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 Post subject: Re: 2016-2017 Formula E
PostPosted: Sat Jul 29, 2017 2:59 pm 
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Coldtyre wrote:
There will be massive investùent in this series, because the good'old argument "top racing series allow technology to be developped for future use in road cars", no longer applicable to F1 except by poorly informed blindfolded fans in lack of pro-F1 arguments, actually applies here.

Batteries that don't overheat, and deliver max power over longer stints, is a perfect R&D playground to increase autonomy, performance and reliability of electric road cars.

Not the way the rules are going to be for now because the battery will be a spec part through 2020-2021 season. I doubt this fact will matter much marketing-sense though... Just a few weeks ago Andreas Seidl from Porsche was saying how "there not enough technical freedoms yet" in FE and now there suddenly are despite the rules staying exactly the same.

The idea of open chassis and battery development was dropped in 2016. Parts open for development are the electric motor, inverter, gearbox and cooling system and have been since the second season.

That old argument has gone out of fashion. When you realize a large manufacturer's (e.g. VW or Toyota) annual R&D spending is upwards of 10 billion, you start to question how is any racing program that is 1% of that figure supposed to make a big difference.


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 Post subject: Re: 2016-2017 Formula E
PostPosted: Fri Sep 22, 2017 3:11 am 
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huh, apparently there will be a race in Zurich next year. First race in Switzerland since 1954. 8O

http://www.fiaformulae.com/en/news/2017 ... itzerland/


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 Post subject: Re: 2016-2017 Formula E
PostPosted: Fri Sep 22, 2017 2:56 pm 
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iks wrote:
huh, apparently there will be a race in Zurich next year. First race in Switzerland since 1954. 8O

http://www.fiaformulae.com/en/news/2017 ... itzerland/


This is good news - I'm pretty sure that they mentioned this as a distant possibility when the series launched.


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 Post subject: Re: 2016-2017 Formula E
PostPosted: Wed Sep 27, 2017 9:08 pm 
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Abt-Audi have decided to pay tribute to every 90s backmarker F1 team:

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 Post subject: Re: 2016-2017 Formula E
PostPosted: Wed Oct 11, 2017 9:17 pm 
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What's the Autosport article about? https://www.autosport.com/fe/feature/77 ... e-is-wrong


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 Post subject: Re: 2016-2017 Formula E
PostPosted: Wed Oct 11, 2017 9:50 pm 
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VirtuaIceMan wrote:
What's the Autosport article about? https://www.autosport.com/fe/feature/77 ... e-is-wrong


Spoiler:
Autosport Paywall wrote:
Normally numbers don't lie, but these must be telling a fib. The gap is big. Shockingly big. Amid talk of the closest Formula E season in the championship's three years of open-powertrain competition, something from pre-season testing suggests not just a gap between one team and the rest, but a chasm.

A three-year rules cycle meant the field was always likely to compress in 2017/18, and certainly the end-of-day timesheets point to a remarkable season in store. Barely a tenth covers multiple drivers, multiple teams. And then you take a look at the long runs...

By the final day at Valencia every team had tried to turn their attention to race runs. The longest stints featured 15 flying laps. Gaps that were previously covered by hundredths ballooned to a few tenths, as is normally the case as the efficiencies of the various powertrains are proven or exposed.

Audi's advantage over everybody is astonishing. Reigning FE champion Lucas di Grassi and Daniel Abt had not been anonymous on the timing sheets in testing, but they weren't stealing headlines with day-topping pace. Quietly and efficiently the new works team went about its business, logging 1464km - the highest total of any team.

Running reliably is one thing, running quickly is quite another. A 15-lap run at Valencia was thought to be bang on the money for an FE race stint. So it was no surprise to see the majority of drivers aim for that target.

Some hit it with ease (NIO completed multiple 15-lap runs with Oliver Turvey and Luca Filippi) and some went further (Jerome d'Ambrosio did 16 timed laps at Dragon, while Sebastien Buemi is also understood to have been aiming for a longer run before a red flag interrupted his main effort). Some didn't hit that number, although it's impossible to say whether they were aiming for it. Venturi, for example, was operating in restricted circumstances, thanks to a faulty batch of gearbox components that led the team sending drivers out for runs that could have ended at any moment.

Individual programmes are exactly that, and most teams kept their cards close to their chest. But a look at the best long runs suggests a clear, and surprising, advantage for the Audi team.

