But the final part of the visit was forward looking, with an eye to 2014 and we got a sneak peak at what lies ahead as the engine builders prepare to run prototypes of the new engine on the dyno for the first time in 2012.

The new generation of F1 engines for 2014 are small capacity single turbo V6 engines. They will turn the page as far as engine technology is concerned and will re-introduce engines as performance differentiators, at least to start with.

However great care has been taken by both the FIA, the manufacturers and the teams to ensure that the new engine formula doesn’t turn into a spending war. Many areas of the engine architecture are fixed, such as the bore size, the crankshaft height, the single turbo and so on. The key to building a great engine rather than just a good one will be getting power from the given fuel flow.

“The engines are high revving. You don’t get the maximum fuel flow rate until you are above 10,500rpm, and the maximum revs are at 15,000rpm, ” Mercedes engine chief Andy Cowell explained.

The regulations are aimed at reducing fuel consumption, with savings of 35% on the current fuel usage, which will save around 55kg of fuel per car per race. But the rules also allow the engineers some freedom to innovate, with certain key parameters controlled, which seems like a good compromise. Another important point is that with the engine architecture fixed, it’s easy for teams to switch from one manufacturer to another if they find they aren’t competitive. This will keep the engine builders on their toes.

KERS will be dropped in favour of ERS, which will store and inject 120kW of power back into the engine, which will make a huge difference. Whereas KERS isn’t that noticeable, ERS will make a very significant difference to lap time. Heat recovery from the exhaust is part of a system which will harvest five times the energy KERS does currently. And when the car is running in the pit lane, the car will run on electric power only.

As for many fans’ fears that the sound will be disappointing, Cowell disagrees. With a rev limit of 15,000 the engines will scream and with
six exhaust pipes going into one turbocharger Cowell believes it will sound “very nice.” He’ll find out soon as Mercedes are shaping up to do their first run on the dyno in the coming months.

Many engineers I’ve spoken to are rejoicing, because they feel that at last there is clarity on exhausts having an aerodynamic effect by continuing to blow over aerodynamic surfaces while the car is in corners. The feeling is they can all get on with designing a nice F1 car for next year, without worrying about how engine modes are going to factor into the aerodynamics.

Blown diffusers are already banned from next year, with exhausts set to exit above the engine cover, but the designers were still going to find ways to get the exhausts to blow across the lower element of the rear wing to generate extra downforce in the corners and now it looks like all exhausts will be allowed to do is blow out gas at high pressure when the driver has his foot on the throttle.

Whiting tried this summer to do something about engine maps and blown diffusers, but it got a bit diluted after Renault and Red Bull complained that it would affect their reliability. The situation evolved, via a messy one off arrangement at Silverstone, and ended up with a compromise, which was in the best interests of getting through the season.

But now a new wording has gone out for next year, which apparently simplifies things. Let’s hope it sticks.

It really has been amazing how much downforce the blown diffusers have generated, as the teams have perfected them; probably 20% more than was envisaged by Pirelli when they designed their tyres and certainly more than enough to take the cars back to and beyond the levels of downforce in the double diffuser days.

Meanwhile Mercedes have got everyone talking with what amounts to an F Duct front wing, which takes in air through the nose of the car and blows it out across the plane of the wing.

Other teams are not clear on the benefits of this line of development and may not leap in to copy Mercedes.

Interestingly, on the subject of front wings, what some teams have found recently is that, with the soft rubber from which Pirelli is making tyres, the “marbles”, or bits of loose rubber that shred off the tyres are forming in clumps in the gaps between the elements of the front wing, causing a loss of several points of downforce.

One of the Ferraris was running an engine that had already done one race weekend and the other had a two race old engine, according to Luigi Fraboni, who is head of Ferrari’s engine operations side and formerly the engine engineer for Schumacher and Raikkonen.

At this late stage of the season, keeping the engines healthy is therefore pretty important – a bit like keeping the driver healthy. Singapore presents other challenges, like the heat and humidity, which make cooling a challenge. Fraboni said that 5% of the engine power is lost due to the sweltering conditions. This is one of the worst power loss figures of the season, after Nurburgring and Interlagos which are at altitude.

A few of us were invited behind the scenes over the weekend by Shell and Ferrari to see how they manage the engine health process at this key stage in the season.

