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.
But maybe that's the difference between shipping a controller for F1 versus shipping one for an industrial or consumer product? shrug.
The problem was that the ECUs went into limp mode due to multiple factors triggered by the drivers driving slowly (slick tires, wet surface, new PU ... ) and the ECUs are programmed to go into limp mode to protect the ICE, since it had no battery anymore and no turbo boost. The update was simply disabling that failsafe.
> 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.
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).
> That's true for the "big teams", small teams don't have the resources, they're just "happy to be there".
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 https://www.the-race.com/formula-1/cost-cap-creating-two-tie...
It was very unlikely there was actual coding involved, as even the C++ build and test toolchain would run for ages (in my automotive days it would run for 45 minutes and that was just build, link and static analysis). In this case it's probably just a config change.
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.
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.
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.
I imagine this is handled at a team level though, Red Bull were giving Max instructions over the radio to keep the revs at a certain level. Presumably if the team had simulated these conditions they'd have discovered the potential problem and then come up with a process to mitigate it.
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
Seems a lot better place to learn than in the middle of the race and earning $0 for the race. Isn't that the entire point of a simulator to learn things that are too expensive to learn in the real world?
There's more than one type of simulator, and F1 has certain 'spending caps', after a spending war bankrupted bunch of teams.
Wind tunnel time and aerodynamics simulator time are included in the cost cap, as are car parts and most staff (but not driver salaries, travel or marketing)
Drivers can spend all the time they want in standard consumer sim racing rigs, practising the tracks. But when it's the type of extra-high-fidelity simulator that lets you make the car better - that's subject to the cost cap.
I assume someone is already offering an extremely high-fidelity CFD simulator (or a wind tunnel) to help companies shoot awesome videos of their cars, for purposes of including them in TV spots, of course.
CFD simulations came at around 2010. Redbull had the best of them, that's why they took over from Mercedes-McLaren those years.
I worked on engine and powertrain simulations, and my compiler was used for vehicle and driver simulations. This was built for Honda, but Honda left, bought by Mercedes, and won them several championships.
In fact there is a very specific cap on CFD simulations beyond the normal cost cap, to prevent an HPC arm race. Used to be an actual flop cap, but of course teams found way around it, now it is more complicated.
> Seems a lot better place to learn than in the middle of the race and earning $0 for the race.
That's... not how it works at all, though. There are no prizes for individual races and the championship money is also pennies to the teams.
Mercedes's Kimi Antonelli is going to win the WDC anyway for sure at this point, given the points difference.
> Isn't that the entire point of a simulator to learn things that are too expensive to learn in the real world?
You're right but this is not those expensive things. Track time is extremely limited, so the primary role of the sim is to develop the car and how it feels to the drivers, mainly so the setup feels perfect to them.
System-level bugs etc must have their own testing but sim is mainly for driver-engineer testing. Many drivers also don't like using the sim at all like Hamilton.
I believe they likely used software they already had or just changed a software. As from what I read, it removed a certain system and limitions in the software which is used to ensure teams aren't cheating (traction control), which was triggering in error due to the strange conditions of the race. So all they were doing is disabling this system
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.
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.
This must be related to how Toto turns off George Russell’s car if it’s looking like he’s still a potential threat to the golden child, Kimi. Kidding. Kind of.
I like that George seems to be in a better headspace. He was like that posh brit talking others down with a know it all attitude, but since the summerbreak he has been way more relaxed and less antagonistic.
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)
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.
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.
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.
In 2020 Hungarian GP, Red Bull rebuilt the front end of Max's car, /on the grid/, after he crashed out during a recon lap[1]. They had 20 minutes, but but finished comfortably early with 25 seconds to spare. Max finished that race in second position.
[1] it was a wet race so the race start was delayed after the initial recon lap.
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.
Traction control was allowed before 2008. The problem was that it trivialized some aspects of driving - drivers could floor the throttle through turns at little to no risk. (I suspect there may have also been some concerns that drivers who pushed traction control too far could have easily ended up in unrecoverable situations.)
> Why? To increase chances of crashes that produces more views?
Why not allow traction control? To increase crashes?
Why not allow "lane keep assist"? To increase drivers crashing into walls?
Why not allow "automatic braking"? To increase drivers slamming into walls and other drivers?
Why do we still have the human in the car when a brick on the accelerator could do the same job? So when the cars crash people feel there are real stakes?