Long-run pace ranking

How the 10 Formula E teams fared over race runs

TEAM DRIVER AVERAGE LAP TIME NUMBER OF LAPS
Audi Sport Abt Lucas di Grassi 1m26.184s 14
DS Virgin Racing Sam Bird 1m26.918s 14
Renault e.dams Sebastien Buemi 1m27.314s 13
NIO Luca Filippi 1m27.770s 15
Techeetah Andre Lotterer 1m27.951s 13
Mahindra Felix Rosenqvist 1m28.158s 15
Jaguar Nelson Piquet Jr 1m28.336s 15
Dragon Racing Jerome d'Ambrosio 1m28.446s 15
Andretti Tom Blomqvist 1m28.448s 13
Venturi James Rossiter 1m26.718s* 8*
*over an erratic run several laps shorter than any other team managed

This analysis must be taken with some caveats. Adding two "dangerous", "ugly", "odd" (depending on who you asked) chicanes didn't exactly turn Valencia into the sort of circuit FE will race on, although as Audi team principal Allan McNish points out, "it does give you a little bit of a feel what the competition has done".

Second, we don't know if those cars finished their respective stints with 0% remaining energy, or 5% or 10%...you get the idea. And di Grassi's long run was a lap short of what was being considered a proper race stint.

So, maybe rivals can cling to the hope that if he'd done a 15th timed lap, di Grassi would have had to lap six seconds slower to make it to the end of his stint. Certainly, Dragon's average dropped off considerably from a couple of 13-lap runs on day two of the test - dropping from 1m27.259s over 13 laps to the 1m28.426s you see above (and is chosen as Dragon's average because it's from a more representative race stint).

But a look at the sector times on his inlap, and the general consistency of di Grassi's stint, suggests a similar decline is unlikely.

"I'm very pleased with the progress," reported di Grassi. And rightly so. The Brazilian made it clear long ago - way back in May 2016 - that full Audi support was needed if the Abt team was going to mix it with Renault e.dams long term in Formula E. The Renault Z.E.15 was the pick of the powertrains in the first season of open motor/gearbox/inverter competition, and it stayed at the front with its evolutionary Z.E.16 last season.

Di Grassi stole the title, but it was a curious victory. To win again, on merit, needed a lot of change. It seems he's got his wish.

Audi's apparent leap to the top of the pack, and the emphatic nature of its testing advantage, is a surprise at first glance. In theory there's less room to improve than ever, given the relative rules stability ahead of 2018/19, when mid-race car swaps are ditched and one car, one powertrain, must go the distance.

So how has Audi made such a big jump? The short answer is investment. Audi withdrew from the World Endurance Championship to focus on FE. The brainpower and financial might that was the building blocks of its ultra-successful LMP1 stint is now being applied to FE, with the support of long-time Abt technical partner Schaeffler.

"We didn't really improve the car, we switched a lot of focus into season five"
Sebastien Buemi, Renault e.dams

Gone is the three-speed gearbox, replaced by a Renault-esque single-speed solution. (Expensive) lightweight materials bring the weight limit down and allow for tighter packaging, which is utterly crucial with the chronically overweight base car and battery.

This is the gift that keeps on giving - it allows more weight to be shuffled forward (the FE car's distribution is horridly rearward), which creates a better balance, and aids pure lap time and efficiency through better braking and acceleration. Allied with a lower centre-of-gravity and the Audi e-tron FE04 is a powertrain that's far better suited to a racing car than its predecessor.

And if you think the pure lap time comparison - where Audi trailed NIO, Renault and Mahindra - is a cause for optimism, remember that being quick over one lap at a high-speed, high-grip Valencia is a very different prospect to being quick on bumpy city streets.

"You would waste time to find the optimal set-up," di Grassi says of Valencia. "We prefer to spend time optimising the systems that are actually more relevant - we did race simulations, starts, pitstops, car changes, qualifying simulations and so on.

"For us it's important to check systems and procedures, to bring the Audi people on board. There's a lot of people who haven't been to so many tests."

Audi's also being helped by Renault choosing to direct a lot of its resource at 2018/19. By being top of the tree, Renault has less scope to improve anyway. Its decision to focus beyond this season may bear fruit further down the line, but it has left the team vulnerable.

"We are one of the only teams that didn't re-do everything," says Buemi. "We've kept the same kind of casing, same electric motor and everything from season two. We didn't do a new crash test like most did. We didn't really improve the car, we focused on other things. We switched a lot of focus into season five."

What that means is Renault's stopped throwing the kitchen sink at FE for a season in which its closest competitor has gone from a superb race team with limited resources to, as Buemi puts it, a team that "is so much bigger than us now".

