McLaren Racing

[Ренат]

7 часов назад, svarog сказал:

На быстрой трассе мы увидим как обстоят дела у Хонды с мощностью. Это более интересно.

Ну и за одно надежность в жару проверим.

и памятуя прошлый год, что бы потом не было недопонимания и соскоков скажи что сейчас стоит на ТР?!

спек4? спек3,7?

или новая концепция?!

[Садист]

14 минут назад, Ренат сказал:

и памятуя прошлый год, что бы потом не было недопонимания и соскоков скажи что сейчас стоит на ТР?!

спек4? спек3,7?

или новая концепция?!

Не не 4-я еще не готова )) Стоит спек 3,86543

[Vo-Va]

8 часов назад, Gonchar25 сказал:

Да, я в активных дискуссиях относительно недавно, однако людей, тем более завсегдатаев этой ветки, которые серьёзно бы говорили о цели Мака 2018 — 1 место в КК и тотальном доминировании вместо мерсов не видел. Иронизирующих про 7 титулов Тофика перед приходом Норриса - да, но чтобы всерьёз — нет. 

Может, вы, конечно, приведёте конкретные примеры, или может это у вас в личных беседах было — не знаю. 

Когда событие произошло и не совпало с тем , о чём говорил до него , очень удобно потом все на иронию или шутку списывать .

 

[Vo-Va]

27 минут назад, Ренат сказал:

и памятуя прошлый год, что бы потом не было недопонимания и соскоков скажи что сейчас стоит на ТР?!

спек4? спек3,7?

или новая концепция?!

А какая  вам разница  что за спецификация ? Хватит уже цепляться за то , что никто не знает , и только гадаем а потом это является поводом .

[Ренат]

8 минут назад, Vo-Va сказал:

А какая  вам разница  что за спецификация ? Хватит уже цепляться за то , что никто не знает , и только гадаем а потом это является поводом .

этоо очень важно! Ибо по заверениям "одного товарища" СПЕК4-это оплот надежности и более мощная чем РЕно. мы ж должны понимать-сейчас Мак  впереди ТР из-за шасси и пилотов(если Спек4) или все же из-за Рено(если 3,78541123634489651233)

 

Раскройте нам глаза, дайте луч истины!!!!!!!!!!!

[Ренат]

22 минуты назад, Садист сказал:

Не не 4-я еще не готова )) Стоит спек 3,86543

опять?!

надо все-таки дать им время, ведра 2 или даже все 5!

[VGS]

вот по Сварогу Хонда=Рено, не пойму чего там в РБ думают еще, спросили бы Сварога.. и катались бы с начала сезона на Хонде, но нет же чего то томятся упускают первое место в чемпе дымясь на Рено

Сварог, если РБ не перейдет в следующем году на Хонду (или перейдет и будет ниже третьего места), готов признать что 2 года ты тут пургу нес?

[d_alfa]

12 часов назад, svarog сказал:

 Аванс доверия уже заканчивается.

Что-то у тебя какие-то двойные стандарты хонде  бесконечность а маку-одна гонка

[GaMi]

27 минут назад, Vo-Va сказал:

Когда событие произошло и не совпало с тем , о чём говорил до него , очень удобно потом все на иронию или шутку списывать .

 

Боюсь даже спросить,на что тогда ваша секта списывает 4й год унижения хонды  на иронию или шутку это совсем не похоже 

 

 

17 минут назад, Vo-Va сказал:

А какая  вам разница  что за спецификация ? Хватит уже цепляться за то , что никто не знает , и только гадаем а потом это является поводом .

во шикарно ,второй частью своего поста можешь тыкать Сварогу в ответ на любой его пост,потому что он совсем ничего не знает  

[LHf1]

12 часов назад, svarog сказал:

Просто поражает желание фанатов оправдать слабость команды.

Все за нее придумают и нафантазируют.

Сказал человек, который этим уже 4-ый год занимается, пытаясь оправдать слабость одного изделия.  

 

10 часов назад, svarog сказал:

Понятно же, что никому в Ф1 не интересно какой ты был даже год назад.

А чего же ты тогда так любишь вспоминать прошлый год-то? Уже все трассы перебрал (пытаясь нам объяснить, где Хонда была, якобы, конкурентоспособна), да ни по разу.

Никому же в Ф1 не интересно какой ты был даже год назад.

 

10 часов назад, svarog сказал:

А возможности Хонды этого года еще никто не успел рассмотреть. Только в Бахрейне все увидим.

Уже все рассмотрели, кроме тебя. В Бахрейне какого года ты забыл уточнить)

[First Lady]

На   Моторспорте нашла старые статьи Андерсона про Макларена и Хонду, которые хотела прочитать, но не было доступа. 

Проявляете интерес запостит?

[Ренат]

2 минуты назад, First Lady сказал:

На   Моторспорте нашла старые статьи Андерсона про Макларена и Хонду, которые хотела прочитать, но не было доступа. 

Проявляете интерес запостит?

конешн, постить, какие могут быть сомненья?!

[First Lady]

2 минуты назад, Ренат сказал:

конешн, постить, какие могут быть сомненья?!

 

ОК.

 

The design flaws that killed McLaren-Honda

 

 

Ben Anderson

 

Скрытый текст

 

Three seasons and nothing to show for it beyond some mud-slinging and plenty of expensive rebuilds - McLaren-Honda's divorce was drawn out in full public view, with fundamental design flaws at the heart of the problem.

The humble oil tank seems such an innocuous component amid the extraordinary complexity of V6 Formula 1 engines and their hybrid parts. With all the millions of dollars invested in trying to make a success of a works grand prix operation, combined with the expertise of two mighty racing organisations, you wouldn't expect something so basic to be the root cause of calamity.

