No, in the same way that noone cares about Honda engines that power IRL/CART. If there is no competition, it might as well be an unmarked engine. Ferrari will not make money on their A1GP deal beyond the cost teams pay to buy them. In that situation, Ferrari only has to design and maintain a single engine spec, so they don’t have the development/upkeep costs to account for.

How about just fixing the amount of fuel the cars can use and then fixing the price of customer engines over a season.

The airbox exists to achieve what is known as volumetric efficiency, it is not about getting higher pressure air into the cylinders as some motorbikes do.

Your physics is a bit out. Power is a derived quantity – it doesn’t exist and hence cannot be measured directly (this is probably surprising to you).

The combustion of the fuel generates pressure on the piston, which is a force. The crankshaft turns this into a rotation force, i.e. torque. To calculate the power from the torque value you just need the angular velocity in radians per second.

Being in Australia I work in metric, so I’ll use it as an example. If we assume that an F1 engine produces a maximum torque of 300 Nm then to calculate the power you multiply 300 by the rpm, divide by 60 to convert to seconds rather than minutes and then multiply by 2 x Pi to get radians. Therefore if maximum torque is at 16000 rpm then the power at 16000 rpm is 502 kW (674 hp). To get 750 hp at 18000 rpm the engine needs to produce 297 Nm at 18000 rpm.

Power is important in terms of overcoming aerodynamic drag. To double a car’s top speed you’d need eight times the power. The benefit of KERS, if only used for top speed (which it isn’t) would give a 3.5 per cent increase in top speed.

So to get back to your question about the advantage the Mercedes-Benz engine has, to have more power it must produce more torque at the point of maximum power. The torque across the working range of the engine is what determines the acceleration for a fixed weight, gearing, aerodynamic drag and tyre rolling resistance.

According to Autocourse a couple of years ago, a key problem with the Renault compared to the best engines was that it lacked lower-rpm torque. The maximum power was okay so the top speed was reasonable, but the acceleration was always behind.

Power gets quoted because people think they understand it when, in most cases, largely they don’t. A Sydney newspaper like calling torque ‘pulling power’.

A final thing on engines: for a fixed engine capacity, long stroke designs do not help the production of torque, despite what is commonly stated in magazines by journalists. The piston area and the stroke multiply together to give the engine capacity and these cancel each other out in the production of torque. Long-stroke designs inhibit power as the internal friction limits the maximum rpm. Therefore the engines with long strokes are often tuned to produce more torque.

Hope this helps your understanding of engines.

Cheers,

Martin

That said, F1 is all about different constructors. It can’t be like A1GP where all the engines are the same. Whilst this would sort the wheat from the chaff in terms of who’s the best driver, teams wouldn’t be teams anymore….