When picking up and cornering, the car’s brain tells the V6 to keep revs, and it delivers 350 kilowatts of energy to the battery. But there is another way the engine can recharge the battery which is when the driver’s foot is still flat on the throttle. F1 calls this “super clipping”, and when this is happening, the car’s power output at the rear wheels is significantly reduced – none of the power going to the battery can go to the rear wheels, and the V6 only has 400kW to offer. Super clipping is therefore capped at 200 kW, leaving another 200 kW (268 hp) to push the car.
So sometimes an F1 car has 750 kilowatts (1,005 hp), sometimes it has 400 kilowatts, and sometimes it may even have 200 kilowatts.
Like the other 21 cars, they will be on the track, but not in any coordinated manner. The software controlling the hybrid system is capricious, and decides when to start super clipping, and when to increase or decrease power from the MGU, based on how much it has already spent on the lap and how much it thinks it will need.
What is the problem?
The new engine rage was created to get automakers more excited about the game, before many of them started retrofitting electric vehicles. It worked: Audi, Cadillac and Honda signed on to join Ferrari and Mercedes. But as I mentioned above, the new formula means that cars lose energy during a lap, especially during qualifying when the goal is to drive the car at its absolute limits.
As we saw in Japan, this effectively eliminates all the fast corners in F1, because you can reach lower overall lap times by using that energy elsewhere. There are no real problems with lift and coast during the race – as mentioned earlier, this is already common practice in IndyCar and endurance racing. But in qualifying, that’s another matter, and watching the cars line up and pass the 130R corner at Suzuka in Japan was something that unnerved almost every race fan this writer knows. Driving it feels even worse: McLaren’s Lando Norris described it as “soul destroying”.
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