Seems wild that they can code and deploy an update of a critical-seeming component in the field like that. I thought such a firmware update would need extensive QA in the lab, along with root causing why this bug slipped through their processes anyway.<p>But maybe that's the difference between shipping a controller for F1 versus shipping one for an industrial or consumer product? shrug.
This reminds me of a story how Deep Space 1 was fixed from 100 million miles-away. [1]<p>[1] <a href="https://gigamonkeys.com/book/lather-rinse-repeat-a-tour-of-the-repl" rel="nofollow">https://gigamonkeys.com/book/lather-rinse-repeat-a-tour-of-t...</a> (the last paragraph, search for "remote debugging" in the page)
> Seems wild that they can code and deploy an update of a critical-seeming component in the field like that. I thought such a firmware update would need extensive QA in the lab, along with root causing why this bug slipped through their processes anyway.<p>These cars are in a perpetual Q&A state, they are getting modified between races. That's true for the "big teams", small teams don't have the resources, they're just "happy to be there". That's why it's possible to see stories like Brawn GP[^1]. That's what makes the sport fascinating, because the overtakes are not as much as one would hope for a ~2-3 hours race. But every little thing counts. In the last race 1st and 2nd had ~103ms diff or something like that for example, which is something that didn't happen for 15-20 years (maybe more).<p>[^1]: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jd3miTpvUmI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jd3miTpvUmI</a>
> That's true for the "big teams", small teams don't have the resources, they're just "happy to be there".<p>This isn't really the case anymore. There's a budget cap, and all of the teams are financially sound most of the time. While the poorer teams might bring fewer upgrades in a year, they still bring upgrades all year long, and R&D is a continuous process in every F1 factory these days. Smaller teams also get additional R&D, compute, and testing time compared to the big teams.
Actually there is a budget cap so small teams have the same resources of big teams. However big teams have an advantage. They assembled a better team and a better network. This is from the team principal of Williams, one of the teams at the bottom of the rankings <a href="https://www.the-race.com/formula-1/cost-cap-creating-two-tier-f1/" rel="nofollow">https://www.the-race.com/formula-1/cost-cap-creating-two-tie...</a>
It seems they simply disabled a bunch of power limits. Probably just settings, rather than an actual code update.
F1 are effectively prototype cars.<p>Every GP is a slightly different car running bleeding edge tech and code.
I'm wondering how good the simulators are. At the start of the season, they were still learning the systems trying to figure out why they were losing power in the straights. So depending on the driver, issues may or may not become apparent. That's like trying to debug why an email can only be sent to a recipient less than 500 miles away.
> trying to debug why an email can only be sent to a recipient less than 500 miles away.<p>Ah, a student of the old masters....<p>(For the uninitiated, or those who wish to relive the memory: <a href="https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html</a> )
The simulators have the ECU in the loop but of course most of the inputs are simulated and they come from models for car dynamics and all kinds of behavior that have a lot of correlations and assumptions built in. As in a flight sim, some of the models are empirical (more like curve-fitting than simulation of physics). Losing power in straights is something a team would be highly motivated to see predicted in the simulator as that’s within normal conditions. But it’s not surprising the simulator can’t predict some edge cases, you’d need to get a lot of things right in the modeling and think of weird inputs.<p>What they probably could do yesterday, on top of checking a ton of telemetry, is understand which inputs were weird and put those into a simulator and get some hints for the FIA to work with. If you’re not aware, the FIA provides the ECU to all teams so that the telemetry used to check compliances and power modes are fair across all teams, and things like traction control are not there. This is why the FIA had to provide the firmware update.
Anthony Davidson who is the Mercedes test driver said that the teams can simulate these scenarios and it seemed that the Mercedes cars were not affected so it seems that other teams hadn't done similar testing in various scenarios.
Piastri and Norris, both on Mercedes engines, seem to have been affected. Not to mention the start of this season where McLaren allegedly forgot to upgrade the firmware on their Mercedes engines and couldn't run more than a few laps for two races.