But that's exactly what happened in 2017. The unfeted oil tank is the chief reason why the McLaren-Honda alliance is no more, dissolved in a poisonous concoction of broken promises and shattered dreams.

Having made encouraging progress in 2016, invested time in helping the FIA to draft this year's new and enhanced aero regulations, and restructured the team in readiness to make the most of them, McLaren felt ready to catch up lost ground to F1's big three teams - Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull.

Meanwhile, Honda planned a major revamp of its engine design, abandoning its original 'size-zero' architecture that contained the turbine and compressor within the V-bank of the engine, instead bringing them outside and adopting the Mercedes concept of attaching them at opposite ends of the block via an elongated connecting shaft.

This would make the engine lower and lighter, helping McLaren solve a high-speed handling imbalance prevalent in the 2016 car, while Honda simultaneously developed new lean-combustion technology on its Sakura dyno that was intended to boost power significantly.

All of which was meant to lift McLaren definitively into the top four at worst, and hopefully into podium and occasional race win contention.

But things got off to the worst possible start when a problem with the oil system consigned Fernando Alonso to the garage for much of the first day of pre-season testing at Barcelona. There was barely an improvement over the remaining seven days of running, as severe vibrations from the power unit and transmission caused repeated breakdowns.

The new-and-improved Honda engine was proving anything but - it was unstable, undriveable, and less powerful than last year's unit. McLaren's patience snapped. As Ferrari and Mercedes completed hundreds upon hundreds of laps, McLaren found itself facing yet another season of severe struggle, and so began machinations behind the scenes to end this ill-fated partnership for good.

It's been an incredibly disappointing season for McLaren-Honda: ninth in the constructors' championship and only three points better than its 2015 nadir. Sixth for Alonso in Hungary was the highlight result, and McLaren was actually further away from Mercedes' pace this season than it was last year.

Results, performance and reliability all went backwards in 2017. As axed Honda F1 boss Yusuke Hasegawa explains, it all had to do with a confluence of connected circumstances, with the oil tank at their epicentre.

"Go back to 2015, our MGU-H energy-recovery level was very low," says Hasegawa. "It was because of the limited turbine package size. In 2016 we modified the turbine to make it much bigger. Because of that we needed to make the turbine position much higher.

"With doing that, I think the recovery level was very competitive - almost the same level as the top team. But because of that we were thinking the centre of gravity was one of the big issues for us - especially in Suzuka I noticed that momentum of the car was very bad.

"Of course we identified that issue from the beginning of the season, so we understood we needed to change the turbine position to much lower, but to do that we had to make the turbine/compressor split and make it a completely different package.

"The connecting-rod length is [now] much longer for the turbine. We didn't create a problem with that connecting rod but, because of the turbine coming out of the engine, the oil-tank configuration was very different. We needed to create an oil-tank configuration that avoided the turbine package."

Switching from a conventional oil tank to what Hasegawa describes as a "crescent shape" created a whole host of unforeseen disastrous consequences for Honda.

"The previous oil tank was just straight, but this year's oil tank was a different shape," Hasegawa adds. "Of course, we tested that oil-tank shape on the dyno, but this is one of the most difficult items to check. We found an issue in the first Barcelona test. It was not a fundamental issue, but it hurt our testing time very much, so it was very bad.

"Of course we modified the oil tank - we updated the oil tank and the situation was solved in just two or three days. But missing two or three days is very fatal for the winter testing."

This problem set back McLaren-Honda's development programme to such an extent that it took five races before the basic package was under control, never mind bettered. On top of the oil dramas, the new Honda combustion concept was also wreaking havoc with the car - something that took months to resolve without adding extra power to last year's numbers.

"It's fair to say the starting level was almost equivalent from last year - peak power was almost equivalent, but low- rpm power was very down," Hasegawa concedes. "It had huge gaps from something like 9000-10,000rpm - no torque. It's OK on the dyno, but when we used upshift and went from 10,000 to 9000, torque decreased dramatically.

"It will create a big oscillation. The dyno's inertia is huge, so it doesn't create a big problem, but the inertia of the car itself is much less. Such a big torque drop was creating a big oscillation."

This made the car extremely difficult to drive (when it was running) until Honda modified the intake system for May's Spanish Grand Prix, which helped recover the lost bottom-end power and driveability. Until then, the drivers were forced to change gear at odd points. You could hear the graunching sounds as the transmission protested the unusual upshift and clutch settings required to avoid this torque drop.

As well as the engine being "far behind" Honda's target at the start of the season, McLaren had to cope with woeful unreliability. Stoffel Vandoorne took just three races to run into grid-penalty trouble, and failed to even start in Bahrain thanks to recurring problems with the engine's MGU-H, while team-mate Alonso non-started the following race in Russia, thanks to an ERS shutdown.

"Other than the target performance we very much had an issue with reliability," admits Hasegawa. "We had so many issues with the oscillation, and also the MGU-H bearing. It also comes from the oil blowing from the oil tank. The oil came to the bearing of the turbine and the turbine bearing was seizing or about to seize - that was creating an issue.

"The bearing itself was not changed from last year, although the package is different, but last year we didn't have such oil blowing from the oil tank because we had a conventional design. Actually, this is just an excuse - we studied very much for every area we changed - but we didn't allow for something besides that area, like the oil-tank configuration, so we had many issues that we didn't expect from our modification.

"We had many MGU-H issues at the beginning of the season, especially in Bahrain. We had maybe three MGU-H failures on Stoffel's car. But we had nothing for that. We just applied a new MGU-H and failure. We spent four or five MGU-Hs there, because we didn't understand what was happening."

