| The problem with race-level fuel restriction is you get drivers managing their pace over the course of the race, which can lead to strategies that people find boring. Or worse, the fastest driver running out of fuel just before the end. It was one of the complaints about Group C prototype racing, although that turned out alright over all, with some help from the comparatively long race format. The "best" system would be to use a fuel flow restriction — X g/s of fuel, with the usual restrictions on fuel composition. The designer's job is then to extract the max usable power from the chemical energy in the fuel. This would make for really exciting development and diversity, and make F1 development a true laboratory for other transportation and power production contexts. It would also be prohibitively expensive and probably result in one manufacturer in a walkover for a while, until others could switch architectures. Experimenting with different architectures is a huge money pit, and is why the prescriptions for 10 and 8 cylinders were in the last couple sets of regulations. Just working out the competitiveness of V12 vs V10 vs V8 was getting unreasonable, let alone dealing with different hybrid setups on top of that. It is also my understanding that the accuracy of fuel flow meters has not been considered good enough to provide adequate parity in a racing environment, when fractions of a percent can mean the difference between winning and losing. The new F1 rules do include fuel flow metering, although it is based on kg/h and I don't know what kind of spiking is permissible. The regulations are as detailed as they are, with specifications for power transfer among components, etc. to spare teams the expense of experimenting there and to give them targets to optimize for. See jdietrich's comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6952583 It is pretty discouraging with respect to the purity of the formula, but it's kind of a fact of life. And I think the development of turbocompounding and pre-spooling turbos with electrically stored energy to avoid lag is really exciting, and the future of combustion power on the road. |