Right. There's plenty of software simulators in racing so was surprised their testing harness doesn't use one.
Interesting that both Mercedes also had great starts relative to the Red Bull that was affected, wonder if that’s somehow related
One of the mercedes literally broke down and did not finish the race. They might not have faced the issue during the first time they went out in that race but Merc reliablity has been very shaky. And ofc Ant will talk only good things about Mercedes. But this is not the type of things they use the driver simulator for, it is to help the drivers train. These types of issues don't make sense to spend simulator time on with the driver in it
Disabling code is usually safer than enabling, seems they were able to pinpoint this rather quickly.
It was probably just "config" changes or changing some hard-coded constants. So relatively straightforward.
They rolled out a prepared safe defaults version with lots of checks, including the crashing one, removed.
I have no idea if modern-day SV’s “tests pass… idfk, it’s a web app… LGTM I guess” coding ethos was the cause of this particular bug. However, it’s a great, relatively benign demonstration of why it has absolutely zero fucking place controlling extremely dangerous hardware shooting a human around a race track surrounded by people.
I think those engineers had some memories of their FSAE / FSUK days during that patch.
They didn't, it just needed a restart. From the first reports the first car's software genuinely glitched out because of the new track/rain/etc and had to be restarted, the other cars got anti-traction control triggered because going this slow for this long unspools the turbo, which got so bad the detection software made a false positive.
there's no traction control or other driver-assistance aids (ABS etc) in f1 cars
That's what the rules say, anyway. Cheating is part of the game, and @ActuallyVen goes into some of the ways teams have played with the rules.<p><a href="https://youtube.com/@actuallyven" rel="nofollow">https://youtube.com/@actuallyven</a>
I mean, the article literally says a firmware update was deployed mid race to remove power limits, is the article wrong?
What they didn't write is that a seperate company Ilmore provides the ECU's for all cars, for decades. Ilmore most likely caused this bug, and they simply turned off this buggy config setting. Ex-F1 technician
It's not Ilmore. It's Motion Applied (formerly McLaren Applied Technologies). However the software is provided by FIA, and the hardware design is also mandated by FIA.<p>Things have been changed.
That’s not correct.<p>The standardized ecu was introduced as a cost savings and fairness measure in 2008. The contract was won by McLaren Applied (which was part of the same McLaren that is the current reigning champion but is now spun off and owned by private equity).<p>The teams basically get an sdk and are largely responsible for the software the cars run at pretty much everything above the hardware layer of abstraction.<p>As a weird piece of history, McLaren applied was not the original winner of the contract for the first standardized ecu in 2008. When it was announced, in 2006, Microsoft was.
> When it was announced, in 2006, Microsoft was.<p>I want to remind a Slashdot comment from that news entry:<p>> Gentlemen, restart your engines.<p>For original story, see <a href="https://slashdot.org/story/06/07/05/2357227/microsoft-to-supply-electronics-to-formula-1" rel="nofollow">https://slashdot.org/story/06/07/05/2357227/microsoft-to-sup...</a>
So what does the ecu actually do? Can teams use any technology as an advantage?
> Can teams use any technology as an advantage?<p>Better engine design, for one. For example, if you have a truck division which is making very high end turbos for high endurance applications, you can build a "split turbo" with a very long yet precisely balanced shaft between the compressor and the turbine, and route the piping the most efficient way to reduce penalties of routing air via bendy pipes, and have a more powerful engine than others.<p>This is what Mercedes did, back in the day.<p>Ref: <a href="https://hackaday.com/2021/04/06/mercedes-split-turbo-was-a-game-changer-in-formula-1/" rel="nofollow">https://hackaday.com/2021/04/06/mercedes-split-turbo-was-a-g...</a>
Think raspberry pi on steroids that are on steroids that are on steroids.<p>It is primarily the hardware to software interface. It runs every feature in the car that converts software code into an out out voltage to do a thing. It is also how everyone interfaces with the car - teams, drivers, f1 tv, and even the race track itself.<p><a href="https://f1chronicle.com/f1-standard-ecu-explained/" rel="nofollow">https://f1chronicle.com/f1-standard-ecu-explained/</a>
A question for someone who knows more about F1: Is this firmware shared by all cars? Or some local server at the track the cars connect to? Why is F1 able to control individual cars like this? The article is very light on details as to what exactly is going on...
