will give the teams a chance to make the rear ends of the cars look very different. We could see some interesting concepts. Or I should say I hope.

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http://www.the-fastlane.co.uk

turbo spinning at 125,000 rpm xD. Need high res!



The capacity might be quite small, but at the revs these things produce, they will be sucking it like crazy. I would say they would maintain the airbox from the rollhoop but perhaps alter the shape of the snorkel running to the plenum. Anyway, will be interesting to see what they come up with.

Autosport have that same picture, I don't think they'll have shown the wrong thing

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"An idea whose time has come cannot be stopped by any army or any government"


3x TBKL rFactor Hillclimb champion

I got it from a Dutch newssite which showed the picture on their Facebookpage. They said that "Mercedes-Benz showed their first images of their 2014 engine".

Probably cos Nick kept the Caterham factory afloat for a while buying spare parts.

Like his fellow music industry colleague Matt Aitken, the only thing he was any good at motor sport wise was crashing.

Are Merc having our leg? I mean that thing looks so completely out of whack it is not funny....though everyone thought the early pictures of the BMW in testing of 2009 was not indicative of their actual car, which turned out to be one of the worst looking cars of all time...I hope Merc don't go down that same route with that monstrosity (if actually real)

It's not like we see the engines when they're running, I'm more interested in what noise it will make

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"An idea whose time has come cannot be stopped by any army or any government"


3x TBKL rFactor Hillclimb champion

Yeah I am rather confused by those comments..

I'm excited by the new rules ... I'm not too worried about the noise, or the passing of the V8s which were never that special to me, they're just a dim reflection of the old V10s and it's time for them to go. The turbo cars of the 80s sounded pretty epic, and these are more or less the same configuration ... in fact, listen to some of the 1960s 1.5 litre normally aspirated cars and they sound lush, add on the turbo whine and we'll have something nice. I'm not sure if 33s is too much ERS - I think we'll see it used even more as an essential lap-time aid rather than an overtaking one, but the effect is doubled now to 160hp so, if you do find yourself in a position to use it, it's going to be a big help ... I'm not sure if Webber will be looking forward to this, given that as races progress, the chances of him having a KERS failure seem to near 100%. (Not meaning to revive the Webber debate, I just notice that if there's a KERS failure going, it usually occurs on his car.)

EDIT: Aero regs aren't the big change they were going to be, so it will mainly be these engines ... well, as long as one doesn't really steal a march on the others, then we'll hopefully be fine. Will there be some kind of grace period? I seem to remember in 2006 there was a bit of concern about the Mercedes engine being a dud (low on power and unreliable) but then it got sorted out and became arguably the most powerful and very reliable. Aero stability or at least similarity is good ...

Technology is part of Formula 1, and since manufacturer teams came into the sport, so it has been a showcase for them, that's part of F1's history - it's just that in the past, teams like Ferrari and the old works Mercedes team were just out to prove they could build the fastest car, Ford made mileage from the Cosworth connection - the same as Porsche at Le Mans in the 1970s is no different to Audi and Toyota now.

I reckon there's going to be a lot of tech failures early in the year. We might end up with a situation where 'Power Units' are vitally important - maybe one engine will be very good and the others not so! The guy from Mercedes, according to Autosport, says you won't be able to race without ERS.

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Dan Wheldon | 1978 - 2011

At 160hp for 33 seconds per lap, he almost certainly has a point ... losing about 20% of the total power output (~750bhp) compared to your rivals for, on average, just over a third of the lap time, will be a pretty huge impact compared to now where you can still make competitive times but are a bit buggered on position defence ...

It's possible there will be disparity between engines ... these engines are very old technology, really, although they are very high performance and impressive in that sense, they've been building these engines, or ones very similar, for a long time, so the reliability in performance and production is very high ... with new processes, without these years of refinement, there could be individual manufacturing differences, though one imagines that the quality control and attention to detail will be second to none, or at least very few.

What are the engine regs going to be like? Still going to be similar to the current regarding limited allocations and extended life expectancy?

5 'Power Units' per season, three less than the current limit (which applies only to engines), but 'Power Unit' includes the engine, ERS, turbo, exhaust and engine electronics ... a failure in any one of those that needs to be replaced will count as one of the allocation of units.

EDIT: Also, with regards to the photo being a fake/wrongly ascribed, I think it must be a Merc release because the Autosport website has two different angles of it, one from 3/4 used as a thumbnail on the main page, and the side-on shot used in the article ...

impressive promo movie of the Sochi track.

Some awesome anachronisms in there ... Juan Pablo Montoya, Bridgestone tyres (unless they know something we don't), old aero regs ... what may even have been an old Sauber Petronas livery.

Car models look like CTDPs rFactor mod with a re-texture on a couple of them. F1 2005 mod.

Plus the sound from the Ferrari V12 well known audio clip

that first bend surprises me, with no run off at all.

It's even worse than that. Allen wrote on his article that, on average, 55s is spent on full throttle, each lap. So, the ERS(why have they dropped the Kinetic bit, btw?) will be present at 60% of the "max power deployed" time.



I already read some people complain about the "Power Unit" terminology(don't remember where) but it seems necessary. As you pointed out, it won't be a "conventional engine" anymore. It really will be a "Power Unit" with lot's of components on it making the whole reliability issue much more difficult to be achieved, for instance.