F1 Testing 2014: Week 3 Bahrain

robbiemc said:
I think the McLaren and Williams PU failures were down to 'well used' units. I guess this must give them a base understanding about which part(s) are likely to fail first.
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Also Merc's, and yes, I've highlighted it a few times, teams are looking for failures because they want to be able to spot a failure coming up before it happens to make a tactical choice.

I think this season making the choice to take a penalty and drop down the grid to replace a part will gain certain teams a huge amount of points and finishes that they otherwise wouldn't get.

Much much better to see a engine failure coming, start down the grid and take 5th than not see it coming, get pole, be in 1st with 10 laps to go and the engine blows. This year finding the failure points of key parts would be a huge priority. I would also think at various points in testing you have different goals. I wouldn't be surprised if those teams with the most mileage with much of their testing done would indeed start to put on used parts and attempt to gain an idea of how long they last as testing comes to an end.
 
Yeah, if i was a team boss I would have at least pushed one engine to destruction (mileage wise) assuming anyone could make it that far without breaking something anyway.
 
http://www.f1sport.it/2014/03/04/f1-la-ferrari-avrebbe-ottenuto-altri-tempi-bahrain/

Translated it basically adds up to, Ferrari had the top speed at every speed trap, were good in corners, but they just never did a full lap that started from the start finish line. So they would for instance do the first 3 corners slow, start a lap at turn 4, do a fast lap then slow down after turn 4 the next time around. You'd get 2 meh laps but one fast lap in the middle of it.

I've said as much before and that lap times aren't indicative because they could be going faster at any given section(doesn't have to be the "normal" sectors as they have many more sensors to compare from than just sector 1/2/3).

Some cars will probably do a full lap starting at an alternative point, and other cars might aim for splitting it up into 2 or 3 parts and splitting their fastest lap between different runs. That Ferrari managed to be fastest in every speed trap and in many corners suggests they might be a lot fastest than their actually reported lap times show.

You would think reporters would add up the fastest sectors(at least) and maybe the fastest they went between each sensor point to get a better idea. I'm not sure how much data the reporters at the track would have access to, bit lazy that they haven't tried to go a little deeper.

While I like Ted, his notebooks waste SO much time doing nothing then most of what he does is too non technical.... most of his development corner amounts to "that's beautiful", not "that seemed to be faster and make the car better, AND looks great" or "that looks great but they went back to the old one because it didn't seem to work". Considering all the time they waste, not making a list of best sectors and the best overall lap they could theoretically have done is really disappointing. I'd prefer he did more interviews and more numbers than showing us the media conference type room. It was like 5 mins of useless preamble before 5 mins of pictures of new bits on cars(that are all beautiful apparently) before complaining about running out of time..... here's a hint, cut the crap and add more actual content then. Real questions, real interviews and real information bits are great, but are padded out with so much crap. The other guy doing the second test whose name I forget... that show was even worse, if he didn't use the word hashtag at all in that show he could have answered about 400 more questions an episode.
 
drunkenmaster said:
I'd prefer he did more interviews and more numbers than showing us the media conference type room. It was like 5 mins of useless preamble before 5 mins of pictures of new bits on cars(that are all beautiful apparently) before complaining about running out of time..... here's a hint, cut the crap and add more actual content then. Real questions, real interviews and real information bits are great, but are padded out with so much crap. The other guy doing the second test whose name I forget... that show was even worse, if he didn't use the word hashtag at all in that show he could have answered about 400 more questions an episode.
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I think most here would agree, but it simply comes down to viewing figures - make anything too technical and people will just switch off. I'll bet Ted would love to do cover more technical items, but sadly it's not down to him.

It's the same with Brundles tech items that are shown during race weekends - these are rarely longer than 5 minutes which is nothing considering how long Sky's programmes run for.

Remember we're the best of the best of the best here, everyone else is just slack-jawed, part-time, ADD window-shoppers :D
 
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At the time the BBC definitely mentioned that Rosberg and Hamilton both had a gearbox failure after 89 laps, and the way it was written certainly suggested both were brand new gearboxes.

and no I very much doubt Mercedes would have put a gearbox in the car (with such limitied testing time available) that had already done 100's of laps.


ediot - No team would waste 1/2 a day per driver (as it takes several hours to change a gearbox) in testing on using an old componant "tactically" to see it fail.