The firmware situation is mixed. The ECU hardware is a standard TAG700 from McLaren. Basically these are software-defined ECUs where you can do whatever. However, FIA has some rules on what you're allowed to modify and has some "compulsory" software in there for monitoring and competition regulatory reasons. It appears there was very limited testing of this module in wet conditions which seems to have affected a lot of vehicles. (I work in Motorsports)
McLaren sold McLaren Applied, the makers of the TAG700, in 2021 and it’s now known as Motion Applied.
Adding to this summarizing my reading from elsewhere: It sounds as if the cause was going too slowly through a sector, and due to to combination of wet conditions and the specific layout of the sectors at Sepang it was triggered for the first time. Since everyone was driving in formation on the formation lap, multiple drivers triggered it.<p>Would this be safety-related, something like "going this slowly through a sector indicates a problem, kill the throttle"? Still seems heavy-handed since the cars were moving, if dangerously slowly.
Wow. I just assumed it wouldn’t be firmware because going from making a fix in 50 minutes to having cars flying at hundreds of miles per hour on that firmware is kind of nuts
It's a pretty intense sport & that kind of timeline is fairly common. They'll do a full car rebuild right before the race, if the driver's had a crash in the session before it. So, the driver will be approaching a corner at 250kph+ in the full knowledge that the brakes were wired up to the pedal just ten minutes earlier. They'll make brake-balance adjustments on the fly in the car as they're speeding down the straightaway.<p>I think the drivers have some extraordinary capability for trust, because the chain of people who need to have got their job correct for that brake pedal to work in that moment is in the dozens, and the consequence for any of them getting it wrong is a particularly violent crash.
Move fast and try not to break things.
Every race is a different car, maybe a different engine, with different software, basically.
Still a Realtime Simulink ECU? In my times it was from Ilmore, round the corner of McLaren.
Is the FIA code available for the teams to inspect, or is it just a binary blob they have to install?
So basically like the anticheat rootkits used in online games to detect ilicit software controls on the player pc's?
F1 vehicles have a lot of actively controlled systems - Engine, MGU, Diff, Brake Bias, Aero etc. Their way of allowing active control but preventing "driver aids" like traction control, torque vectoring is to tightly regulate and give them a box where they can place their controls and what inputs they are allowed to use.
The FIA has this software to stop teams from creating a form of traction control (which has been banned for a good while now)
Yeah I was wondering this also. I had no idea they had some shared blob (or maybe they have source code access) that runs in all of their cars. Would love to read more about how this process works if anyone knows!<p>Wonder if they all get given a thumb drive at the start of the weekend with the latest patch. Release notes saying "library updates and bug fixes, now go drive 200mph around a track! Have fun!"
TLDR: this wet weather mode stuff is FIA mandated because it is basically a rule enforcement around traction control. The loss of traction was related to a weird interaction in low-revving engines, turbos not kicking in, and the rest of the systems trying to do something that anti-traction control stuff would prevent.<p>During the Sky commentary, Anthony Davidson explained the specific electro-mechanical interactions based on what teams were telling him.<p>The FIA absolutely do need the ability to enforce regulations, but perhaps they should be <i>monitoring</i> for traction control and then stewarding that, rather than managing parts of the ECU firmware...
They all run the same ECU and the same firmware on it, yeah. Teams can control some parameters though. It's to stop any kind of traction control.
Wow, crazy that all cars have to run the same firmware (sans parameter tweaking). I thought as an outsider to the sport that F1 was all about engineering the best possible car and putting the best possible driver in the seat, but the control systems engineer in me is sad that they're all stuck with the same control algorithms.