Out on track the engine’s health is analysed in real time by telemetry engineers when the car is running, but after each session the Shell technicians take a sample of the oil and test for a range of 15 different metals, to see what the wear rate is like.

We were invited to try this machine out for ourselves and found, as expected, that wear is highest in higher mileage engines, but to our surprise we also found that the wear rate of brand new engines is high, as the new parts rub against each other and ‘bed in’. You find higher levels of Aluminium in the oil on a new engine, for example, but this should reduce as the engine beds in.

The particles of metal get into the oil when the engine runs and then by firing electric currents through the oil sample, the Shell engineers can pick out the amounts of each metal and see if an engine is about to fail.

They set the measured amount against the predicted amount and any anomalies are studied carefully. The value of the track lab comes in comparing what you see with what you know about the engine.

At this stage of the season, with a high mileage engine such as they used in Singapore, this is really important because it’s a big call to tell Ferrari that they need to change a drivers’ engine after qualifying, meaning he’ll take a 10 place grid drop. But better to do that than have it fail in the race.

Of course this year’s championship is one sided and Ferrari aren’t in it, so the pressure is less. But at this stage last season, with Alonso in a position to win races and challenge for the title, tests like the ones we did on the Singapore oil carry great significance and responsibility.

Another key point is that when you are trying to get three Grand Prix distances and three qualifying sessions out of an engine, as Ferrari did this weekend, plus some Friday practice sessions in later races, you want to lose as little power in the later stages of its life as possible.

We saw the difference it makes using fuels with cleaning and friction reduction components blended in, both of which are in the Shell V Power fuels used by Ferrari. Any build up on deposits on the valves, for example, will reduce performance and take away power, as you can see quite graphically from a valve which has been running V Power and one which hasn’t. This technology has been around for a few years now to the extent they’ve taken it across to their road car fuels.

An interesting point I had not realised was that the F1 fuel blenders can adjust the fuel to give better fuel consumption and this is something that they had done with the fuel for Singapore. Singapore is one of the heaviest fuel consumption races of the season, so any help that can be given there will lighten the fuel load that the car has to carry at the start. It’s only a small difference, but every little helps.

Of course the fuel always has to match the sample given by the fuel company to the FIA, but again what I had not realised was that they can keep changing that sample all the time, as long as they provide a sample of a new blend to the FIA ahead of the race weekend and it is passed for use.

But again they have to be careful – fuel can get contaminated by things like the grease on a glove and that is enough to fail the FIA test. So Shell have a space in their Track Lab to analyse it before and after each track session to make sure it complies. Getting disqualified for having the wrong fuel fingerprint would be a really soft way to lose a race weekend.

In a unique face to face meeting, US and Canadian F1 Fans were given the chance to set the agenda and give their points of view.

This clip starts with a fan, Tristan Baker, asking the team bosses what they say to fans who do not like the idea of the proposed 4 cylinder turbo engines for 2013.

Watch the video then leave your comment below and please vote in the poll.

2013 has been a key date on the horizon for some time as it offers the sport a massive opportunity, one it cannot really afford to squander. It amounts to a chance to reshape F1 to be exactly what it needs to be to set itself up for a bright future as both thrilling to watch and relevant to the road car industry and to society in general.

F1 cars will change dramatically in 2013 (Darren Heath)

The current Concorde Agreement expires at the end of 2012 and at the same time the engine formula is due for renewal, away from high powered 2.4 litre V8s towards something more sustainable.

Although a current F1 engine’s ratio of power produced for amount of fuel is allegedly better than a Toyota Prius, to continue down the path of burning up 150 kilos of fuel per car per Grand Prix race, let alone what is used in practice and qualifying, is clearly not sustainable. Of course the real environmental impact of F1 is in the air travel and logistics sending people and freight around the world to 19 Grands Prix and in spectators driving to circuits. But that is broadly the same for any world class event.

F1 can send out the right signals from 2013 onwards by changing the formula. The name of the game now is making the engines more fuel efficient, by harvesting waste energies and changing the aerodynamics accordingly. The key to the 2013 changes is to control the engines by means of regulating how much fuel they can use and regulate the fuel flow.