When Honda did finally understand what was going on, it modified the oil tank to stop the oil blowing, and beefed up the MGU-H bearing to make it more resilient. Things got much better after that, but McLaren still used more engine components than any other individual team this year and, when Honda missed its agreed performance target to match the estimated power output of the Mercedes customer engine in time for August's Belgian Grand Prix, the fate of McLaren-Honda was sealed.

We'll never know if McLaren could have been convinced to remain on board had all those reliability problems not derailed Honda's early-season development. Without them, perhaps Honda would have made faster progress with its new combustion concept and things might have been different.

But McLaren had pretty much made its mind up before the end of pre-season testing, where that pesky new oil tank had already begun wreaking irrevocable chaos with its mighty aspirations.

 

[First Lady]

How McLaren-Honda was torn apart – the full story

 

Скрытый текст

Ben Anderson

The second coming of McLaren-Honda is over. After three embarrassing seasons one of Formula 1's once-proud alliances is in tatters - but how did it get ripped apart so comprehensively?

Anyone who's followed Formula 1 closely over the past three years will say this outcome was only a matter of time, but now, finally, after nearly three seasons of woeful underachievement, the second coming of the McLaren-Honda alliance has been dissolved.

Yesterday's news follows a series of frantic meetings between McLaren and Honda bosses during the recent Italian Grand Prix weekend, as McLaren served notice to Honda that it intended to walk away from the multi-year works engine partnership that began in earnest in 2015.

It wasn't meant to end this way. McLaren-Honda was meant to rule the world. "Domination", in the manner the previous incarnation of this alliance achieved in the late-1980s, is what Ron Dennis set as the target.

But the best McLaren-Honda managed this time around was merely derision, as it singularly failed to achieve anything approaching its lofty ambition. The decision for McLaren and Honda to finally go their separate ways follows a sustained, some might say endemic, period of underachievement that has tested McLaren's patience beyond breaking point.

Relations were highly strained during the first season of the reformed partnership, but became much better last season, as Honda showed a firmer grasp of the complex hybrid power loop that defines the potency of F1's current breed of V6 turbo engine, helping McLaren climb from ninth to sixth in the constructors' championship.

Meanwhile, McLaren had undergone a serious overhaul of its technical structure, including re-hiring Peter Prodromou from Red Bull. The aim was to improve McLaren's car design processes and rate of development, in readiness for a championship challenge once the Honda engine came good.

The minimum aim this year - not firmly stated publicly but admitted privately - was to finish inside the top four at least. In fact, McLaren chief operating officer Jonathan Neale said the team would be "disappointed" to finish fourth.

McLaren felt the MCL32 produced by its revised technical team would maximize the potential of this season's new and enhanced aerodynamic regulations. This, coupled with a redesigned Honda engine concept - lighter and lower than its predecessor - was meant to allow McLaren to leapfrog the midfield and carry the fight to Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull.

But pre-season testing revealed serious shortcomings. The Honda engine was leaky, unreliable, and less powerful than the old design. It also shook uncontrollably, as the transmission produced terrible vibrations that weren't predicted during winter testing on Honda's Sakura dyno.

McLaren's pre-season preparations were thoroughly ruined as the team struggled to turn laps during two weeks of winter testing, its rivals gaining an advantage with every frustrating minute that passed without McLaren on the track.

Star driver Fernando Alonso was furious; the whole McLaren team was furious. This was setting the team up for a worse season that its annus horribilis of 2015, but without the genuine excuses of a manufacturer then-new into the V6 game.

It was nothing short of a crisis. Moves began behind the scenes to terminate the partnership and seek a return to the Mercedes customer engine fold. Ironic when you consider a major part of McLaren's rationale for partnering with Honda was a belief it couldn't win the world championship as a customer team in the hybrid era.

Nevertheless, the McLaren board figured it could lean on past ties to secure a supply, perhaps even as early as in-season. The Mercedes board was supposedly happy to help McLaren out - they go way back after all - the Mercedes F1 team less so.

But first McLaren faced a tricky conundrum - how to extricate itself from a works partnership with Honda that also commercially puts significant funding into McLaren'sbudget?

McLaren initially tried to repair the damage by brokering an arrangement for Honda to work with Mercedes on a consultancy basis, by which Mercedes agreed to provide advice on component supply chain and other technical matters.

News of this potential partnership broke during the Russian Grand Prix weekend, but apparently hit the skids amid Honda's understandable reluctance to reveal the inner workings of its power unit design to a rival. McLarenwas initially furious, but eventually conceded this would have been an untenable situation for Honda.

So, it was left to Honda to clean up its own mess. The Japanese manufacturer had already begun work on fixing its own shortcomings, bringing in Ilmor - the organisation drafted in by Renault during its own period of early struggle with this formula in 2015 - around the time of April's Chinese Grand Prix.

Honda managed to fix a few of its pre-season problems, but it still suffered a serious lack of power and continued unreliability - particularly with the MGU-H - during the opening races of the campaign. To avert this growing crisis, and rescue the partnership from dissolution, McLarendemanded Honda achieve parity with the Mercedes customer engine it was seeking to obtain as an alternative.

They drew up a three-stage development plan to achieve this by an agreed deadline. The first step was scheduled for May's Spanish Grand Prix, the second for the Canadian GP in June, the third and final step - to match the estimated Mercedes customer engine output - was meant to arrive in time for August's Belgian Grand Prix.