The teams use a single homologated ECU to prevent driver aids. I would assume it doesn’t have a downlink on-track to prevent tampering, but presumably with umbilical cord connected in the garage during red flag they can make changes, which the FIA probably sent over. Who knows.
I just finished watching the race. The start was certainly a callback to the start of the season when cars were dropping like flies and having constant odd problems.
Here is the team radio of Lewis Hamilton literally turning his car off and in again on the formation lap!<p><a href="https://youtu.be/e1bPfbNn_TU?is=zrTGCKm_6klH0JwZ" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/e1bPfbNn_TU?is=zrTGCKm_6klH0JwZ</a>
I can't not read it as "They vibe coded a patch in 50 minutes". Had they used Sol 6.1 they would still be waiting
Amazing to learn on this thread. Does anyone know what they would use to simulate ECU problems like this? Im a firmware engineer in the industry and kind of seeing a problem like this and this thread really opened up my eye to what it looks like under the layers of Media in F1
I looked it up yesterday and they have the ECU in the loop for the driving simulators (the ones the drivers practice with and that are used for checking mechanical changes). But these use empirical models, they can't simulate everything. You would have to get a lot right in the models and top of that know where to test edge cases and then simulate all inputs correctly for those. You can surely input yesterday's weather conditions but whatever model is there might not predict an output that goes to the next model and so on..<p>I'm sure there's also all kinds of other HIL testing but it comes down to thinking about all conditions and having models and tests that are realistic enough for those conditions. It's impossible to have perfect coverage.<p>It's probably kind of lucky that enough cars were impacted so that the issue was revealed instead of having a just a few cars knocked out of the race.
With something safety-critical like an ECU, I'd be surprised if they left formal proof out of their software design and testing. This would make unexpected hardware behaviour much more likely imo. I guess I'd get around it by setting up automated hardware-in-the-loop simulators for testing every possible environment and input. Surely the cost would be worth it for F1 as a whole.<p>At a startup I worked at, we jerry-rigged Pi 5's with commercial of-the-shelf environmental sim software to achieve this. Very cost effective, lol.
Auto software engineer here.<p>It’s frankly because Motorsport software guys are pretty arrogant. They look down on road car and truck engineers, but reality is they develop stuff with virtually no processes and they usually have only very basic engineering skills, yet every day they are told Motorsport is at the forefront of technology.<p>“Motorsport grade” auto components usually means crappy, and everything requires a software patch or constant maintenance to work correctly.<p>Not surprised there was a bug, and not surprised they were able to develop and deploy a patch in 1 hour without V&V testing it or anything.
I wouldn't be surprised if many of the motorsport software engineers you mention come from mechatronic/electronic/aero backgrounds. Don't get me wrong, I've seen an analog electronic engineer perform software wonders; 10,000+ lines of bash, custom C macro libraries, and a PHP runtime older than I am have taught me that programming can be closer to art than science. But relying on that cursed bundle of chaos felt deeply violating and unsafe lol.<p>Nowadays, I mentally place any engineer without production software experience into a 'research' box. Any resulting code may break the laws of physics, and should be tested as such ;).<p>Edit: It's also a minor crime to look down on automotive software engineering! The stakes of mass-manufacturing have forged some seriously awesome software. Top-of-mind for me is CAN support in Linux and safety-critical contributions going into ROS2.
Similar HFT and quants, they are elite in a very specialized niche: aerodynamics and CFD. The rest is extremely outdated.<p>Keep in mind that when James Volwes become the team principal of Williams in 2023, he was horrified to realize Williams operated everything in Excel spreadsheet, and to track the progress of how parts are made, they emailed Excel spreadsheet to each other (and remember, we are talking about a car with 100k parts). And the first thing he did was to onboard Atlassian / Jira and redesigned the process of communication / car production from the basics.
> And the first thing he did was to onboard Atlassian / Jira and redesigned the process of communication / car production from the basics.<p>Ah, that explains the incredible results Williams has had since then!
