Motorsport Off Topic Thread

Apparently Sauber - Honda deal to be announced quite soon.

Makes sense all round really. Honda get more miles on their engine, McLaren don't need to worry about a rival team beating them with a Honda engine and Sauber get a cheap deal with potentially a leading engine. Certainly more potential than a 2016 Ferrari with zero updates.
 
Shimmy said:
Apparently Sauber - Honda deal to be announced quite soon.

Makes sense all round really. Honda get more miles on their engine, McLaren don't need to worry about a rival team beating them with a Honda engine and Sauber get a cheap deal with potentially a leading engine. Certainly more potential than a 2016 Ferrari with zero updates.
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The reason they have a Ferrari 2016 engine is precisely because they are going Honda. Don't sign up to a 3 year current engine deal with Ferrari, they know you're switching when you ask for a single year only. Ferrari have no interest in giving them a new engine to pass all the info off to Honda. Honda won't have a leading engine next year, they are monumentally far behind the other teams with the current engine design, even if this has much more scope for improvement than the last engine, they are years behind the other teams. If they are even close to competitive before at the very least 2019 I'll be completely shocked. I wouldn't be surprised if Honda have a significant performance deficit still even by 2020.

If they ignored Honda they had the cash from new owners and championship points as well as likely slightly fairer money distribution happening in the next couple of years to secure a current year Ferrari engine deal, or even Renault. Taking a Honda engine looks good in value, but will keep them right at the back for years to come.

To me signing for Honda in Manor's situation, get free engines and maybe drivers or a little cash and survive or go out of business, that would have been a no brainer. But surviving relatively well and choosing to go with Honda to save some cash while giving up any chance of real improvements for a couple of years seems like a very bad decision. Completely different situation.

Wouldn't surprise me if 2016 Ferrari engine is still superior to 2017 Honda for the whole year and even if they had to go with 2017 Ferrari next year, would likely be better than Honda's 2018 engine.
 
Just waiting for the delusional to come in with demands for V12's and V10's. What ever they decide they'll almost certainly still be turbocharged and have some hybridisation. I can't ever see F1 going back to an NA engine.
 
My money would be on either a 2.0L or 2.2L Twin Turbo V6 with hybridisation, with power around the 1000hp mark.
 
SoliD said:
http://www.autosport.com/news/report.php/id/128744/f1-plans-cheaper-noisier-2021-engine-switch

Be interesting to see which way this goes and direction they take. Yes engines need to be cheaper, but the benefits to the automotive industry and us as consumers is definitely being seen with the huge economy improvements they're making with these engines.
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Tell you what, the FIA have cost F1 and the various manufacturers that have and are participating in the sport huge amounts of money with there wacky ideas. This highlights the situation at Honda. Goodness knows how much money they will spend in getting there power unit up to speed with the rest and knowing by the end of the 2020 season this engine will be dumped. With a shelf live date now pencilled in for these current engines why not open up testing and let them go for it. I wonder how many new manufacturers will consider F1 come 2021 or will Formula E be the place that manufactures want to develop and invest in.
 
I think the general idea is go back to something a bit simpler. The current engines are immensely complex and therefore immensely expensive. Something like a 2.5 V6 with limited boost pressure and some form of KERS like they had in the old NA days. I'd imagine they'll drop both elements of the current ERS and stick to just one.
 
It seems like a waste of money to go back to the old NA engines after all millions of pounds they've thrown at these engines. Couldn't the FIA just freeze most of the development on the energy recovery side and upgrade the size of the ICE to a V8?
 
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