INSIDER
Pre-season testingalways sparks some
controversy based on creative interpretations of
the 105 pages of Technical Regulations that govern
the design of the cars. It’s the first time that rival
technical directors get a look at the opposition,and inevitably this leads to discussion of
the semantics that may be used to form the
understanding of those regulations.
I’ve mentioned oil burning briefly in this
column before, but since interest in this abstruse
subject – which many thought had been put
to rest – has been sparked afresh, it’s worth
revisiting and examining in more detail.
Perhaps the first thing to point out is that the
use of lubricating oil to enhance power through
improved combustion is not new. In the last
era of turbocharged engines some pretty exotic
but highly lethal fuels were used. These were
pioneered by BMW, who had supposedly foundOIL BE DAMNED:
FORMULA 1’S
BURNING DESIRE
the formula through reading papers regarding fuel development for
the highly boosted engines used by the Luftwaffe fighters in World
War II. These fuels bore little or no resemblance to petrol, and
indeed the rules didn’t require that they should. Instead they were
a mixture of hydrocarbons; the majority was blended from benzine,
xylene and toluene. The primary component was the toluene at close
on 85 per cent of the fuel mass, which had an octane rating of 121,
significantly higher than the 100 octane standard aviation fuel.
Unfortunately toluene is highly carcinogenic. Having
contemplated the implications, after a short while the FIA defined
a fuel for the engines that was much closer to road fuels.
This left the engine developers with a
problem as they could not run the boost
anywhere near as high as they would like,
since the new fuel didn’t have the anti-knock
properties of the recently banned fuel.
Some of the more resourceful realised
that while the fuel may be limited, the oil
wasn’t, and on any engine it’s normal for a
small quantity of oil to enter the combustion
chamber, either through bypassing the piston
rings or through leakage of the valve guides.
In addition it wasn’t too difficult to
contrive a system on a turbocharged engine
where the oil used to lubricate the turbo
bearing could be encouraged to leak into
the compressor and hence find a direct path
to the combustion chamber. It wasn’t long
before the lubricating oils were being doped
with anti-knock compounds to allow modest
increases in boost. This wasn’t illegal; it was
just an example of the rule maker being one
step behind the rule exploiter.
If we now fast forward to 2014 we had the
potential to revisit this contrivance but for
slightly different reasons.
In 2014 the current hybrid power unit was
introduced. Just as significant as its novel
architecture was the fact that this was the
first F1 engine to be governed by a fuel-flow
limit. Until then, all normally aspirated racing
engines had been designed on the principle
that one needed to get as much air as possible
into the engine and then inject the right
amount of fuel to obtain best torque.
One kilogramme of gasoline contains
around 43 megajoules of energy. The 2014
regulations decreed that the maximum fuel: LAT ARCHIVE. ILLUSTRATION: BENJAMIN WACHENJE.Exotic fuels are now outlawed in Formula 1; the blends used have to be closely related to pump fuel
In the last turbo era,
engine manufacturers
used oil burning to
circumvent the rules
banning high-octane
fuel blendsUNDER
THE
HOOD
PAT SYMONDS
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