I have a friend who has worked in aerodynamics at several of the F1 teams. The parts themselves are pretty high tech, but all of the management of the data, the processes, the software to produce them etc is pretty shoddy.
Preach; I worked with a couple guys who left the F1 software industry and my experience matches yours. They wrote JavaScript like it was old school C, didn’t know version control etc, and refused to learn anything different.
Ah, yes, because the software on road cars is so much better.<p>The amount of times I had to turn off and on again my dad's Skoda because the screen was stuck on "loading user profile".
> Lando Norris calling the electronic glitches "horrible" and further proof that F1 should move away from hybrids.<p>But the human fireballs, deaths and suffering of gasoline-related accidents are no proof that F1 should move away from gas-power?
If you are that worrid about safety, don't ever watch the Isle of Man TT bike racing.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31RZ5wU-Fg0" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31RZ5wU-Fg0</a><p>There are typically at least two deaths every year. The last time there were no fatailties was in 1982.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Isle_of_Man_TT_Mountain_Course_fatalities" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Isle_of_Man_TT_Mountai...</a>
This F1 is shit, I've lost interest in it. When the race winner is not determined by the pilot skills, or the team, or the car itself, but by some software, battery power, excessive ruling, lawyers, etc. it's to me not at an interest to be seen.<p>To me F1 shall go back, remove all the crappy rules made in the last 20 years, return to pure gasoline V10 engines, no turbo, no hybrid, minimal electronic, no closed park, no limit in consumption of fuel, tires, etc, return to refueling during the race, and let the better pilot with the best car and the best team win.<p>These F1 is too sophisticated, at this point to me makes very little sense even racing, just race the car in a simulator at this point, everything is decided by the electronics and algorithms anyway, seeing talented pilots like Max Verstappen or Lewis Hamilton struggle to race because the electronics of the car doesn't let them show their potential, because they have to "save battery" or "save fuel" or "save tires", doesn't make a good show to me.
Those are two seperate issues. Safety issues are solved by making the cars/driver gear safer.
> "It's just horrible. I don't know, it just proves that we shouldn't have any of that stuff, the electronic side," Norris said<p>It seems he doesn't want ANY electronics, which is frankly ridiculous. The steering wheel has looked like the one from a flighter jet for decades now. There is electronics in everything, even the helmets.
Your comment clearly indicates that you have absolutely no idea what you are trying to talk about. Norris's comment is perfectly clear for anyone who has any inkling of what is going on currently in F1. Why even bother making such a comment when it is a complete waste of bytes?
Last fuel related death was in 1986. The incident in 2020 with Grosjean's fireball was a 67g impact. If the car were to only have one big EV battery, which it almost is in current regulations, then in such a crash would very likely get punctured and be even riskier fire. So to answer the question, no.<p>At end of the day, it is a motorsport and it will always have its risks.
In the first race of the season, his team-mate was taken out before the race started because his car gave him more power than he was expecting all of a sudden. Similar things have happened multiple times this year.
The issue is of why deaths happen isn't due to gas, its because F1 is simulatenously "build the fastest car that can hold incredible speeds in corners", and "we are going to put restrictions on when you can use technology to make racing fair"<p>Look at Moto GP. The crash speeds are much slower, because they happen during cornering, and because bikes don't have that much aero downforce even with all the power ranger wings on them now, the riders have to brake a lot more.<p>Instead of trying to push hybrid tech, which will never be that good for racing, Id like to see F1 focus more on actual ICE engine refinement, because ICE isn't going anywhere even in the age of evs. Something like no front/rear wings, no pitstops, ICE only, standard ECU for power delivery, no ABS, but you can run AWD with electronic suspension and torque vector as much as you want.
I summarized it with Gemini because the website was too unusable while on mobile:<p><a href="https://share.gemini.google/bwoJ65BshQkQ" rel="nofollow">https://share.gemini.google/bwoJ65BshQkQ</a>
Time to go back to NA engines, the hybrids don't give the rock concert wall of sound
Lets all vent in one more place. How this kind of regs get forced is sad. All the casual fans want something fun to watch. All the serious fans want NA engines. The drivers hate these "power units".
