Honda releases audio sample of 2015 engine noise

2015 F1 season

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http://youtu.be/431h20gvm3M

Honda has given a foretaste of what its V6 turbo engine will sound like when it makes its Formula One comeback with McLaren in 2015.

The Japanese engine manufacturer has released a sample audio clip of its engine being revved.

Honda will base its European racing operations at Milton Keynes and begin work there in June next year.

Honda Motor Europe president Manabu Nishimae said: “It’s exciting to hear the cry of our new born Formula One engine for the first time.”

“Our engineers are working hard to develop the engine and we are all looking forward to the start of the 2015 season.”

Mercedes earlier gave a preview of the sound of their engine built to the new-for-2014 rules.

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Keith Collantine
Lifelong motor sport fan Keith set up RaceFans in 2005 - when it was originally called F1 Fanatic. Having previously worked as a motoring...

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65 comments on “Honda releases audio sample of 2015 engine noise”

  1. Better than expected. And will be even better in the real world.

    1. Sounds like a hoover. It’s ‘better than expected’, sure. Doesn’t mean its any good though. What we have now is awful, this is worse.

    2. I’m sitting at the end of pit straight next year in Melbourne so I’ll let you know!
      I kind of like it, sounds like the early 90’s Turbo era a little bit, but with a bit less “oomph”. I’m guessing it will be similar to the early 00’s Indy Cars – they weren’t as loud as F1 and tonally you could hear the difference in the engines.

    3. Yes but I think we were slowly used to the decrease of cylinder in f1, I certainly don’t like the current ones so this sounds ok but the V12 of the 412T2 is amazing and so were all of the subsequent V10s and also the downshift sounds that were very mechanical.

  2. Like I said in the topic I made about it in the forums here, sounds great! Better than the current V8 engines, which produce a pretty terrible sound in my opinion. The only reason people like the sound of the V8 is because it is LOUD. I have a hard time believing anyone saying they really think the rev-limited V8 sounds beautiful. I really like the V6, sounds like a proper engine again!

    1. Have you ever attended a f1 event in recent years?

      1. @alfa145 Been to Spa in August. So? It was amazing and hearing how loud the engines actually are was amazing, the sheer volume just can not be experienced if you haven’t attended a race live. However, it’s not a beautiful sound. Unlike the V10, which almost had a melody to it.

        1. good point, until you say thr v6 sounds better to you, more like an engine.. I don’t get that, the v8 are still crazy stuff, the noise is still insane, still f1 territory. with this v6 don’t you think f1 is going backwards to earth even more, after dropping v10 and v12? I mean, becoming too normal instead of remaining pure crazyness, the most sublime extreme and pure form of motorsport?

          1. @alfa145 the problem with the perpetuation of thought is the general assumption that anything smaller than 10 cylinders is sacrilege in F1, V6’s can be crazy too. The issue that many people have is that bigger is better for one, and that if bigger were allowed some how the FIA wouldn’t Sterilize those configurations like they’ve done with the V8 and V6t already.

            Also it’s sad that people see this as a step backwards, why? Formula is suppose to have some real world advancement and it could with the regulations they are soon to impose for the next few years, but probably not on the level LM is going to be at next year alone.

    2. Many would kill me for saying this, but I reckon this would sound better if it was topped at 12k RPM. A high-pitched turbo is not very nice, IMO. Still I agree, it is quite better than what we have now, but waaaaay behind V10s. Not to mention V12s, heh.

      1. @carlitox perhaps so, but I hate to think an engine is being covered by an electronic cap and not it’s physical limitations. So I don’t like rev limiters in any circumstance: if the engine can do more, let it I say!

  3. I keep hearing people go on about how the new engine’s don’t sound like a racing/F1 engine’, But what does a race engine sound like?

    Is it the current V8’s?
    V10s?
    V12’s?
    The various turbo configurations from the 80s?
    The Ford DFV of the 70s?
    The 1.5ltr engines of the 60s?
    The Supercharged engine’s of the Pre-war era?
    The H16 BRM?

    The F1 engine regulations have changed a dozen times over the years, There has been hundreds…If not thousands of different sounds over that time so exactly which one is what an F1 car should sound like, How exactly should a race engine sound?
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formula_One_engines

    The new power units sound fine to me, They sound racey enough & will no doubt be fast, powerful & produce good & exciting racing & that is what a race engine should do.

    1. I see your point, that and F1 engine has never sounded like one thing, and agree that there is an uptick in the shrill whine about the death of the legacy, and hate for all things new.

      I cannot, however, say that the new engine sound has filled me with excitement like the banshee tone of a V12, the rending of time and space invoked by the Turbo’s of the 80s, nor the earth shattering rumble of the Supercharged Pre-war designs.

      This new one is not a sound that imparts a vision of power. To me, it is more of a hairdryer with a variable switch, a playing card stuck in the exercise wheel of a lab rat in a cocaine experiment, entirely too much like a shrill whine.

    2. The BRM 16cyl was nasty. But I don’t mind this sound… Also the sound is quite baffled with respect to what it will sound like in ‘open air’

    3. Dizzy. Comment of the day for me.

      Brilliantly put.