(Presumably they've decided they want the sport to be about the drivers to some extent.)
There’s room for debate but automated safety features on a racetrack isn’t like having them for normal highway driving. What if an edge case isn’t found in testing and automatic braking causes a crash instead of prevents it? How do you consider all edge cases when there’s 22 cars driving at 300km/h?
Aside from that it’s preposterous to think the FIA wants crashes or less safety. A large chunk of regulations are for safety and historically the drivers fight against many of the safety measures (in other words, FIA is historically not the ones blocking safety measures).
Crashes don't directly make for a better race; what matters is the amount of actual competition, and for that you need variation.
If every driver drove exactly the same way, then the race would be 100% down to basically just team strategy and the car itself. For fans of strategy that might be fine, but I think most people would find it much less interesting.
Basically, there's an endless struggle between "how much do we let automation control?" If there were no such rules, the role of the driver would be far less than it is now, which would effectively reduce competition.
There's some debate but it's kinda settled, it's the pinnacle of motorsports so no driver aids, they are moving away from hybrids, realizing road car relevance/parity is no longer the direction
I don't think it is the hybrid per se that is the issue. It is the heavy computer directed control of harvesting and deployment that it is disliked by both drivers and fans.
There have been series' like that, but its equally bad, in the other direction. In that scenario drivers qualify in speed order, then they do the race in the same order. It's not much fun to watch.
Every track is the same because all the cars have the same strengths and weaknesses.
In other words, there are too few variables.
Good races are where teams are involved to make the best car, drivers are involved to execute the best driving, strategists are involved to make the best decisions, and luck creates jeopardy for all.
With different cars (any they are remarkably different given the extensive regs) some do well at high speed tracks, others prefer corners and so on.
I mean that's pretty much the IndyCar spec and they have pretty decent racing. They've done things like embracing underbody aero to cut down on dirty air to allow them to follow closer, low downforce specs on ovals to force them to race the track. Even a spec car, a drivers ability to communicate setup issues to the team, the team to implement them, the budget to do it. F1 is some of the best in the world, but none since Mansell have really came over and dominated, not even Alonso.
Current IndyCar is pretty good compared to the IRL years, this isn't an argument to make F1 a spec series. I was IndyCar for close exciting racing, I watch F1 for the engineering battle as well as the drivers. I think for a lot of F1 fans, the off track drama, the development of the teams through out the season, and the cool ideas they come up with to try to push the boundaries are about as good as the on track entertainment.
The spectacle is still very important, there is nothing like seeing F1 cornering speeds in person. IndyCar isn't close, they have their oval thing with ultra high sustained top speeds, but not even close to F1 on a road course. When you see how fast an F1 car can change directions, it genuinely boggles the mind that a human is behind that. And they've really dropped the ball in that aspect this season. The fans aren't happy, the driver's aren't happy. Something needs to change.
> I mean that's pretty much the IndyCar spec ... but none since Mansell have really came over and dominated, not even Alonso.
Didn't Alonso's first attempt at the Indy 500 (with McLaren?) result in him making it into the final qualification category, and see him leading the race until his car blew up, forcing him to retire? On his first attempt?
Because then it's not Formula 1 anymore, Formula 1 is about the prototype engineering competition paired with the driver's competition. Without one of them it's a different motorsport.
F1 seems to be the result of a tension between normal people wanting to see the driver in control, and engineering teams wanting to one-up each other in tech. The two ideas don't actually mix, but like with two fluids that don't mix, you can still pretend they do if you keep stirring.
Because that’s also not desirable all the time either. There are lots of one make series out there but they can be pretty mixed in how fun they are to watch. I was at Croft a few weeks ago and the BTCC rounds were incredible, close racing with overtakes and near miss crashes.
The Porsche GT and GT Sprint Cups (911 and Cayman respectively) were a lot more like a procession where the faster drivers quickly ordered themselves and drove away from the rest of the grid. Granted there were fewer cars starting, which didn’t help, but it still didn’t make for exciting viewing.
Generally, the way F1 was originally supposed to work is that manufacturers develop tech to skirt regulations, which then means that tech makes it eventually into consumer cars. A lot of the core technology in modern cars (TC, ABS, Turbo control, e.t.c) got properly developed in F1 before it was brought to the masses.
