Lauda also expects reliability to be deciding factor

F1 Fanatic Round-up

Posted on

| Written by

In the round-up: Reliability has emerged as a major theme of the off-season, with Niki Lauda among many to stress its importance for the upcoming championship.

Links

Your daily digest of F1 news, views, features and more.

Lauda and Ferrari agree; reliability is key (Reuters)

Lauda: “Whoever has less failures this year will be world champion.”

Analysis Lotus E22 Twin Tusk nose (ScarbsF1)

“What Lotus has done is to create a mandatory nose tip, in terms of cross section and height, but with just one tusk. It’s the right hand tusk that achieves this (highlighted yellow). But in order to avoid the twin tusk design being considered as having more than one nose tips, which is explicitly excluded in the rules, the left tusk is shorter as design the front and avoids being in the same plane as the right hand tusk’s tip.”

Tweets

Comment of the day

Dkpioe on one of the interesting technical details on the Ferrari F14 T:

The small sidepods are interesting. Does it mean Ferrari have a great cooling system for their V6? Does it mean they are packaging too tight and will have race failures? Are they risking speed over reliability? Or have they got it absolutely correct?

We will soon find out! With reliability a likely concern for this season, I think this season’s testing times will be really insignificant, unlike the past few years.
Dkpioe

From the forum

  • The 2014 Daytona 24 Hours was interrupted by a serious crash yesterday and at the time of writing details on the condition of the drivers involved is being awaited

Happy birthday!

Happy birthday to Stealthman and Weasel Chops!

If you want a birthday shout-out tell us when yours is by emailling me, using Twitter or adding to the list here.

On this day in F1

Happy birthday to Sergio Perez who turns 24 today.

Image © Red Bull/Getty

Author information

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...

Got a potential story, tip or enquiry? Find out more about RaceFans and contact us here.

36 comments on “Lauda also expects reliability to be deciding factor”

  1. I do wonder if at some point in the season (like Singapore or Catalunya maybe) we have a strange race like Monaco 1982, not for people spinning off, but just everybody retiring with so little of the race to run…

    1. Sounds a bit more like Monaco 1996…

  2. More likely than not reliability will be almost totally dependant on the reliability of the engine you are running, so basically any customer teams (i.e not Ferrari, Mercedes or if you construe the situation Red Bull) just need to pray!

    1. Not necessarily, for example if cooling (or lack of) is the main reason for engine failures then every team will have varying degrees of reliability.

  3. Lauda: “Whoever has less failures this year will be world champion.”

    Enter Max Chilton.

    1. Haha! Good one!

  4. Cheeky comment by Audi.

    They are right, tho…

    1. I love the way the R18 looks, but I wouldn’t call it beautiful!

    2. I wouldn’t call their cars good looking either…

    3. Le mans rule have been making less atractive cars in the past decade but the Aco is in the right direction one of the stupid is to have the same width front and rear tyres and the awkward mandatory cockpit space that realistically only fit 2 small children and last but not least the 50km fuel tanks, how come 24h racing gets ridiculously small tanks but f1 must run 2 hours nonstop.

  5. I may be on my own here but I’m loving the new F1 cars, the Ferrari nose does look very weird but at the same time, we have pretty much all (of the revealed cars) the cars with drastically different looks to the front of them. For me, I’m absolutely loving seeing the new cars.

    1. Yeah its nice to see some really visible innovation for a change.

    2. Yeah the variety is what’s keeping me interested this spring, whereas there wasn’t much going on in the buildup to 2013. It’s a pity so many people seem to have a negative view of this.

      1. @claran agreed. Im in this bandwagon.

    3. David not Coulthard (@)
      26th January 2014, 7:46

      Yeah, me too. The only annying things now are the DRS and double-ponts finale.

    4. Finally, some people here who like the radical changes and strange looking cars! I like them too and I hope that every other unveiling next week will bring a new surprise design! There all special in their own way so far.. So bring out the next one, i’m looking forward to it!