The moment you do that you are obliged to reduce the drag from the car and that means smaller wings and different floor. At the same time this should make them more exciting to watch as the overtaking opportunities will improve. Overtaking should also be helped by the significant power boost which will come from the energy regeneration systems. We are talking about a boost worth something like 20% of additional power for 20 seconds or more.

Working groups from teams, engine makers and the FIA have been looking at this. On the FIA’s side Gilles Simon, formerly with Peugeot and Ferrari, has been brought in by Jean Todt to oversee this important transition. And the plans are beginning to take shape. The engine will be smaller capacity, 1.6 litre turbos, with plenty of energy regeneration, far more than in F1′s rather half hearted first attempt at KERS last year.

The changes to the engine will mean that the aerodynamics will have to change because if you are regulating the fuel flow, you have to reduce the drag of the cars. There has been talk of going back to a ground effect, in other words deriving more of the downforce from the floor of the car, rather than the wings,

“Any freedom to make the cars have a shaped underside will make them less set-up sensitive so easier to engineer and drive,” says Frank Dernie, a veteran of the ground effect days of the early 1980s. “I would personally be grateful for any freedom to make the underside of the cars less awful and think it can only be an improvement to do so. If we get more ground effect and smaller wings the engine will need to be a fair bit less powerful…”

I’m quite excited about the prospects for these changes and once we get some more clarification I’ll look at organising a fan discussion on 2013, with some engineers to help decode how it will work.

In the meantime, I’ve posted a video at the bottom of this post, of an interview I did a while back with Cosworth CEO Tim Routsis. It was primarily about how Cosworth has diversified as a business into new fields like military applications, clean air technology, but the second part of it, (starting at 2m 22s) is a very interesting take on the 2013 rules and what kind of engine and chassis F1 is heading for.

The Mercedes, Ferrari and Renault engines will all be as they were in 2009. The V8 engines in use in F1 at the moment are all frozen in specification, with no performance developments allowed. However manufacturers are allowed to request changes in the interests of reliability.

In that process, some changes were made which definitely improved performance, so by the end of 2008 there was quite a difference in performance between the best and worst performing engines.

The FIA ruled that Renault, which had been left behind, would be allowed to retune its engine to bring it up to the level of the others.

This season the same thing happened again. According to analysis we ran on this site in November, the spread of engine power from the best to the worst engines this year was around 2.5%. This means that, if the Mercedes is believed to have had 755hp, the least powerful engine was 18hp down, which is worth just under 3/10ths of a second per lap.

This time the FIA proposed that if the teams were unhappy then they should sort it out themselves, but it could only be on the basis of the best engine being detuned. Mercedes were very unhappy with this and there was some scepticism about the whether the Renault was as down on power as it was being suggested, especially as Red Bull won six races. After extensive discussions got nowhere, the FIA is believed to have ruled that the engines will stay as they are with no re-tuning.

It is worth remembering that “equivalence” isn’t actully required in the rules, just no performance development. So getting exactly equal engines is not something the FIA has to be seen to pursue.

Red Bull were keen on a move to Mercedes power for 2010, but met with resistance from McLaren and Brawn and also from powerful voices within Red Bull itself. So they will remain with Renault. But this is no bad thing; it is worth remembering that they won the last three races of last season, so the engine clearly wasn’t struggling.

And perhaps more important, performance isn’t going to be the holy grail in races this season; fuel efficiency is, due to the new rule outlawing refuelling. The Renault is the most fuel efficient engine in the field, so the Red Bull team can budget for a smaller fuel tank, which improves weight distribution and aerodynamics and they will carry a lighter fuel load at the start of the race. Every 3 kilos of fuel they carry less than their rivals will help them by a tenth of a second per lap. That could be decisive this year.

Adrian Newey said today that McLaren and Brawn blocked RBR from having the Mercedes engines. The team also evaluated Cosworth. But I have a feeling that they will do just fine with the Renault this year.

This story has been written in response to a number of questions posted on the site by readers wanting to know what’s going on with equalising engines. Thanks to them for suggesting it.

Very good, now please knock 30hp off

This was graphically demonstrated at the last two Grands Prix, where the Toyota looked the worst but even the Renault was well short of the Mercedes. I’ve heard estimates of a 20-30hp advantage for Mercedes over Toyota.

The FIA says that “should the teams wish to eliminate this performance differential, they may be allowed to do so by reducing the performance of the more powerful engines. However, no engine upgrades will be allowed.”