What I do find interesting is GT3 cars have both ABS and traction control these days and they have great racing. I believe prototypes have TC but no ABS. I realize the mix of talent is much different, especially in GT3 where there are Pro/AM teams and stuff like that, but I'm not sure TC makes that big of a difference on the racing. I don't think ABS should ever be allowed in open wheel as it inspires too much risk taking in overtakes. The whole reason NA F1 revved so high was partially to help keep the power band reasonable exiting slow corners.
As you say, the driver skill is very different between F1 and GT3. If traction control was allowed in F1, the teams would not settle for something like in GT3, it would become an arms race. In the end we might end up with racing determined by who has the best control algorightms, and not who has the best dirver/chassis.
The entire purpose of traction control is to reduce the driver skill required when cornering and braking. This is why traction control is omnipresent in consumer vehicles, because the vast majority of road drivers are awful.
FIA bans traction control so as to place more emphasis on driver skill.
We should allow batting machines for baseball players to hit the ball more reliably as well. Poker players should play with their cards face up. I agree.
Manually controlling to the limits of the car is a big part of the skill of racing.
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!
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!"
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.
I think it's been a long time since any motor racing was just about engineering the best possible car. The problem is that engineering got too good - the best possible car we could make would simply be far too fast to be safe. So F1 (and all motor racing) are always playing the rules to try and keep an even field (otherwise the best funded teams would be leagues ahead) and to stop the engineers from killing the drivers.
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.
During the Sky commentary, Anthony Davidson explained the specific electro-mechanical interactions based on what teams were telling him.
The FIA absolutely do need the ability to enforce regulations, but perhaps they should be monitoring for traction control and then stewarding that, rather than managing parts of the ECU firmware...
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.
The problem happened during the formation lap. They red-flagged the race and brought all the cars off the track. I don't know any more about the update mechanism than you do, but GP's theory is plausible.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Think raspberry pi on steroids that are on steroids that are on steroids.
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.
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.
> "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
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.
Which is indeed ridiculous and that's not what he said. The electronic side refers to the hybrid part. Most drivers have spoken out against that this season.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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"
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.
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.
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..
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.
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.
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.
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.
“Motorsport grade” auto components usually means crappy, and everything requires a software patch or constant maintenance to work correctly.
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.
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 ;).
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.
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.
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.
It's all because of the bad idea of artificially limiting the regenerative breaking powered boost. Why even have that limitation, lift it and allow all the teams to a roll their own software, work on their batteries and electric motors and regenerative breaking. Make it just another field of competition like the rest of the cars engineering, sure you can have minimum and maximum specs but putting in place electronic controls to nerf performance flies in the face of the spirit of the sport.
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".
I'm not saying they're necessarily wrong in this specific case, but basically every change in every single sport ever is treated by the participants and "serious fans" as a horrible idea that will be the death of the sport.
Sometimes changes really are bad and are reverted, but more often the changes eventually get accepted and years later everyone involved treats it as an integral part of the sport.
Even "serious fans" almost always seem to be biased by the state of the sport when they started watching. Every change since that point is horrible and misguided, but they rarely argue for reverting changes that happened before then.
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?
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.
But yes, they completely made the powertrains to opaque for the viewer, and they definitely missed the ball on the sound aspect.
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?
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.
Maybe 30+ years ago. Carbon fiber parts, motors made of Beryllium alloys, the hybrid tech was interesting for a short while etc.
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.
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.
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.
Someone on reddit showed a graph comparing both, and it's just ridiculous.
I'm an avid F1 fan since 1990s, and think hybrid engines is the wrong way to do it.
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.
These days F1 is one huge yawn fest. Who wants to see a bunch of millionaires drive cars around in loops in a fixed order? The whole thing could be replaced by a simulation really. Any real Racing left F1 decades ago.
Unfortunately the motorcycle counterpart MotoGP has been going the same direction. But At least in MotoGP they're now trying to control the aeros and electronics and bring back the racing and rider vs rider competition.
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?
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...
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...
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.
All that, yes. But they don't work too well if the battery runs out halfway down the straight... and there is too little charging.
I wasn't politicizing E vs ICE... but commenting on the particular specifications these rules mandate for F1. Specifications that are not fit for purpose.
There's no reason the battery should run out on the straight, though. You can charge at any point while driving, not just during braking. Obviously you're taking torque from the engine to do so, but that's a strategic consideration.
