PAUL CROCK/AFP/Getty Images
“If I’m honest, these are the things that keep me up at night,” says Guy Lovett. Like most of today’s F1 paddock, Guy wasn’t following the Imola drama in 1985. “I was smashing models of those cars together on my mother’s floor, not considering the implications of their fuel design,” he laughs. Now Shell’s Technology Manager for Ferrari, Lovett has time to consider little else. Some 30 years after the dawn of F1’s first Turbo era, fuel engineers are scrambling to adjust contemporary gas to a very familiar formula.
“We’re going back to basics with fuel components. Fuel rules haven’t changed, but the appetite of the engine is quite different.”
Lovett’s enthusiasm is apparent, even over the phone. He talks about early testing on a single-cylinder slice of V6 F1 engine in Maranello. He talks about additives, how Shell and Ferrari have run an F1 car on retail gas. How his team reached its tentacles into Shell’s diesel development staff to better assess new technology. He talks about the places where Shell can sharpen their edge. “FIA dictates that we use 5.75% biofuel by mass. That’s an area that can be exploited. There’s so much happening in biofuels right now.”
Then he clams up. “I’d love to tell you exactly what we’re doing, but I just can’t.”
Fuel development wasn’t so different in the mid-1980s, though it was a little less practiced. It was in 1985 that the 1.5-liter twin-turbo V6s made the leap into insanity. Intriguing, then, that the specifications of today’s V6 racing engine are remarkably similar to the hairiest racing cars the world has ever seen.
In the 1980s, just like today, fuel was the answer to a host of problems. The blood running through the veins of volatile and consumptive things, creating an appropriate fuel became a project that could make or break a team. Just bring up the ‘80s to anyone with a passing interest in F1 fuels, and they’ll blurt out, “Rocket fuel.” Guy did.
“Rocket fuel,” for all intents and purposes, means toluene. It reeks like paint thinner and works well as such. More importantly, it has a superior energy density to gasoline, and it won’t cook a cancer in you like benzene. When F1 teams started adding rocket fuel to already-potent racing engines, turbo pressures started to increase and cars started to break dynos. And engines.
That fragile balance means that today, a running Turbo-era car is a rare find. Ask an owner. Michael Taggart has been trying to coax his Lotus into life for years. Best known for being the unruly predecessor of the 97T that would propel Senna to greatness, the Renault-powered Lotus 95T was so rudely unsuccessful that it famously prompted team boss Peter Warr to say driver Nigel Mansell would “... never win a Grand Prix as long as I have a hole in my arse."
Of course, he was wrong.
F1 cars of the mid-eighties were living, growing prototypes. Wings sprouted mid season and didn’t stop growing until the car was left to gather dust. New composite technology allowed for a light and stiff monocoque chassis and bodywork. Even the paint was designed for lightness, it’s thin, the gold has faded to a pale yellow now, and the ripple of Kevlar beneath is no less visible or tantalizing as it was in the 1980s. Mansell’s Lotus 95T pushed technology into an undrivable, unreliable future. Refined into the Lotus 97T and placed in the hands of Senna, that technology made a legend.
Chris Cantle
I went to Willow Springs to hear the Lotus
run. It’s a hell of a thing when it does. Taggart’s mechanic, an enormously
capable guy named Dean Sellars, has had to tinker the car into submission.
After an hour of fiddling and getting oil pressure up and checking computers,
the ignition is thrown and the engine lights. It barks loudly and never wants
to settle into an idle. There’s a hollowness, too, on top of the snarl. The car
laps the track maybe twice before the driver throws his hands up in
frustration. A wastegate is stuck open and the car is useless without forced
induction. We only get to hear the siren song of the little V6 for a minute,
but at full boil, the Renault engine is a dangerous thing, and it sounds like
it.
More time passes. The Lotus is fueled by commercial race gas, now. It’s been detuned from it’s wicked 1000+ dyno-melting horsepower to something manageable. It might have been tempered, but it’s still ill-tempered. When the sun sets we’re hot and frustrated, and we wind up drinking cognac out of mugs, and then the bottle, at the top of Turn 3.
The first test of the F1 season made our session at Willow Springs look like a picnic.
We’ve been blessed by years of shockingly reliable engines in F1. All that might change this weekend. Despite the incredible investment in science and technology, the computer modeling, and the single-cylinder test engines, racing is still a risky thing.
If all goes according
to plan, we’ll never see the result of Lovett’s hard work. An F1 fueling rig
will invisibly and almost instantly pump 100 kg of gas, chilled 10 degrees
centigrade under ambient air temperature, and we won’t see a drop. This
weekend, Ferrari’s 2015 F1 car will be exploding a cocktail that began
development more than a year ago and has been designed, engineered, studied,
tested, and tweaked by a team of more than 100 people at facilities across the
globe.
Things have changed so dramatically in F1.
Teams are restricted to a fuel that is, fundamentally, a superbly tuned
gasoline. No more tricky lead and manganese additives. Toluene is long gone.
Lovett tells me that the gasoline going into an F1 car shares about 99% of the
same chemical components as retail fuel. The FIA samples and tests fuel
constantly to be sure, and that means Lovett’s trackside team of six has to do
the same, running their creation through their own gas chromatography lab.
Research, refine, research, refine, and
then finally… race. That cocktail would smell familiar to any of those drivers
at Imola 29 years ago.
source: http://www.roadandtrack.com/features/web-originals/the-invisible-blood-of-f1?src=soc_fcbksBy Chris Cantle March 15, 2014 / Photos by Getty Images
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