F1 Fanatic

Do we have any experts here?

I think it’d actually be slower, granted I’m not the expert you were looking for, but the Veyron basically has two 4 litre V8s. The engine themselves nevermind being absolutely huge would probably weigh the same as an entire F1 car.

Considering the old 3.0 V10s produced pretty much the same power as a Veyron proves my point, an F1 cars aerodynamics is the reason why it’s “slow” compared to a Veyron.

Without the wings and underfloor, but some kind of more basic downforce an F1 car could get close to 300 mph without such an engine.

Hard to say, yeah.

First of all, that engine needs huge radiators, and it’s W-shaped, so that means it’s CoG is higher, and the whole engine cover would need to be enormous. And it’s incredibly heavy.

So if you put one in a F1 car right away, it’d probably make the whole car slower.

That said, if F1 engineers got one of those engines, they’d make it a lot more powerful than it is. They’d push the rev limiter much further and they’d not need to secure the engine is reliable enough to be used in the road for years.

But the size of the engine it’s still too big, so maybe it’d be faster in straight line, but not over a whole lap in a racing circuit (like the Zonda vs original Veyron in Top Gear a couple of years ago).

@Harvs – F1 engines are 95kg exactly.

@sato113 – I’d put my money on around 21,000; which is what they were hitting before limiters and the engine freeze.

It would be a great experiment, but on a whole lap I am sure that the normal V8 2.4 engine would be the quicker way around the track. It is just a whole lot smaller and lighter, so it requires smaller airboxes and cooling and has a lower CoG.
If the F1 engineers were allowed to play with the engine though.. The Veyron engine could be pretty amazing. Considering they could screw around 1500hp from the four cylinder 1,6 liter engines in the 80′s, also with the engine block from a road car!
The power they could get from that engine would be way too much for tyres to take, and render the power useless, everywhere but on the straights, but still with the massive weight penalty. I don’t think it would be worth it.
But it would be nice to see how quick you could make that thing go from 100-300km/h with the skinniest wings, all ballast removed and the engine from a Veyron in the back.

I just wanted to take this experiment a little further then.
Well if we apply some simple maths here (and I mean REALLY simple).
So we multiply the power of the 1,6 liter engines with the displacement difference compared to a Veryon engine they could, potentially get 7500hp! That is some 500-1000hp short of what a top fuel dragster delivers.
Though the engine from a dragster, is not only supercharged, but it also runs on nitro and stuff like that, to get those 8000+hp, so I don’t think that upping the revs and raise the boost on the turbo’s will get you to that sort of power.
But it does ask the question, how do F1 engineers get nearly 1000hp pr liter from the engines (The same as they get from those top fuels), and in the 80′s make them go a whole F1 distance of 300 odd kilometers when the engine on a dragster needs a full engine rebuild after just 412 meters?!
I am no engine expert or anything like that, but my guess is that engine power is a bit like top speed.
You only need some 30 hp to get to 100 km/h in a sort of small car. To get to 200, you need what 100? 150?
To get to 300 you will need 400-500hp.
To get to 400km/h a Veyron needs a thousand!

My point is, is it the first 1000hp pr liter that is the “easy” bit, but when you need to extract 1000hp pr liter, over 8 liters of capacity, over just 8 cylinders is a lot harder?
I mean in a top fuel each cylinder gives them 1000hp.
In one of those four pot F1 engines each cylinder “only” had to cope with around 400 hp.
Is that what makes the real difference?

In that case then, a Veyron engine, with all 16 cylinders running 400hp would be able to develop 6400hp, which is still a lot!
Though the cooling to provide that, would be pretty hard. Especially when the engine is in a W configuration.

Sadly real life physics are quite a lot more advanced then this and we need to take into account just short of a billion things, before we would get any sort of realistic power figure.

@raymondu999
I get that from the old turbo monsters of the 80′s 1,6L to 1500hp’ish gets you about 1000hp/l. As the Veyron is a turbo charged engine I thought that it would be better to compare it the most recent F1 turbo technology. Though it is a bit aged.