Honda brought updates to each of these races, but they were not sufficient. As its F1 project leader Yusuke Hasegawa admitted in the FIA press conference at Spa, Honda "failed" in its task, and was now in breach of the development plan agreed with McLaren, opening the door for separation and severance.

Anticipating that Honda-Ilmor wouldn't succeed in its task, McLaren continued efforts to secure a supply of customer engines from Mercedes. The F1 team was supposedly reticent to agree to this, fearing an Alonso-driven McLarenwould be a threat to its own prospects at certain tracks. Nevertheless, feeling it had the support of the Mercedes board, McLaren was confident.

Then Sauber fired team boss Monisha Kaltenborn and installed Frederic Vasseur as team principal. Kaltenborn had signed a memorandum of understanding that Honda would supply engines to Sauber for 2018 and beyond, but the proposed deal fell apart amid the growing uncertainty over McLaren's future, and whether Honda would even continue its F1 programme without McLaren.

Vasseur immediately cancelled Sauber's proposed Honda engine deal, undoing weeks of work at Hinwil that had already begun in preparation for Honda coming on board in 2018.

McLaren believes Vasseur went straight to his old friend Wolff to ask for a customer engine supply from Mercedes and was rebuffed, but supposedly Sauber never considered doing a deal with Mercedes in the first place, preferring instead to focus on renewing terms with Ferrari.

Apparently, there was not enough time to make a fresh collaboration with Mercedes work in any case, whereas renewing a pre-existing relationship with Ferrari made things easier for Sauber's 2018 preparations, given the mid-season timing of its decision to cancel the Honda deal.

Mercedes says it does not have the capacity to supply a fourth team properly anyway, having seen the 2016 title battle between Nico Rosberg and Lewis Hamilton warped by serious reliability problems while it supplied a fourth set of engines to the now-defunct Manor team.

McLaren believed Mercedes would rather supply no fourth team at all than see a customer supply head back to McLaren, and began to suspect that even if a deal could be brokered it wouldn't receive parity with the works team on fuel supply and engine mapping.

Talks thus began with Renault around the time of July's British Grand Prix, as Ferrari and Mercedes both ruled out supplying McLaren with engines. The sticking point was that Renault also does not want to supply a fourth team, given the reliability problems it has suffered while servicing three outfits in 2017.

With Mercedes, Ferrari and Renault all locked in to supplying no more than two customers each, as well as their own works outfits, attention turned to breaking the deadlock.

Toro Rosso is a team in need of funding, while the Red Bull/Renault relationship has long been strained, following Red Bull's failed attempt to divorce Renault in 2015 and jump into bed with Mercedes.

The relationship appears so broken there seems little chance of Red Bull ever returning to special customer status with Renault. Why not allow Toro Rosso to work with Honda for a year then jump in on the deal when Red Bull'sown Renault contract expires? Works Hondas have potential for Red Bull in the medium term; second-rate Renaults do not, goes the theory.

The makeweight in the deal was Toro Rosso driver Carlos Sainz Jr, a longtime target of Renault. The plan was for Sainz to go to Renault to compensate Renault for releasing Toro Rosso from the final year of its engine deal, allowing Honda to strike a fresh deal with Red Bull's second team to remain in F1, while McLaren takes over the vacated Renault engine supply. Everyone goes home happy.

Renault said it was open to a partnership with McLaren on the same terms as Red Bull, and McLaren can count on the bonus of already dealing with Renault's fuel and lubricants supplier BP. McLaren also believes it can help Renault technically, having assisted development of certain elements of Honda's energy recovery systems.

What McLaren wants, that it feels it wouldn't get with Mercedes, is total parity with the works outfit - something Red Bull feels it does not receive currently, incidentally, though the French manufacturer has pledged extra support in the wake of Max Verstappen's repeated reliability problems in races this year.

McLaren believes Renault's new 2017 engine concept is capable of producing 570kW (764bhp) of power, but current reliability concerns make 20bhp of that potential inaccessible. Work is ongoing at Viry to correct this for 2018.

McLaren estimates that a fully operational Renault engine, with BP fuel and works mapping, would produce 5bhp more than a current customer Mercedes engine, which it reckons is 15kw (20bhp) down on the works engines owing to software mapping it believes Mercedes only makes available for Hamilton and team-mate Valtteri Bottas in qualifying.

Renault F1 boss Cyril Abiteboul spoke before this season about Renault's new engine concept having the potential to beat Mercedes, and it seems McLaren agrees with that assessment.

Concerns about Honda's long-term commitment to F1 in a post-McLaren world looked to have scuppered the proposed Toro Rosso deal, and therefore McLaren's hopes of a Renault engine deal, during F1's August break, so McLaren was faced with a three-way choice as F1 reconvened at Spa:

1. Stick with Honda but potentially lose Alonso, who privately told McLaren he will definitely sign a new contract once McLaren agrees an engine deal with Renault.

2. Urge further negotiation of a deal between Toro Rosso and Honda by helping convince Honda to maintain its longer-term commitment to F1, freeing up the Renault engine supply McLaren seeks.

3. Divorce Honda but convince it to quit F1 altogether as part of the severance, placing the onus on the FIA to find McLaren an alternative engine for 2018 if one of the remaining manufacturers is not forthcoming.

In the week following the Belgian Grand Prix, McLarendecided once and for all against option one and told Honda its works partnership would cease at the end of 2017, leaving Honda free to do a deal with Toro Rosso to remain in F1, or disappear completely.

Honda motorsport boss Masashi Yamamoto met with McLaren chiefs in Japan before flying into Monza for crunch talks during the Italian Grand Prix. It seems Honda still harboured hopes of convincing McLaren it has developments in place for 2018 that could convince the team to remain in alliance.