However, it's not like Renault's likely to be thrown into no-man's land. It was right up there on pure pace, and Buemi was on a much more competitive long run before a late red flag on the final day. It probably wouldn't have challenged di Grassi's, but it would have vaulted him clear of Sam Bird's effort for DS Virgin.

The benchmark powertrain hasn't been invested in to the same degree as Audi's, perhaps, but its potency and efficiency has been clear from the beginning and it will surely be in the mix. Perhaps the most likely outcome this season will be a fierce fight for pole position, with Audi and Renault enjoying a bigger advantage in the races.

Pure pace ranking

The fastest single lap time from each team

TEAM DRIVER TIME
NIO Oliver Turvey 1m21.822s
Renault e.dams Sebastien Buemi 1m21.890s
Mahindra Felix Rosenqvist 1m21.934s
Audi Sport Abt Daniel Abt 1m21.946s
DS Virgin Racing Sam Bird 1m21.950s
Techeetah Jean-Eric Vergne 1m22.078s
Dragon Racing Jerome d'Ambrosio 1m22.252s
Jaguar Mitch Evans 1m22.432s
Andretti Antonio Felix da Costa 1m22.979s
Venturi Edoardo Mortara 1m23.619s

The two tables included in this analysis might suggest the NIO team is in for a repeat of last season, when it was rapid in qualifying but lacked efficiency in the race. However, improvements to the thermal management of the powertrain (cooling was a major problem last season) and the efficiency has left overall pacesetter Turvey buoyant, even though it was newboy Filippi who had the most impressive long run of the two.

"The race running is tricky to analyse becaue you don't know what people are doing with energy each lap," says Turvey. "Over one lap we can be quick. We can compete in that sense.

"Buemi and di Grassi have been the benchmark in the races. We hope we've caught up enough to fight in the race, but we won't really know until Hong Kong. Clearly those guys have been very strong over the last few years and they are the favourites going into this season.

"We have to see in the race whether we can be as competitive but I feel we've made a step forward in race pace, so we can go to Hong Kong with some confidence and hopefully we can be racing them."

NIO will need to overcome race-winning teams if it's to haul itself from point-scorer to regular frontrunner, though. Techeetah, DS Virgin and Mahindra all took victories last season, and look like they will be in the best-of-the-rest ballpark this campaign.

As a Renault customer team Techeetah needs to be judged against the works squad, particularly with Jean-Eric Vergne and Andre Lotterer leaving it nowhere to hide on the driver front. It might take a couple of races to iron out any operational issues (Techeetah is the only customer team on the grid so is not granted the 15 days of private testing afforded to everyone else) but the bottom line is it should be exactly where Renault is.

DS Virgin and Mahindra are harder to judge - certainly Sam Bird looked competitive relative to the non-Audi runners in testing, and it would be odd to see that team drop down the order. Mahindra emerged as a genuine frontrunner last season and is sparing little expense in its pursuit of more success in FE. Felix Rosenqvist was right up there on pure time, but lacked a little in his long runs.

In fact, Mahindra's long-run pace dropped it into Jaguar/Dragon territory. Both of those teams had significant room for improvement after a disappointing 2016/17 season, and Mahindra will be disappointed if it swaps fighting for poles and wins to fighting for points against last season's table-props. Andretti might boast more BMW engineering support than before ahead of its official entry as a works entry in a year's time, but it still looks like it's propping up the times.

Renault has looked stunning at times over the last two seasons, but it never gave an inkling of an advantage like Audi has
Therein lies the true difficulty of Formula E, an ever-compressing pecking order that will catch out anyone who underdelivers.

It also serves to reiterate the significance of Audi's performance during the race simulations in testing - it looks to have stolen a march in what otherwise appears to be FE's most competitive, closely-fought technology battle to date.

"If you look at it the lap times are very, very close but we can pleased we've had reliability," says McNish. "And another thing is both drivers have been consistently fast, whether it's been in the [high] temperature in the day doing long runs or in qualifying simulations that we saw right at the end."

Renault has looked stunning at times over the last two seasons, but it never gave an inkling of an advantage like Audi has.

Maybe that'll prove to be a gross misinterpretation of unrepresentative pre-season testing. Or maybe the misinterpretation is in the ultra-tight lap times that dominated headlines initially at Valencia, and prove to be a regrettable false dawn.


Tl;dr: Audi-Abt may be sandbagging to hide a huge pace advantage over the entire field.


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