Given that each gearbox has to do the equivelant of 4 live gp's plus the equivelant of one more for quali laps etc is more than 300 laps, and given that they both had a failure after less than 200 laps each (rosberg 190 odd and LH with about 160) the gearbox shouldnt be failing that quickly
 
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Shimmy said:
But he's not unfounded in his claims. The Head of Renault PU development at the tests admitted that they were behind schedule and is mainly due to software gremlins. Saying things like 'limp home' mode and 'fail safe' programs either didn't exist yet or were very immature in their development, even for relatively minor issues these then become major problems for the teams.
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The problem is not that he's claiming there were software problems; there have been. It's with his pig-ignorant frothing about the causes of those problems.

Let's start with his opening passage

I’ve been working in the IT business since the mid-nineties and a recurring problem in recent years has been that even magna cum laude university graduates don’t know how to program properly anymore​

Gosh! Really? Fresh-faced graduates aren't top flight programmers! Who'd have thought? A degree in Computer Science, at best, makes you a passable programmer; to become a good programmer you need experience. It has always been thus and it will always be thus. It's just ignorant to think you're saying anything insightful by commenting on this.

If you come fresh out of university today, chances are that you have learned to program in Java or C#, which has nothing to do whatsoever with programming. Imagine you were asked to write a program for bolting stuff together. Today’s kids would come up with something like that:​

Translation: I'm a grumpy old fart who doesn't like this new fangled technology. It's also deeply irrelevant to the problems of Red Bull because you can bed your bottom socks that (a) they aren't putting fresh faced graduates straight onto the coalface and (b) the people they're hiring are embedded programmers not Java monkeys.

Renault, however, seem to have hired an unholy bunch of C# script kiddies or some guys, who acquired their hardware programming skills on Wikipedia, because if they were hardcore nerds from days gone by, we wouldn’t have heard the words ‘software problem’ uttered nearly as often as we did during winter-testing. To put it bluntly: A program that after 2 years of development still doesn’t run properly has been written by someone, who chose the wrong job.​

Clueless speculation followed by a complete ignorance of development cycles. Astonishingly so from someone who claims to have been "working in the IT business since the mid-nineties". Red Bull's programmers aren't running towards a fixed target, they're constantly re-designing, re-developing and tuning towards hardware that changes on a weekly or even daily basis.

Testing these days is considered optional. When was it last time that you bought a video game that didn’t install a first patch within a week of release day?​

Another clue-free comment. Games these days receive more testing than they ever have. The reasons that Games are coming out needing patches is because they're multiple orders of magnitude more complicated than they used to be combined with a bunch of economic factors and the fact that you can patch these days. Did you know that Pac Man famously had a bug in its Ghost AI? In fact, test-driven development is vastly more widespread than ten years ago and barely existed twenty years ago, claims that bugs are down to second rate developers and - worse - down to programmers learning in modern languages are the purest rose-tinted nostalgia.

The last program I bought that didn’t need patching to repair basic functionality cost me 0,00 bucks, because I had written it myself. I had spent 3 months on programming it and 2 months on testing it and when it it was released, it worked. Today’s industry would have released it after 3 months and then spend 4 months on releasing patches that should have been part of the release version.​

A spot of ego-stroking followed a failure to understand release cycles. More to the point: Renault didn't choose the release date; they couldn't hold back the software for further testing.


There's nothing insightful about pointing out that having software problems means you had problems in your software development means you had problems in your software development department but there's not a single solid insight in this blogpost; it's a collection of rants based on little more than arrogance and prejudice.
 
FrankJH said:
At the time the BBC definitely mentioned that Rosberg and Hamilton both had a gearbox failure after 89 laps, and the way it was written certainly suggested both were brand new gearboxes.

and no I very much doubt Mercedes would have put a gearbox in the car (with such limitied testing time available) that had already done 100's of laps.
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The bbc are retarded, simple as that. As I've linked to, the car did 89 laps on the day the gearbox failed and Merc said the gearbox failed. They did not say the gearbox failed the second time and the car did 103 laps that day, so do you think they put the car together did 14 laps, then take the gearbox out and change it, then do 89 laps then it failed?

Likewise, the drivers have 5 engines(in 6 components) for the season. That is 19 races(I think?) so we could say 4 engines per race...... gearboxes have to last for 6 consecutive races so need to last longer than engines and can't be switched out between races. Thus, its exceedingly unlikely that having run an engine for 6 days of testing in bahrain(it was never made clear if it also did Jerez though I guess by mentioning 6 days at Bahrain it's implying it was new after the first test), that they would have been changing out gearboxes constantly. In all likely hood that gearbox did that 6 days of testing(I can't remember exactly but I believe the gearbox ended day 2 and they put a new engine in during the morning of day three?) and almost certainly wouldn't have been new. As said, Merc only said gearbox problems the second time around, i've not seen anyone or anything say specifically a failure.