Both McLaren's commercial chief Zak Brown and Alonso suggested they'd be keen to see those plans. Hasegawa said he feared Honda wouldn't be able to convince McLaren to remain on board for next year.

The FIA and Formula 1's new owners declared themselves ready to step in to resolve matters if necessary. F1 of course wants McLaren and Alonso to be properly competitive next year, for the good of its show; the FIA wants Honda to remain on the grid for the good of the controversial engine regulations that tempted the Japanese manufacturer back in the first place.

That race finished with something akin to a Mexican stand-off between Toro Rosso/Red Bull, Honda, McLaren and Renault, with everyone waiting for someone else to pull the trigger first. News of Renault's deal to take Sainz from Toro Rosso emerged a week later, the first in a sequence of domino moves that allowed McLaren to annul its partnership with Honda.

There always seemed a fundamental mismatch in ideology between these two. Honda arrived under-prepared and never managed to make up for lost time, seemingly content to work at its own pace and use F1 as an experimental test bed for technology and engineers.

McLaren only wanted results, and wanted them yesterday, which added pressure on Honda and increased the likelihood of mistakes. Honda wanted to be better, but could never progress quickly or competently enough to satisfy McLaren's demands.

Once trust was lost, there was no real hope of reconciliation. So now, finally, after nearly three seasons of abject disappointment and underachievement, McLaren-Honda's second marriage is over.

A match made in heaven it ultimately was not. Rather a tale of great expectations that never came close to being fulfilled.

 

[First Lady]

Why McLaren is betting on Renault, despite Red Bull's disaffection

 

Ben Anderson

 

Скрытый текст

 

So desperate are Red Bull and McLaren for success in Formula 1, they are both prepared to gamble massively on the engine supply front. The next 12 months should indicate whether either can revive its fortunes.

For those who believe in Karma, the next 12 months in Formula 1 should make for fascinating viewing. McLaren and Red Bull both face a reckoning in 2018 that could have serious ramifications for their respective futures, and their respective reputations as two of grand prix racing's powerhouse teams.

Those reputations are hard won and easily lost. McLaren's has been slowly eroded by almost five full seasons of chronic underachievement, while Red Bull has gradually lost the aura of dominance it enjoyed with Renault in the latter part of F1's V8 era, before V6 hybrid turbos ruined everything.

Now the fates of these two proud and successful entities are intertwined - united by their mutual dissatisfaction with their present engine partners. They both put such a brave face on things to begin with, until slowly but surely the vitriol spilled forth into the public domain. Both said it wouldn't, until frustrated competitive instinct took over.

Now, both must surely depend on the F1 engine equivalent of Wife Swap to dig themselves out of trouble. McLaren has prevailed upon Renault to rescue it from a Honda-shaped hole; Red Bull has lived through almost four seasons of Renault strife and may soon rely on Honda to be its saviour.

In many ways both these teams are victims of their own success. Both know what it is to utterly dominate Formula 1, but such impressive achievement so often breeds hubris.

McLaren and Red Bull both believe they belong at the front of the grid - that it is their right to be there. Partly, that is necessary self-belief in a world where winning is everything. It is not totally without foundation either. But unerring self-confidence has its downsides.

When things started to go badly wrong, both felt they could demand the best engine in F1 and get it with no questions asked. Both were ultimately denied. Now, it increasingly looks as though they must feed off one another's scraps to get by until new regulations present opportunity for the balance of power to shift away from Mercedes.

How the mighty have fallen. But you make your bed and lie in it, so the saying goes. Red Bull trashed Renault repeatedly during its darkest days, quickly lost faith in the French manufacturer, made threats to quit the championship if a competitive engine wasn't forthcoming, made overtures to Mercedes, got blocked, and was then forced back to Renault, cap in hand, to renew its existing engine deal on worse commercial terms.

People have long memories when it suits them. Why would Renault really want to lift a finger for Red Bull – especially with its own works project to focus on? Of course it will say all the right things in public, fulfil the terms of the contract, offer a bit of extra support when something goes wrong. But there is a difference between being professional and going the extra mile. And let's face it, running a marathon is tougher if your heart's not in it.

Of course, it's not quite as simple as that. Renault made commitments to Red Bull that were not met, so Red Bull felt within its rights to kick up a fuss. But the way it did this created a lot of damage that arguably can't ever be properly repaired.

The relationship appears broken; the necessary trust is no longer there. Red Bull's status as a preferred customer certainly looks diminished. Now Renault has a new customer on the horizon, so it's no real surprise to hear suggestions it wants to cease working with Red Bull when the current contract between them expires at the end of 2018.

Regardless of any Bernie Ecclestone-engineered obligation to supply Red Bull on Renault's part, lack of will should be enough to send Red Bull elsewhere. Why stay where you are not wanted?

That's where McLaren comes in - the team that gave up a customer supply of the best V6 engines in Formula 1 to become works partner to a different engine manufacturer that hadn't been properly successful in F1 for the best part of 25 years, and which has now given up on that project too.

McLaren and Honda were going to win... no... “dominate” together, but in actual fact they simply produced three years of miserable underachievement. McLaren insisted it wouldn't turn against Honda in the way Red Bull turned on Renault - there were a hundred million reasons not to of course - but eventually McLaren did turn on Honda, felt similarly confident it could get back into bed with Mercedes, got spurned, and out of desperation has now struck up a new relationship with Red Bull's old flame. What happened to "it's impossible for a customer team to become world champion"?

