F1's New Rules

One of the difficulties with figuring out the impact of the F1 rules and rule changes is the units of measure they use to describe them. To make life harder, they give the power usage of engine and MGU-K in Kilowatts, and then tell us that capacity of the battery is 4 Megajoules.

Wait a minute, we’re car people; cars run on Horsepower. Lights, toasters and things like that run on Watts. And what the fuck is a Megajoule?

Happily power is power, and energy is energy, and what you call them is a matter of what system you use. It turns out that the 400 kW that the engine delivers is the same as 536 HP, and the 350 kW that the electric motor provides is the same as 470 HP. That Megajoule just as easy; 4 Megajoules is the same as 1.03 kW-h, which means you are using one kW for one hour and slightly less than 2 minutes.

So the MGU-K (electric motor) delivers 350 kW, and the capacity of the battery is 1.03 kW-h. Um, Houston, we have a problem. If we do some simple math:

     1.03 kW-h / 350kW = .00294 hours * 3600 (sec/hr) = 10.59 sec

Well, dog my cats and call me Rover. If you run your motor at full power, you RUN OUT OF BATTERY POWER IN 11 SECONDS, and are racing with only the 536 HP provided by the engine. Seems to me like that could present a problem from time to time.

Further, the new rule caps charging the battery to 7 Megajoules per lap, which is the same as 1.8 kW-h. So, more simple math:

    1.8 kW-h / 350kW = .00514 hours * 3600 (sec/hr) = 18.51 sec

The fastest lap time at Miami last year was 1.29 minutes, so if a driver will be able to fully deploy his electric motor for some 24% of each lap (18.6 secs). Is that enough at Miami? It looks a bit marginal to me.