<p><pre><code> Gentlemen, a short view back to the past. Thirty years ago, Niki Lauda told us ‘take a monkey, place him into the cockpit and he is able to drive the car.’ Thirty years later, Sebastian told us ‘I had to start my car like a computer, it’s very complicated.’ And Nico Rosberg said that during the race – I don’t remember what race - he pressed the wrong button on the wheel. Question for you both: is Formula One driving today too complicated with twenty and more buttons on the wheel, are you too much under effort, under pressure? What are your wishes for the future concerning the technical programme during the race? Less buttons, more? Or less and more communication with your engineers?</code></pre>
The F1 isn't just spectacle it's also something that should show real advancement in technology. They don't want to be seen as deliberately going back 20 years in tech.<p>But yes, they completely made the powertrains to opaque for the viewer, and they definitely missed the ball on the sound aspect.<p>I get that they need to look environmentally conscious but let's be honest: it's maybe one decade - two tops - until F1 is electric. Until then, why not just skip the hybrid bits and do loud and simple engines?<p>I was at a GP in september, something you do very much for the noise and spectacle - the race you follow best from your couch. And it was astonishing just how much better F3 and F2 sounds, compared to F1. And that surely can't be good for FIA.
> The F1 isn't just spectacle it's also something that should show real advancement in technology.<p>Maybe 30+ years ago. Carbon fiber parts, motors made of Beryllium alloys, the hybrid tech was interesting for a short while etc.<p>But then, either you want fun for the fans of the fossil engines OR you want advancement in technology. I don't think it can be combined anymore. My feeling is it will go the way of horse races, completely irrelevant to the broader transport technology, and won't go electric at all.
It's a turbo that muffles the sound (and resulting reduced revs because high RPM was restricted due to cost reasons).
NASCAR still uses classic carbureted V8s. I personally prefer that sound over the much higher-pitched F1 engines.
I don't follow motorsports very closely, sorry, but racing hybrids sounds extremely queer.<p>They might as well not do it at all.<p>You cannot greenwash auto racing as "sustainable" when by its very nature it need not exist. It's done for sport.<p>It's like people who hunt exotic animals agreeing to put suppressors on their rifles as if that somehow makes it more acceptable.
In theory: it's not greenwashing, it's so that the humungous amounts of resources they put into developing F1 engines are not completely wasted ... so that some of the tech can "trickle down" to road car engines. Hence, the interest in hybrids. At least they get to learn how to charge a battery really, really fast.<p>In practice, of course, it's all going to go a bit south when road cars go to 90% EV. There is already a "formula E", of course.
The worst thing is that, whatever they "save" in the hybrid part, is offsetted by the amount of pollution of flying all people and machines around the world.<p>Someone on reddit showed a graph comparing both, and it's just ridiculous.<p>I'm an avid F1 fan since 1990s, and think hybrid engines is the wrong way to do it.
The hybrid power train isn't about carbon emissions at the race, its about advancing lower carbon technology.<p>That said, its still dumb since consumer cars are moving on from hybrids it seems.
It's not just about being environmentally friendly; hybrid engines have fairly significant performance advantages over non-hybrid engines.
F1 couldn't call themselves the pinnacle of motorsports if they moved away from hybrid engines. The performance advantages are fairly staggering.
There are very obvious performance benefits to running a hybrid.
I think you're right, but I do wish the formula was more open ended. The super strict regs were supposed to prevent runaway costs, but now we have the cost cap. So like, why not institute a cost cap for the pu manufacturers and let them go nuts.