The most telling indicator of how far McLaren has fallen is that it would have been happy to stick with Honda, if only the Japanese manufacturer could have developed this year's engine to parity with the Mercedes customer unit McLaren spurned to join forces with Honda in the first place. Never mind the original plan to produce a more powerful engine than Mercedes could...

The attraction of Renault is simply that it supposedly has the potential to just about eclipse the Mercedes customer engine, if the current power unit can be made to work correctly and reliably. McLaren's hopes for the next three years now rest on something Red Bull has been waiting on for the last four, to no avail.

Fascinating that these two sacred cows of Formula 1 now glance across at each other's field and wonder if the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. Honda will graze in Red Bull's secondary pasture next year, while Renault and Red Bull live through another year of loveless marriage.

In all likelihood, Honda engines will end up in the back of the 2019 Red Bull, because there will simply be no better option - unless third-rate Renaults still end up being superior to top-spec Hondas.

McLaren feels Honda is so utterly useless that it is prepared to sacrifice millions of dollars worth of commercial funding and a works partnership to take an engine that currently would put it in contention for occasional podiums at best - exactly the sort of results McLaren was achieving in the dog days of its Mercedes relationship, with a much worse car it should be noted.

The difference, of course, is trust. McLaren feels it will get absolute parity with the Renault works team - something it felt it was denied by Mercedes and would still be denied even had they joined forces again; something Red Bull feels it doesn't get from Renault presently. McLaren and Renault can start fresh, and build a collaboration untroubled by volatile recent history.

McLaren's big mistake was arguably changing too much at once. Producing good chassis became its main problem circa 2013 and '14, not engines. Now, the cars are much improved but the engine is no good. Honda received only mixed messages through all this - full support one minute, public humiliation the next, depending on the given day. It's interesting to learn that both organisations emerge from this talking past each other - each feeling the other was too inflexible to make things work.

Ignorance is bliss. McLaren's future now depends entirely on something Renault has singularly failed to deliver for Red Bull under these regulations: a reliable engine. The very real risk is that Renault will not find the magic key to unlock the untapped potential lurking within its current power unit design, will then have to detune it accordingly, and McLaren will be left barely better off than it is now.

Fernando Alonso will surely not stand fighting for lower top six finishes and the occasional flukey podium. The novelty will wear off quickly if he must get used to the sight of Lewis Hamilton and Sebastian Vettel disappearing down the road in front of him even with a Renault in the back of his car. If Alonso walks, McLaren loses a key asset, and a chunk more of its formidable reputation with him.

Red Bull needs to hope Honda comes good, because otherwise it faces being Renault's inferior customer until the new engine rules come into play at the end of 2020. Renault is already stretched, already dependent on Red Bull's technical support to get certain things done - such as retrofitting the 2016 MGU-K design into the '17 cars when the new design failed repeatedly in testing.

McLaren will undoubtedly move in to take over that role now, leaving Red Bull less room for manoeuvre. McLaren-Renault is a three-year partnership; they will share fuel and oil supply - key to extracting proper power from these engines - and Renault is already talking of McLaren becoming its reference. As McLaren and Renault enjoy their honeymoon, Red Bull surely faces an immediate future as the bitter, jilted former lover. The third wheel at dinner. The gooseberry on a night out.

And it gets worse. By 2019, two of Red Bull's star assets could well be lost. Daniel Ricciardo is free to seek alternative employment after next season; Max Verstappen could well force his own way out of the team too. Both are unlikely to be impressed by the prospect of Red Bull-Hondas, and are sure to be hot property on the driver market in 12 months' time - when Ferrari will have a spare seat and Mercedes will surely make one available should Valtteri Bottas not take the next step.

But it's not all doom and gloom yet. McLaren and Red Bull are still potentially formidable. McLaren has finally arrested its troubling trend of having to make bad cars come good  with ferocious in-season development. This year's MCL32 is a good car - good enough to keep Alonso happy during the least competitive period of his career.

Conversely, Red Bull hasn't built a really good car since 2013, but still has the requisite power, dexterity and engineering genius to turn things around quicker than almost any other team on the grid. Now unexpected windtunnel correlation troubles are fixed, it should be able to hit the ground running next year.

But both outfits have been damaged by their sustained periods of struggle. Red Bullshould not be battling to keep its star drivers out of the greedy clutches of rivals; McLaren should never be finishing ninth in the constructors' championship two seasons out of three, fighting to retain its best people in the face of chronic underachievement.

But that's where pride and impatience gets you. McLaren had the best engine in F1, but decided to be too clever for its own good - giving it up for a failed experiment that leaves it battling to simply claw back the equivalent of what it once readily held in its hand.

Red Bull's unfettered frustration with Renault has driven a seemingly irreconcilable wedge between them that means Red Bull's best hope now looks to be McLaren's failed experiment finally coming good as Renault shifts its focus elsewhere.

Don't get me wrong, F1 would be far better with Red Bull and McLaren up at the front, challenging Ferrari and Mercedes on a regular basis, but you could say the same for Williams - a once-great team that also used to win championships regularly, but hasn't challenged properly in well over a decade.

Everything is clearer with hindsight of course, and clearly the predicament McLaren and Red Bull find themselves in is not entirely of their own making. But both also must take some responsibility for the present state of things - recognise they are not without flaws, that they have made mistakes, and that no team possesses an inalienable right to success in F1.

We are living through troubled times for McLaren and Red Bull, but the next 12 months should tell us a lot more about how and whether this fine mess is salvageable. Once the rot has set in, it can be awfully tough to shift.

 

 

[Ренат]

11 минут назад, First Lady сказал:

 

ОК.