    4. The difference is they never really sounded like downgrades until the V8s. The V8s never sounded like F1 to me.

  4. I’m not a fan of these audio clips personally as I think they just give fuel to the doomsdayer’s fires for the engines clearly do not sound their best on a test bench, with the exhaust being forced out and the sound itself reverberating on the wall surfaces. Without a race exhaust and open air, I don’t think audio clips do the sound justice.

    That said, I think these engines will sound great once they are raced for the first time: still not as good as the heavenly V10’s, but better than the V8’s absolutely. I am certain they won’t sound like vacuum cleaners in the Ardennes!

    1. Yeah but so does everything and then when it’s actually released if it slouches even a tiny bit people hate anyway. I think it’s good big companies like this give us content, it kind of shows off how excited they are about their own projects and that they can’t leave people in the dark until the very last minute.

      1. @kartingjimbo true, but they usually only serve to instil doubt over how good the engines actually sound!

    2. Not to mention the fact that the audio signature of the engines has probably been manipulated prior to release to make it harder for rival outfits to carry out an audio analysis and work out the performance characteristics of the engine.

      1. Never thought I would say this… but Anon’s comment makes sense :)

  5. “I keep hearing people go on about how the new engine’s don’t sound like a racing/F1 engine’, But what does a race engine sound like?”

    Easy question, it sounds like a screaming daemon, revving at 20.000 RPM as it approaches the old Bus stop on Spa, instantly telling you that you’d better get those ear plugs back in right now or this will have an impact; immediately followed by a series of crazy loud explosions that you can feel in your chest from 50 meters away as the engine and gear box are slammed down through the gears forcing the engine to max RPM each time. The brake discs goes from not visible to glowing brightly red in an instant and at the end the car comes almost sideways into the pits while the driver struggles to keep it straight at the end of his training pass…

    1. But that’s just a personnel opinion which is kind of the point I was getting at.
      Everyone has there own ideal of how things should sound, Usually based on how things sounded ‘back in the day’ because often people don’t know any different.

      In the 40+yrs I’ve followed F1 I’ve heard dozens of different sounds from dozens of different engines so for me there is no ‘how it should sound’ there is only ‘a sound’ & that sound is a race engine that’s both fast & powerful.
      The 10’s sounded like that as did the V8’s & so will the V6’s.

      1. “Eye of the beholder”, you can reduce everything to that.

        It’s not the end of the world that engines are dumbed down and held well below their actual redline, but its not the sound of development, of struggling to get the last juice out of every cubic cm. You instantly knew that those engines wasn’t noisy because of boys will be boys, but simply because that was the best way, an f1 engine is noisy beyond fun.

        To me the new ones sounds muffled; And they are.

    2. @tvm I quite liked the idea of CVT’s, actually. That way you are literally pushing the engine to the absolute peak of it’s performance all the time: it is happiest when it is at the optimal fuel usage/distance travelled ratio: i.e, converting as much chemical energy as possible into kinetic energy. So I always thought it would have been awesome seeing cars – still at pretty much full revs – charging into corners!

  6. David not Coulthard (@)
    18th October 2013, 16:04

    Assuming that the above video is the one in the forums, I’d say that we’ve now got a proper sound again.

    To me a “proper” sound is either a pre-MMVI V10 or a Matra V12esque thingie. I think the V6 is a lot of the latter, or at least it sounds like old engines.

    Let’s hope it stays that way, albeit a bit improved, once the put the exhaust on!

    1. David not Coulthard (@)
      18th October 2013, 16:04

      once they out the exhaust on!

      1. David not Coulthard (@)
        18th October 2013, 16:05

        once they put the exhaust on!

  7. I just heard the V10 renault 2006 . And wow , I must say this sounds too much under powered in comparison to the scream of the V10 . Anyhow , we can’t judge whether it is too bad or not until it goes out on track .I personally am bothered more about the racing in 2014 than the sounds ( It’s not as if we are racing electric cars , there will be a roar of an engine )

    1. Of course it sounds underpowered. These V6s are generating 200-300bhp less than the V10s.

      1. It’s not necessarily the “underpowered” that effects the sound (although that is contributing factor), it is mainly the exhaust energy that is used and to spin the turbine. The energy from the Exhaust pressure and subsequently sound pressure and intenity level are converted.

  8. Not too bad, wait and s… hear :-)

    Anyway, it’s impossible to listen a sample on the internet and compare it with the real sound: and when I say ‘real’, I mean on the track, with the car 10m from you.
    Anyone who went on location to a F1 Grand Prix knows what I mean: it’s like comparing the sound of thunder on your TV and when the thunder strikes the ground 100m from you. There is no comparison.

    I’m quite confident the turbo engines will be impressive to listen ‘live’, like the V8 are today. Different, but still impressive.

  9. Milton Keynes, eh? Let the conspiracy theories commence! ;-)

  10. Unlike the shrieking V8s, I’m beginning to have a hope that the slightly muted and lower revving turbo engines might have a discernible difference in engine note between manufacturers.