Make race cars analog again
Oh yes, the insanity of the new F1 power units! The goal was 50/50 Electric/ICE split... but why go hybrid when the cars use fully synthetic fuel and have essentially no runtime carbon footprint? Well for car makers to signal their virtue of course! Did they worry about the mega tons of goods they ship around the globe to race in 24 different countries... or perhaps the armada of VIP private planes that follow... or the 1M fans that drive to each venue?<p>Ok, so hybrid... but where will the E energy come from? Clearly from the brakes, the rear brakes... the same ones that get only a fraction of the braking energy because all the forces move to the front under deceleration. Where is the energy stored, in the battery of course... which is so small it runs out halfway down a single straight. So you basically have a big complicated heavy car with half the power it should...<p>And naturally you have lots of software controlling "deployment" of your meager E reserves. It even guesses where you are on track based on time/speed, because GPS is illegal for that. Sigh...<p>To be clear... I am not arguing ICE is good or E is bad. Just that F1's current specs for the ICE/E mixture is horrible.
F1 is a constructors championship, and the constructors are interested in developing electric power trains. Nobody wants to spend 100 million to tweak the last 0.1% performance out of a turbo-charged V8.
Quite right, on the constructor part... that is very much the appeal for us techies. But they do spend 100 million tweaking the last 0.1% of aero advantage and tire-deg management. a) They could just homologate a common engine, like in F2 and concentrate on the chassis or b) make a properly designed hybrid PU. By (b) I mean have an E component that gets adequately charged... the MGU-H (E-Turbo) of the last generation seemed to work fine. The current specs is nuts, definitely NOT advancing technology.
Banning teams like Ferrari or Mercedes from competing with their own cars (including the engines) would be the end of F1. The current regulations are extremely ambitious such that constructors can get a significant advantage from developing better tech. And it's working, the Mercedes powertrain is clearly dominating, even though the Ford V8 is more powerful.
Because electric engines are more performant than gas ones so you can in theory have better driving perfomrance? I.e., high, flat and predictable torque curve, re-use braking energy (so it adds up to ICE), extremely high energy density of the engine unit.
My understanding is that the switch to hybrid was to get rid of needing to refuel during a race, since that is dangerous. The 50/50 split is new this year, but they're already working on fixing that for next year. But even then, they had to reduced the number of laps because otherwise they would need to re-engineer the entire car to allow more fuel.
Let’s all just watch go karts and ignore what F1 always was because we think electricity is political now.
"Glitch"? That sounds a bit too cutesy for this situation. How about something like "error"?
While this is "interesting" for nerds like me.<p>This is also portrait of how embarrassing, fake, boring and not-racing F1 has become. Even the "boring" low overtaking 00's were orders of magnitude more exciting than this clown show.<p>This is also one of the consequences of the FIA Emperor being a complete power hungry fool and many competent people being pushed out of the FIA. Congratulations.
"Meet the F1 developer who fix a critical bug in 50 minutes with AI agent"<p>2000 PRs per day btw.
Claude, make my car fast, make no mistakes
For anyone not willing to click through, by "Bahrain" they actually mean Malaysia.
For anyone not aware, this was the Bahrain Grand Prix held in Malaysia. The FIA allowed Bahrain to host their Grand Prix at a circuit which isn’t normally used for F1 any more in Malaysia because of the geopolitical situation in countries around Bahrain.<p>Therefore this <i>was</i> the Bahrain F1, it just happened to take place in Malaysia.
[dead]
[flagged]
F1 teams have never fully owned the car, you’ll notice they all look pretty similar. The FIA has a lot of rules around the construction of the cars
Gotta love how people assume software patches have never been prepared in an emergency before LLMs. Ever heard of Apollo 14?
I’ve really enjoyed this year.
What do you think mechanics do with old school cars?
Honestly at this point, bring back the V10's.
When such complex and powerful machine is doing the actual run, and it has complex logic circuitry, capable of making some decisions, it is similar to horse racing and the machines should be awarded (same as horse), not the jockeys.
They do. There are two parallel championships. The drivers and constructors championships.<p>That’s why when Hadjar was off with an injury the Red Bull team got a replacement driver (Liam Lawson from Racing Bulls), because they still want to get as many points for that car in the constructors championship as possible :]