So lets put it this way the average race distance, around 305km is 58 laps at Bahrain. With the gearbox needing to do 6 consecutive races that is around 384 laps. There is no reason, with needing to test how long their gearbox lasts, to change it out every day at testing, the same way they didn't change the engine. Merc did 351 laps in the first test at Bahrain, and 89 laps on day one and two. So seemingly did 529 laps before failing(if it was the same one from the start), the second one may not have failed.

Now from what I can gather the Merc stopped on day 2 due to gearbox failure and was late starting day 4 because of a gearbox problem(bbc states they replaced it, but I'm not sure if they've assumed that or not). Day ONE and Day TWO of the last test they did 89 laps on each, they did not have a gearbox failure on day one. The after 89 laps thing twice is clearly not correct.

Another way to think about it is if they failed after 89 laps a piece every time(they didn't and don't) then we'd have see a gearbox failure halt essentially every day at testing across all three tests, it didn't which should give you an idea that it's not a problem. It would seem that one has failed after a significant number of laps and as the gearbox has to last maybe longer than anything else on the car there is EVERY reason to try and put a used one in and keep track of how often they are failing. Gearbox and engine failure will cost a lot of race finishes and grid penalties this year, it's crucial to have an idea when they might fail, they have more reason to put in a partially used one and find it's breaking point than put in a new one every day and have zero idea about lifespan going into the season.


On another note, the 10 place grid penalty for a new engine is better enforced. If you only qualify 16th and get a 10 place grid penalty, you will drop to 22nd in one race and drop the remaining places at the next race so you have to have the full 10 place drop even if it's across more than one race. Gearbox is a 5 place grid penalty.
 
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JeditOjanen said:
On which note, have we got a masochistic lunatic replacement for you lined up yet?
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Is Duke no longer doing them?

Mike306 said:
Shimmy
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If people just want threads creating for each race weekend with relevant background information, I'm happy to do it. I actually relatively enjoy that sort of stuff, which is why I'm more active during testing/pre-season.

I'm just not interested in the bickering once racing begins. :p
 
It got boring giving those that moaned/trolled a platform each race weekend but after a few years it was time to let someone else do it. Looks like you just volunteered yourself :p
 
Duke said:
It got boring giving those that moaned/trolled a platform each race weekend
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To true, it got hard just reading them, for one decent post out of 15.
Ignore list came in useful for the usual suspects.

F1 is usually dominated by 1 team, that's f1 for you. It doesn't make it rubbish, but perhaps those people should move to a same spec series.
 
Duke said:
It got boring giving those that moaned/trolled a platform each race weekend but after a few years it was time to let someone else do it. Looks like you just volunteered yourself :p
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Glaucus said:
To true, it got hard just reading them, for one decent post out of 15.
Ignore list came in useful for the usual suspects.

F1 is usually dominated by 1 team, that's f1 for you. It doesn't make it rubbish, but perhaps those people should move to a same spec series.
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Duke said:
I'm quite interested in the tech side so tend to browse F1Technical forums.
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Ditto all of the above. I stopped actually reading the posts within a race thread years ago haha.

Much more interested on the tech side of things and developing stories in the sport. Pretty much why I started the off topic thread and have done testing threads for a couple years.

I'll do the race weekend threads no problem, just don't plan on reading much of it beyond a Saturday. :p
 
It's a shame a few can spoil it for he many :( For the most part I think this is a great little sub forum... I learn so much :D But often when the race rolls around I just sit and enjoy the race and don't tend to get involved in the 'discussions'.

Good on for volunteering Shimmy, I'm sure your efforts will be most appreciated :)
 
Shimmy said:
Ditto all of the above. I stopped actually reading the posts within a race thread years ago haha.

Much more interested on the tech side of things and developing stories in the sport. Pretty much why I started the off topic thread and have done testing threads for a couple years.

I'll do the race weekend threads no problem, just don't plan on reading much of it beyond a Saturday. :p
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:)

Guerrilla said:
It's a shame a few can spoil it for he many :( For the most part I think this is a great little sub forum... I learn so much :D But often when the race rolls around I just sit and enjoy the race and don't tend to get involved in the 'discussions'.

Good on for volunteering Shimmy, I'm sure your efforts will be most appreciated :)
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This.
 
I've not been keeping up with the F1 2014 news but is that silly double points rule for the final race still in place or have the FIA seen sense and got rid?
 
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