yeah they also have 18k dollar oil pans

 

18k for a pan!? WTF? What is it made of! it cant be that thin. our motor which is nowhere near F1 sucked up our oil pan. The thing looked like a rib cage!

maybe you mean oil system? an 18k dry sump seems more believeable

 

2.4L F1 Motors would cause a few changes.....

You can either stick with the 300cc cylinders in a V8 arrangement which will have a shorter motor since it's a 90 deg V.

You could have a V10 but then you are narrowing the V angle of the motor back to 72 degs. Renault tried that wide angle V10 and the motor was junk, as soon as the went back to the traditional 72 Deg V in 2004 the car was much faster, same thing when they were fast before in the mid 90's with Schumacher.

More cylinders means a smaller piston and shorter stoke if you reduce the displacement, which would allow higher RPM. So who knows which way they will go. Obviously the smaller bore has the benefit of less piston mass but also less cylinder head breathing. Then again lower power levels seen with the less displacement can use a lighter piston too, so if they do lower the displacement we should see 19,000-20,000rpm motors in time easy.

Bret

 

no i mean for just the pan not the whole system

 

Ok but why? Who makes it?

I get why a Inconel set of headers is so much but not a $18K pan.

 

as far as i know, all those oil pands do is cover the crank and keep oil from dripping. Its a dry sump pan I've seen tons.

 

does this have to do with the stress on the crank? cause at those RPMs i can see the crank getting stretched. So wouldn't it be more efficient to get the V angle as small as possible without effecting the intaketoo much. cause with 10cyl i would think that they could change up the firing order and make the crank move like a wave and take advantage of it...then you could take the inner 4 main caps and instead of having them tight with bearings you could give them a 1/2 inch freespace for the radius allowing them to be in contact with the mains at high rpm. or how about removing those 4 mains all together. the main-less engine is this possible or am i insane?

 

Actually it a simple thing thats used in any V engine. The number of cylinders divides into 720 for a even firing order.

So you come out at 90 degs on a V8 and V16, 72 degs on a V10, 60 degs on a V12 and V6.

There are 90 deg V6's but they have even and odd fire cranks to keep the stress down.

The Renault F1 engine that was a wide angle had a very low center of gravity and it also had very bad crank harmonics that I don't think they could ever fix.

Bret

 

while were on the subject:
what makes an I6 so glorious? Why to the (cant think of the terms right now, i think turkey made me dumb) waves get cancled out.

 

I beleive Mr. Krause said somewhere that one of the cardindal rules of racing was to not run over your own crankshaft (when asked about a rediculious number for a stock motor to hold).

That rule follows the "make sure you have a crankshaft" rule


no mains? how do you plan on getting the crank in the engine

not exactly slip fit material there

 

there would be 2 mains, one on each end.

 

Don't know about "glorious" but an I6 is inherently balanced and has a main bearing on either side of every rod (except for older ones which didn't have 7 mains). They make pretty good production car/truck engines, but not so good racecar engines where packaging is an issue. A high CG hurts also.

The model T Ford had 3 mains, and a flimsy forged crank and about 20 hp at about 2000-2400 rpm. Guys still break these cranks. Flathead Ford V8 also had 3. Ol' Henry wasn't one to spend any money where he didn't have to.

77 you definitely want as many main bearings as you can fit in. The more mains the better for crankshaft bending control. Probably torsional bending is harder on a crank than "beaming", or bending due to power and inertia loads. With only 2 mains (vs 5 possible), the crank would have a VERY short life at any significant rpm. Shoot you'd probably have to use shorter compression height pistons in the 4 center cylinders of a V8 to keep the pistons from smacking the heads as the crank bent at higher rpm.

I'm not sure how the F1 guys deal with the uneven firing of their 90* and other non-72* spacing. IMO, the Renault 106-110* (whatever it actually was) was done for a lower CG and other packaging/aero/chassis reasons, and not for more power. I believe they had some intake runner/plenum issues because the banks were so far apart. The video at the beginning of this thread shows the newer engine with what looks like 72* V.

FWIW, "running over your own crank" often comes about because of block strength (or lack of same). Sometimes the whole, unbroken crank falls out.

 

You definitely have to finish to win! There is always a balance between weight/strength/cost/reliability that must be struck and there is a big role for "art" in all of this "science". If it all could be reduced to an equation, all the motors would be the same and "perfect". That is to say that they would blow up just as the car crossed the finish line. Of course, in that respect maybe those "low tech" fuel cars come closest to the ideal. While I know they rebuild F1 engines after each race, they are very reliable and always seem to have couple of extra laps in them when needed. I think a fuel car is really finished after a run. Another few revs, and a major "oil pan failure" would almost certainly occur.

I have been reading a book about the WWI naval battles between Englind and Germany. They had a different philosophy about dreadnought (giant armored battleship) construction. The Germans felt that the first rule of battleship design was to keep it floating, as a sunken ship couldn't fight! Accordingly, they built them with very thick (heavy) armor. This compromised the mass that could be devoted to armament and propulsion. So, they were slower and outgunned compared to comparable British ships. The Brits went for light armor and consequently their ships were more heavily armed, faster, and more manuverable. Even though they fought a climactic battle at Jutland in 1916 it was never clear who got it right. Too many variables involved.

This is only peripherally related to engine design, one just reminded me of the other. A street motor need to be like one of those German ships while a race car more like the British. Hmm, weren't Lotus race cars fast but flimsy? What about German race cars?

Rich

 

Great post!

Didn't the Brits get the Bismark because they hit the rudder and disabled her?

Yep, race engines need to get to the end of the race in one piece..plus a little extra for the burnout. It's the "One Horse Shay" theory of design. I believe Colin Chapman said something like "if a part doesn't break once in a while, it's too strong and probably too heavy."

Old German race cars were often complex to the extreme. Mark Donahue's book The Unfair Advantage has a couple of good chapters about working with Porsche, especially when he and Penske first met up with them.
It's a great read.

 

An F1 pan is probably 1) structural 2) heavily involved in the undercar aerodynamics and 3) made from unobtanium or other exotic material.

F1 engines seem to have five almost individual crankcases; each pair of cylinders has a bulkhead that extends to the bottom of the pan. Some of the techinques used to construct these pans are pretty much state of the art.

FWIW, my guess is that $18,000 for a F1 oil pan is WAY low, perhaps by an order of magnitude.