  11. We had small capacity turbo engines in the 1980s & I don’t remember anybody whining about how rubbish they sounded & how F1 needed to go back non turbo engines.

    the honda turbo ayrton senna drove was a 1.5ltr V6 & that sounded good-
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcmKJ5MhDh8

    ferrari v6 turbo from 1080s-
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-npEh41xiU

    the indycar series use v6 turbo engines now & they sound very nice-
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inHtSQv8iS4
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3YuSPTVB2Q

    1. i disagree about the indy car engines, i think they sound weak and pitiful compared to the engines Champ Car/CART used

  12. Sounds good, but… limited.

    There’s no rage, no feel that “this is the very very limit of what’s phisically possible”.

    I hate rev limiters.

  13. you can really tell its being fed through one pipe not two. shame

  14. I don’t care how it sounds as long as the cars are fast.

    Anyway, if you want a proper noise you need rotors, not pistons ;)

    1. @mazdachris

      Rotors but no pistons… a helicopter? :P

        1. I don’t like the sound of rotary engines actually: I always think they sound almost as if they aren’t revving correctly – the noise seems dampened.

    2. “proper noise” ?!? What’s that supposed to mean, piston engines are fake (fake sound) or what ??

      1. It’s a phrase you might use to humorously convey your preference for one type of sound over another. You can tell this comment was humorous because I used the universal symbol for playful, non-serious comments – ;)

        Of course I suppose it’s possible you are new to the internet and were unaware of the meaning of this symbol, in which case I suppose your earnest incredulity is not entirely without explanation.

        Hopefully you’ll understand next time you see it.

        “;)”

  15. OmarR-Pepper (@)
    18th October 2013, 17:10

    Hey, turn off the blender…

  16. nobody seems to care about that they ALREADY fired the engine on? For how long have been Honda working on this engine?.

    1. Honda have a V6 Turbo in Indycar so maybe they have simply used that angine as a base.

      Alternatively they could have been working on this since the regulations were announced, They were after all in the initial meetings that helped shape the new engine rules.

  17. Wow, that came fast from Honda, I thought their engine development had not started yet… But its strange that Ferrari have yet to reveal a glimpse or audio of theirs

    1. Save the bast ’till last ;)

      Actually, yeah, it is a little worrying, but hopefully they know what they’re doing!

  18. Im going to be honest and say…this engine sounds like a 4hp chainsaw :|, and yes i am a mclaren fan…

  19. As if the vacuum cleaner was not enough, Honda now dreams to power blenders too. And why Milton Keynes, why not Woking?

    1. They are trying to steal ideas from Red Bull and feed them into McLaren!

      1. Lol @strontium: that’s quite funny – explains how they got Peter Prodromou!

    2. That is quite easy to answer – for a start, Honda already own the facility in Milton Keynes (it was their base of operations when they worked with Jordan, although it was mothballed when they switched their operations to Brackley), so it would be a lot cheaper to reuse an old facility rather than building a new one from scratch.

      Asides from that, there is the advantage that Milton Keynes is in closer proximity to the production and research centres of most of the major component suppliers in F1 than Woking, which is another major attraction.

      Mahle Powertrain, who offer their expertise in high precision engine components (Mercedes, Cosworth, BMW, Renault and Ferrari all used, or continue to use, pistons manufactured by Mahle) is one such example – they have a major R&D and manufacturing centre about 20 miles away in Northampton.
      There are other important component suppliers who are based close to Milton Keynes – Bosch, for example, are based in St Neots (about 40 miles away), NGK (who supply spark plugs and related electrical components) are based in Hemel Hempstead (also about 40 miles away) and so forth. From a logistical point of view, picking Milton Keynes makes a lot of sense in terms of the compromise between being close to their suppliers and to McLaren’s headquarters (about 65 miles away from Milton Keynes), so it’s not surprising that they have chosen to work from there.

  20. A hoover?
    A blender?

    Some F1 fans must have some crazy over-powered household appliances!

  21. This new engine formula will sound great, for a preview watch indycar! I am all for new engine formulas, the sound is irrelevent when you are absorbed watching a race. F1 is constantly changing- car shapes, engine sound, but the people that complain most are the ones that have only watched f1 for a few years, so the changes feel more dramatic, but that is how f1 is, it changes very often. There are people who say that a screaming v10 is what an f1 car should sound like, but how many years was v10 used out of the history of f1? 15% of the years? and v12 even much less,maybe 5% by 10% of teams. any.form of engine, twin, triple, i4, v4,v6, i6, v8, v10, v12,v16 and turbo variations can sound great at highly tuned states

  22. Wait for it, F1 car approaching!

    bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzZZZZZZZOOOOOOooooooooooooooommmmmmm…….

  23. I am a bit concerned by this engine note… sounds like a palm sander.

  24. David not Coulthard (@)
    19th October 2013, 1:01

    Milton Keynes?

    Red Bull Acura Racing-Honda?

  25. Screw the haters, this video will give anybody goosebump who grew up watching F1 in the late 80’s… if you close your eyes and listen it harkens back to the days of senna’s amazing onboards…

  26. OMG that’s awful!

  27. Sound a little like the auto rickshaw I take in India.

  28. OMG! I am not really exciting with that F1 engine’s sound…so sad!

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