High revving engines - endurance

[hansforum]

Hi!

Can someone explan why F1 engines break after only few hundred miles, I mean what parts are the weakest link and why do they fail? What is the most often reason they broke?

I read that some civil sport car engines (Audi R8 V10 for example) have average piston speed higher than F1 engine. Why don't they break so fast?

Thanks!

 

[dgallup]

Up to a point. The old days of Colin Chapman's ideal race car disintegrating as it crosses the finish line are gone. With the minimum weight limits, crash test requirements, RPM limits, 6 engines for the entire season, and other rules they can't design quite on the razor thin edge they used to when you had engines that only had to last a qualifying session.

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[Lou Scannon]

Not just raw power either, but power with some flexibility (which has to do with the useful rpm range). The mission has changed slightly, but I doubt the current F1 engines are any more over-designed for today's mission than Colin Chapman's were for theirs.

 

[140Airpower]

It is interesting to compare current F1 engineering to Colin Chapman's "ideal". In Chapman's day it was not possible to actually achieve the minimum racecar that would disintegrate at the end of the race,... with reliability. The effort to so resulted in a high failure rate short of the finish line. Most recently in F1 the reliability has been at an astoundingly high level by historic standards. Important in that has been the requirement that engines last very much longer than they traditionally did. It is ironic that it seems to have been much easier to design an engine to last several race weekends than to last for just one race. Backing off a little from the quest for "the maximum for the minimum" yields excellent reliability.

 

[Lou Scannon]

140Airpower, I haven't studied the statistics, and I'm not sure what an appropriate comparison would be, since the F1 engine's mission is different, between the old days and today. But with modern design and validation techniques, it stands to reason that there would be relatively fewer raceday failures now compared to yesteryear.