Australian Grand Prix 2015, Melbourne - Race 1/19

Honda/Mclaren should have targeted 2016 for their return and stayed with Merc for another year. Rushing development on that engine has cost them already. I can't say this enough, Honda were testing in November when the other three teams at the same point last year were testing 2+ months later at the end of Jan. They've had loads of information from Mclaren in what should have been the most difficult year and they are miles and miles behind where the worst teams in testing were last year.

Remember at this stage Lotus were doing relatively as badly in terms of reliability/speed and that wasn't because of the engine directly, it's because they made fundamental mistakes with the chassis and design as things barely improved over the entire year. Good teams CAN and do make horrible mistakes and again people seem to just completely gloss over the fact that Mclaren made two relatively simple designs in the last two years and utterly screwed up both.

Just because a car looks smooth or shapely doesn't mean the aero works, or the suspension isn't awful(or upside down :p ) or the brake by wire isn't useless, or the radiators don't leak or aren't big enough, etc, etc.
 
You will always wait for tomorrow.

If they put it off for another year they would still face the same problems but you are a further year behind.
 
Slam62 said:
Tbh the new engines rules have made things very dull and I want hammi to win.
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I think the new engine rules have been a good thing; however, combining new engine rules with immediate limits on engine development has been a very bad idea.
 
I haven't paid much attention to the off season this time around, so these were my first real impressions of 2015...

Impressed by the apparent Ferrari turnaround.

Disappointed by the lack of a No. 1 on Hamilton's car. Dude, you're world champion, get a No. 1 on your motor. It might also make watching the inevitable Merc. 1-2 marginally less tedious.

Horrified by Jenson's 'tache! :eek: For me that's worse than McLaren's qualifying performance. Hopefully both situations will be rectified as the season progresses.
 
OldCoals said:
You will always wait for tomorrow.

If they put it off for another year they would still face the same problems but you are a further year behind.
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With the limits on testing you can't really do much if your not competing. As painful as it is, it was the best thing for Honda to do getting the engine in a competing chassis ASAP.

Having only 1 team running the engine is probably the biggest pain at the moment. But I can understand why none of the other teams would want to take an unproven engine when there's 3 a year ahead to chose from.
 
been working today so only just caught up, the radio ruined the result anyway.

everyone was talking about reducing the gap to merc but its doubled by the looks of things. They have built up quite a team it seems.

shocked at the mercs, have they ever qualified as last 2 places on a grid?

I think alonso needs to keep up the memory loss and maybe mention not remembering signing a contract with mclaren.
 
Skeeter said:
With the limits on testing you can't really do much if your not competing. As painful as it is, it was the best thing for Honda to do getting the engine in a competing chassis ASAP.

Having only 1 team running the engine is probably the biggest pain at the moment. But I can understand why none of the other teams would want to take an unproven engine when there's 3 a year ahead to chose from.
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I agree.

As other have said, Renault had the advantage of four teams running their engines last season.
 
Skeeter said:
Again! Seriously, how many times do you need people to explain to you why McLaren couldn't run Honda engines last year!
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I know the above was aimed at someone else but...

Honda could have been testing though in an old modified chassis, or even in another type of car altogether (as was rumoured with Ferrari). Of course we don't know they weren't.

On a separate note, shame about Bottas, and more of a shame we can't get Suzie in the car in a race.
 
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Mr Jack said:
I think the new engine rules have been a good thing; however, combining new engine rules with immediate limits on engine development has been a very bad idea.
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It's a cost cutting measure. Someone has to cover the development costs. A number of the customer teams are in financial trouble as it is.
 
Running F1 chassis outside of events and scheduled testing must be in a chassis 2 or 3 years old. That was V8 era so there's no way the V6 would fit. And making a mule for it to fit into would be a new chassis and not an old one, so they wouldn't be allowed to run it.

Running the engine in a road car may have been possible, but it wouldn't have offered much useful info. Bottom line is the earliest Honda could run an F1 chassis with their V6 was the post season test at Abu Dhabi, and that's what they did. If they could have run it earlier they would.

Also, on that Ferrari, while people speculated they were testing the F1 V6, I think its more likely that they were testing the road car engines in the California T and 488.
 
The more I read of the excuses from Ron and the Honda guy the more I feel like the engine is just a complete dud. You've got Ron saying they can't turn engines up as they can't risk losing engines. But the consequence of losing engines is starting from the back of the grid..... where they are anyway. We've also got the Honda guy saying they can't turn it up because they don't want to lose engines AND they have no experience running at higher temps... but how can you get experience with the engines running turned up unless you, you know, run with the engine turned up. Both of these arguments are illogical and for me not believable at all.

I mean with this huge bank of dynos running the engine in the lab... not one is running in a hot box at higher temps to simulate full load running, that alone sounds like BS to me.

If you were running Mclaren and cared about image, what would be most embarrassing to you, getting into Q2 then your engine blowing up, or qualifying dead last? The upshot of turning the engines up is they'd get this experience they apparently need. I mean lets say you're running turned down so the engine is at say 700C instead of 800C... you find a fix for problems running at lower speed but when you turn it up those fixes fail because they don't fix it when the engine is turned up. Renault had turned up engines and run fast in testing, all of them in Australia and several of them running hotter than they should(100kg/h+ for some teams :p ).

Basically none of these excuses make any sense and makes me believe the engine is 'turned up', at least the ICE is, maybe however the Kers/mgu-h are simply non functional at this point and that will provide a big chunk of performance, though I don't believe it will bring them 5 seconds per lap more performance.

Something very odd going on because their excuses are all ridiculous. Button seemed convinced they would at some point run a bit faster, and looked completely disappointed after qualifying. Again which points more to thinking they were going to have more pace than they did.
 
At Canada last year no ERS and no rear brakes lost Rosberg about 1 second a lap. Honda must have the ICE turned right down to be 4 seconds back.

I'm with you on saving engines. Its pointless if they are at the back already. They need to take the pain and get stuff fixed.
 
Personally I do think its a kers/mgu-k integrating with the engine that is the issues so basically they have got it turned off. On a couple of occasions it failed on rosberg car last year and was worth a 1.5-2 seconds a lap and mad the engine sound rough.
 
Skeeter said:
I'm with you on saving engines. Its pointless if they are at the back already. They need to take the pain and get stuff fixed.
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It's catch 22. Say they turn them up and break an engine a round per car for the flyaways... By the time they've sorted the powertrain and are able to run at the tail end of the big four they'll end up at the back of the grid again for every scheduled change which wipes out the chance of a good result.

Have a read of Beast by Jade Gurss - it's about the development of the Ilmor pushrod that ran and won a single Indy 500 in '94. I didn't realise quite how much work went into engine development and how dependent it is on environmental factors and installation.
 
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