 

The design flaws that killed McLaren-Honda

 

 

Ben Anderson

 

  Скрыть контент

 

Three seasons and nothing to show for it beyond some mud-slinging and plenty of expensive rebuilds - McLaren-Honda's divorce was drawn out in full public view, with fundamental design flaws at the heart of the problem.

The humble oil tank seems such an innocuous component amid the extraordinary complexity of V6 Formula 1 engines and their hybrid parts. With all the millions of dollars invested in trying to make a success of a works grand prix operation, combined with the expertise of two mighty racing organisations, you wouldn't expect something so basic to be the root cause of calamity.

But that's exactly what happened in 2017. The unfeted oil tank is the chief reason why the McLaren-Honda alliance is no more, dissolved in a poisonous concoction of broken promises and shattered dreams.

Having made encouraging progress in 2016, invested time in helping the FIA to draft this year's new and enhanced aero regulations, and restructured the team in readiness to make the most of them, McLaren felt ready to catch up lost ground to F1's big three teams - Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull.

Meanwhile, Honda planned a major revamp of its engine design, abandoning its original 'size-zero' architecture that contained the turbine and compressor within the V-bank of the engine, instead bringing them outside and adopting the Mercedes concept of attaching them at opposite ends of the block via an elongated connecting shaft.

This would make the engine lower and lighter, helping McLaren solve a high-speed handling imbalance prevalent in the 2016 car, while Honda simultaneously developed new lean-combustion technology on its Sakura dyno that was intended to boost power significantly.

All of which was meant to lift McLaren definitively into the top four at worst, and hopefully into podium and occasional race win contention.

But things got off to the worst possible start when a problem with the oil system consigned Fernando Alonso to the garage for much of the first day of pre-season testing at Barcelona. There was barely an improvement over the remaining seven days of running, as severe vibrations from the power unit and transmission caused repeated breakdowns.

The new-and-improved Honda engine was proving anything but - it was unstable, undriveable, and less powerful than last year's unit. McLaren's patience snapped. As Ferrari and Mercedes completed hundreds upon hundreds of laps, McLaren found itself facing yet another season of severe struggle, and so began machinations behind the scenes to end this ill-fated partnership for good.

It's been an incredibly disappointing season for McLaren-Honda: ninth in the constructors' championship and only three points better than its 2015 nadir. Sixth for Alonso in Hungary was the highlight result, and McLaren was actually further away from Mercedes' pace this season than it was last year.

Results, performance and reliability all went backwards in 2017. As axed Honda F1 boss Yusuke Hasegawa explains, it all had to do with a confluence of connected circumstances, with the oil tank at their epicentre.

"Go back to 2015, our MGU-H energy-recovery level was very low," says Hasegawa. "It was because of the limited turbine package size. In 2016 we modified the turbine to make it much bigger. Because of that we needed to make the turbine position much higher.

"With doing that, I think the recovery level was very competitive - almost the same level as the top team. But because of that we were thinking the centre of gravity was one of the big issues for us - especially in Suzuka I noticed that momentum of the car was very bad.

"Of course we identified that issue from the beginning of the season, so we understood we needed to change the turbine position to much lower, but to do that we had to make the turbine/compressor split and make it a completely different package.

"The connecting-rod length is [now] much longer for the turbine. We didn't create a problem with that connecting rod but, because of the turbine coming out of the engine, the oil-tank configuration was very different. We needed to create an oil-tank configuration that avoided the turbine package."

Switching from a conventional oil tank to what Hasegawa describes as a "crescent shape" created a whole host of unforeseen disastrous consequences for Honda.

"The previous oil tank was just straight, but this year's oil tank was a different shape," Hasegawa adds. "Of course, we tested that oil-tank shape on the dyno, but this is one of the most difficult items to check. We found an issue in the first Barcelona test. It was not a fundamental issue, but it hurt our testing time very much, so it was very bad.

"Of course we modified the oil tank - we updated the oil tank and the situation was solved in just two or three days. But missing two or three days is very fatal for the winter testing."

This problem set back McLaren-Honda's development programme to such an extent that it took five races before the basic package was under control, never mind bettered. On top of the oil dramas, the new Honda combustion concept was also wreaking havoc with the car - something that took months to resolve without adding extra power to last year's numbers.

"It's fair to say the starting level was almost equivalent from last year - peak power was almost equivalent, but low- rpm power was very down," Hasegawa concedes. "It had huge gaps from something like 9000-10,000rpm - no torque. It's OK on the dyno, but when we used upshift and went from 10,000 to 9000, torque decreased dramatically.

"It will create a big oscillation. The dyno's inertia is huge, so it doesn't create a big problem, but the inertia of the car itself is much less. Such a big torque drop was creating a big oscillation."

This made the car extremely difficult to drive (when it was running) until Honda modified the intake system for May's Spanish Grand Prix, which helped recover the lost bottom-end power and driveability. Until then, the drivers were forced to change gear at odd points. You could hear the graunching sounds as the transmission protested the unusual upshift and clutch settings required to avoid this torque drop.

As well as the engine being "far behind" Honda's target at the start of the season, McLaren had to cope with woeful unreliability. Stoffel Vandoorne took just three races to run into grid-penalty trouble, and failed to even start in Bahrain thanks to recurring problems with the engine's MGU-H, while team-mate Alonso non-started the following race in Russia, thanks to an ERS shutdown.

"Other than the target performance we very much had an issue with reliability," admits Hasegawa. "We had so many issues with the oscillation, and also the MGU-H bearing. It also comes from the oil blowing from the oil tank. The oil came to the bearing of the turbine and the turbine bearing was seizing or about to seize - that was creating an issue.