Last year the weakest engines were the Renault and the Honda and they were told that they could bring their power levels up to the others, which Renault did. But this year two key factors are different.

First FOTA has well and truly made its mark on F1, through the breakaway threat, and the teams were effectively allowed to come up with their own rules package, following the meeting after Silverstone at which the breakaway and the budget cap were shelved.

So the FIA is tossing this issue back to FOTA and saying that its up to them to sort it out between them. As this issue is a possible fault line between FOTA members, it provides them with a test. The twist is that the best must lower its standards, which is not the F1 way, and it is asking a lot of Mercedes and Ferrari, both of whom are keen to get back to the front of the grid in 2010 with their works teams after an embarrassing season. They owe it to their fans and their sponsors to be competitive next season and voluntarily knocking 20hp – worth 2/10ths of a second at most tracks- makes that challenge greater, especially with the cars being so close on performance. FOTA wants unity and harmony between competitors, but the engine builders will not want to show their performance figures to their rivals, so it’s going to be a thorny one to resolve.

But the other factor which has changed since this time last year is the return of Cosworth, which will power the four new teams (or at least three of them depending on what USF1 decides to do). As the Cosworth is based on a 2006 design, and the FIA originally wanted it to be allowed to run at 20,000 revs, the feeling in the paddock is that the engine will be some way off the power of the best engine.

Every little helps and knocking 20-30hp off the Mercedes will help to reduce the gap to the back of the grid teams.

Cosworth insist that their engine is at least a match for the Renault and Toyota and maybe even the Ferrari, as managing director Tim Routsis told me that computer simulations show that the results of the races in the first half of the season would have been the same if the front runners had been using Cosworths, based on the performance figures they have.

We will see in the New Year, when the new teams hit the track alongside the existing teams. But the FIA will not want the new teams to be well off the pace, so the engine downgrade is very much in their interests too.

Senna says he is more hopeful of getting an F1 seat next year as there are more opportunities than there were this year.

With just over two months to go until the inaugural Grand Prix in Abu Dhabi, Senna was able to drive the track in a 4×4 road car and get an impression of what kind of track it is and which of the current F1 teams it will favour, bearing in mind that the season finale could be the decisive race in the championship. His answer may surprise you.

Is spoke to him on the phone today and I thought I would share his thoughts with you:

What do you think of the track?
It’s impressive, different from anything seen before. The nearest is probably Shanghai in terms of how well planned and laid out it is, but this place is on another level. Many of the solutions of this track are interesting.

Such as?
Well the pit lane exit, which is a tunnel, for example. That is more than a bit interesting. The pit speed limit line is before it so they will be racing through the tunnel. It’s quite narrow, not as narrow as the exit in Valencia, but still narrow and it exits onto the high speed Turn 3, mind you the cars exiting the pits will be going quite quickly by then. Also something I’ve never seen before is the run off area for Turn 7 is underneath the grandstand!

Any other surprises?
It’s not as flat as I thought it would be. They’ve moved earth around to make some elevation changes. This gives some really nice blind corners. There is a nice mix of corners, some fast corners, the ones around the marina are off camber.

It will be really hard to get a good compromise on the set up, especially the aero balance. It’s the kind of track where the car will feel really oversteery. The majority of the corner are tight, so a good front end will be very important. It has a very long straight, the longest in F1 at 1.2 km with a first gear corner going onto it and at the end of it. To me this looks like a real KERS track. As for set up, you’d go for a medium to high downforce set up, something like you would use at Magny Cours.

Which bits do you like the most?
The first complex of corners, turns 1, 2 and 3 are really nice, fast sweeps. It’s very cool, they are blind corners and the exit of turn 3 is downhill. Then turns 14 and 15 are really cool fast right handed corners, where the wall is quite close.

How is the Marina? Is it more Monaco than Valencia?
Yes it will be like Monaco when the boats are in there, but it’s much more modern than Monaco, the architecture is much more modern. There are some beautiful buildings here, like the Shams Tower, and the hotel which is like a bridge over the circuit.

Will it be more of a Brawn circuit or a Red Bull circuit?
“It’s a KERS circuit!”

What are your chances of a race seat looking like for next year?
” There are more opportunities for next year than there were for this. I’m talking to some teams, the odds are looking better for next year.”