    5. David not Coulthard (@)
      26th January 2014, 10:17

      Sometimes, many wrongs make one right.

      If all cars next year adopt only one of the designs seen so far this year, though, it’ll be awful.

  6. Chris (@tophercheese21)
    26th January 2014, 2:09

    I hope reliability isn’t the deciding factor, or as big an issue as the teams seem to think it will be.

    I want to see the drivers beat each other legitimately, not through the failures of the cars.

    1. Well, drivers race each other using …cars. So if it fails is as legitimate as it can be. It is a team sport, although a lot of people want to look at it as an individual one.

    2. @tophercheese21 If you think reliability shouldn’t be a deciding factor, some world champions from bygone years/era’s aren’t legitimate champions in your opinion? As @caci99 said: car failures are a part of racing with…cars.

      1. Chris (@tophercheese21)
        26th January 2014, 10:46

        Of course I know that car failures and retirements are part of racing, I’m just saying that a lot of the technical people in F1 are saying that reliability is the most crucial thing this year. So if there are on average 7-10 cars retiring every race, then I don’t think it’s a good thing for the sport entertainment.

        Basically I’m just saying that I hope the reliability of teams isn’t as bad as they think it may be.

        1. @tophercheese21

          So if there are on average 7-10 cars retiring every race, then I don’t think it’s a good thing for the sport entertainment.

          That would still be over half the field finishing the races, which is historically speaking pretty high reliability for F1. In the 80s and 90s you would frequently get ten finishers or fewer, and from larger fields that started the race. It’s only really in the last decade or so that we’ve seen so many cars finishing so often.

          1. Indeed, it used to be relatively common to see the last to drop out still bag a point for 6th, or just miss out because a backmarker managed to get an extra lap in when we started watching F1 in the early ’90

  7. both drivers in the Daytona 24 crash, Memo Gidley and Matteo Malucelli, are reported as being conscious and talking. Unbelievable when you see the crash.

  8. David not Coulthard (@)
    26th January 2014, 7:43

    Lauda: “Whoever has less failures this year will be world champion.”

    Just as I thought that Max Chilton was never going to a crack at teh championship…..

  9. What we will see is what new engines are even more reliable, than last year. Less RPM’s, small fuel flow, nice small engine, very common in modern world. Each need to last for approximately 2000 km.
    The only weak point is ERS, mainly because of overheating and electronic failures. And maybe gearbox.
    All these talks are made to raise the interest.

    1. David not Coulthard (@)
      26th January 2014, 7:49

      Less RPM

      From what I know, unlike the V8s this year’s engines were designed wth the RPM limit in mind, so I don’t think they’ll try to bring out as much RPM as possible, but rather the best setup they can come out with that revs only to the limit.

      1. @davidnotcoulthard
        With such restrictions the strongest part of the new car will be torque. It should be massive, comparing to the 2013 car. Because of that they don’t even need that much revolutions. I think they will limit it during weekends even more.

      2. Not even to the limit, max fuel flow occurs at 10,000 rpm there will be no reason to set up the cars to exceed that rpm and they likely only will with a tail wind or going downhill.

        1. @hohum Ahah, that would be fun to watch)
          But I think they’ll go till 14,000 or something like that) They need the balance between the fuel economy and maximum speed, so they have to use the advantage of turbine which can help inject almost endless amount of fuel, but also the possibilities of the engine. And I think the biggest horse power will be around 13,000-14,000 revs (just guessing).

          1. Almost endless amounts of fuel = 100 kg/h or 27,8 g/s under the new regulations.

          2. @robo, As steven says max fuel equals 100 kg/h and cannot be increased by exceeding 10,000 rpm even though the permissible limit is 15000 rpm, max power will occur at max fuel flow.

          3. @hohum
            I doubt you can inject very much fuel in 1.6 engine rotating at 10,000, because it needs time to burn this amount of fuel. You need to increase RPMs to make the damn thing work faster)))

Comments are closed.