"The bearing itself was not changed from last year, although the package is different, but last year we didn't have such oil blowing from the oil tank because we had a conventional design. Actually, this is just an excuse - we studied very much for every area we changed - but we didn't allow for something besides that area, like the oil-tank configuration, so we had many issues that we didn't expect from our modification.

"We had many MGU-H issues at the beginning of the season, especially in Bahrain. We had maybe three MGU-H failures on Stoffel's car. But we had nothing for that. We just applied a new MGU-H and failure. We spent four or five MGU-Hs there, because we didn't understand what was happening."

When Honda did finally understand what was going on, it modified the oil tank to stop the oil blowing, and beefed up the MGU-H bearing to make it more resilient. Things got much better after that, but McLaren still used more engine components than any other individual team this year and, when Honda missed its agreed performance target to match the estimated power output of the Mercedes customer engine in time for August's Belgian Grand Prix, the fate of McLaren-Honda was sealed.

We'll never know if McLaren could have been convinced to remain on board had all those reliability problems not derailed Honda's early-season development. Without them, perhaps Honda would have made faster progress with its new combustion concept and things might have been different.

But McLaren had pretty much made its mind up before the end of pre-season testing, where that pesky new oil tank had already begun wreaking irrevocable chaos with its mighty aspirations.

 

 

 

 

емко, эпично, трагично, удивил подход инженеров поднебесной, напомнило Райкинское-Претензии к пуговицам есть?!

[BMU]

Цитата

Нефетированный масляный бак - главная причина, по которой Альянс McLaren-Honda больше не растворяется в ядовитой стряпне нарушенных обещаний и разрушенных мечтаний.

[BMU]

Неправильная пятница в ветке начинается с Х..ды

 

 

Правильная с:

 

[septacid]

4 часа назад, svarog сказал:

Если ты давно читаешь эту ветку, то уже давно должен был заметить, что я не Хонду тут нахваливаю, а борюсь с сектантством. 

 

тут было мнение что данный экземпляр личности надо к нам записывать, плашку троля, регалии...цвета....

Тролли, люди со сложной организацией, многие повзрослели с тех пор когда можно было поржать да поиздеваться в теме феррари в 2009-2013 м и отошли  дел.. а здесь человек прямой, по своему мудрый, с собственной философией. 

И энтузиазмом Дона Кихота 

Нам бы таких полд.жины да семь лет назад, во всю ту же тему феррари.  Добились бы закрытия темы совсем.

[Барт Венегор]

Разрыв шаблонов

Цитата

Заместитель руководителя «Форс Индия» Боб Фернли назвал в числе одной из причин невыразительного начала сезона-2018 моторы «Мерседес».

«По сравнению с Гран-при Австралии 2017 года команды с моторами „Мерседес“ стали быстрее в среднем на 1,1 секунды, тогда как коллективы с моторами „Рено“, которые являются для нас основными соперниками, прибавили в среднем на 1,6 секунды. Но нам важно сохранять наши прошлогодние сильные стороны — надёжность машины и грамотную стратегию в гонках. Дайте нам два-три этапа, чтобы лучше понять новый болид и подготовить обновления для него», — сказал Фернли Auto Motor und Sport.

 

[Gonchar25]

2 часа назад, Vo-Va сказал:

Когда событие произошло и не совпало с тем , о чём говорил до него , очень удобно потом все на иронию или шутку списывать .

 

Ну слушайте, основной лейтмотив ветки и общее ожидание от сезона -- это минимум 4 место в КК, как максимум борьба за подиумы и конкуренция с РБ. 

Никто здесь дублей и доминирования Макларена в сезоне 2018 не ждет.

Опять же, может быть Вы мне покажете, кто на серьезе это ждет, процитируете, не знаю. Я таких людей не вижу. 

[AGSyar]

1 час назад, Vo-Va сказал:

Когда событие произошло и не совпало с тем , о чём говорил до него , очень удобно потом все на иронию или шутку списывать .

 

Т.е. ты правда считаешь, что мой пост про 7 титулов Тофика был написан всерьёз? 

[Vo-Va]

5 минут назад, Gonchar25 сказал:

Ну слушайте, основной лейтмотив ветки и общее ожидание от сезона -- это минимум 4 место в КК, как максимум борьба за подиумы и конкуренция с РБ.

Никто здесь дублей и доминирования Макларена в сезоне 2018 не ждет.

Опять же, может быть Вы мне покажете, кто на серьезе это ждет, процитируете, не знаю. Я таких людей не вижу.

НЕ буду пальцем тыкать .

Причин несколько.Про одну писал выше.

 

[Ferdi]

1 час назад, Барт Венегор сказал:

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У Рено три сильные команды, а не фарм-клубы и доходяги, как у этих трусов из Феррари и Мерседеса. РБ хорошо и задолго готовился к этому сезону, Энстоун ожидаемо усилился, да ещё у них теперь два пилота и то, что Макларен, при таком пожарном переходе на эти движки, не просел относительно их, очень хорошо характеризует инженерный потенциал команды.

[Алексей95]

3 часа назад, Ferdi сказал:

У Рено три сильные команды, а не фарм-клубы и доходяги, как у этих трусов из Феррари и Мерседеса. РБ хорошо и задолго готовился к этому сезону, Энстоун ожидаемо усилился, да ещё у них теперь два пилота и то, что Макларен, при таком пожарном переходе на эти движки, не просел относительно их, очень хорошо характеризует инженерный потенциал команды.

Надеюсь, не будет как в 14 году, шаровый подиум в Австралии,  а по сезону уступили   Вильямс и были перед ФИ в КК. вроде проблема была из за Мобила еще? У Всех Мерсов был Петронас