> Obviously you're taking torque from the engine to do so, but that's a strategic consideration.
but drivers dislike do not being in control the harvesting and deployment (which apparently would be too complex to be manual), while fans dislike cars clipping out on straights.
Regenerative brakes (maybe even on front wheels!) would be great, but they are not enough to charge the battery given the current split. MGU-H was also a great invention, but was phased out apparently for complexity.
Next year the power output split will be tweaked to make clipping less extreme, but won't solve allt he issues.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Therefore this was the Bahrain F1, it just happened to take place in Malaysia.
I have a chuckle every time the Williams is on the screen with its Claude sponsorship. Why don't they simply ask Claude to make their car fast, are they stupid?
Yes, there are definitely trends in which sectors sponsor F1. Most famously perhaps, the tobacco companies. Cryptocurrency was in vogue for a few years. Now it's AI companies.
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.
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 :]
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.
But maybe that's the difference between shipping a controller for F1 versus shipping one for an industrial or consumer product? shrug.
The problem was that the ECUs went into limp mode due to multiple factors triggered by the drivers driving slowly (slick tires, wet surface, new PU ... ) and the ECUs are programmed to go into limp mode to protect the ICE, since it had no battery anymore and no turbo boost. The update was simply disabling that failsafe.
> 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.
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).
[^1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jd3miTpvUmI
> That's true for the "big teams", small teams don't have the resources, they're just "happy to be there".
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.
Indeed. Haas is the only team that failed to hit the budget cap (while still being significantly ahead of AM and Williams).
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 https://www.the-race.com/formula-1/cost-cap-creating-two-tie...
It seems they simply disabled a bunch of power limits. Probably just settings, rather than an actual code update.
This is the most likely…they just flipped a setting flag that was causing an unintended conflict.
F1 are effectively prototype cars.
Every GP is a slightly different car running bleeding edge tech and code.
This reminds me of a story how Deep Space 1 was fixed from 100 million miles-away. [1]
[1] https://gigamonkeys.com/book/lather-rinse-repeat-a-tour-of-t... (the last paragraph, search for "remote debugging" in the page)
It was very unlikely there was actual coding involved, as even the C++ build and test toolchain would run for ages (in my automotive days it would run for 45 minutes and that was just build, link and static analysis). In this case it's probably just a config change.
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.
Ah, a student of the old masters....
(For the uninitiated, or those who wish to relive the memory: https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html )
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.
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.
They have people in sim almost all the time / as much as allowed during the weekend.
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.
I imagine this is handled at a team level though, Red Bull were giving Max instructions over the radio to keep the revs at a certain level. Presumably if the team had simulated these conditions they'd have discovered the potential problem and then come up with a process to mitigate it.
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
Seems a lot better place to learn than in the middle of the race and earning $0 for the race. Isn't that the entire point of a simulator to learn things that are too expensive to learn in the real world?
There's more than one type of simulator, and F1 has certain 'spending caps', after a spending war bankrupted bunch of teams.
Wind tunnel time and aerodynamics simulator time are included in the cost cap, as are car parts and most staff (but not driver salaries, travel or marketing)
Drivers can spend all the time they want in standard consumer sim racing rigs, practising the tracks. But when it's the type of extra-high-fidelity simulator that lets you make the car better - that's subject to the cost cap.
> but not driver salaries, travel or marketing
I assume someone is already offering an extremely high-fidelity CFD simulator (or a wind tunnel) to help companies shoot awesome videos of their cars, for purposes of including them in TV spots, of course.
CFD simulations came at around 2010. Redbull had the best of them, that's why they took over from Mercedes-McLaren those years.
I worked on engine and powertrain simulations, and my compiler was used for vehicle and driver simulations. This was built for Honda, but Honda left, bought by Mercedes, and won them several championships.
In fact there is a very specific cap on CFD simulations beyond the normal cost cap, to prevent an HPC arm race. Used to be an actual flop cap, but of course teams found way around it, now it is more complicated.
> Seems a lot better place to learn than in the middle of the race and earning $0 for the race.
That's... not how it works at all, though. There are no prizes for individual races and the championship money is also pennies to the teams.
Mercedes's Kimi Antonelli is going to win the WDC anyway for sure at this point, given the points difference.
> Isn't that the entire point of a simulator to learn things that are too expensive to learn in the real world?
You're right but this is not those expensive things. Track time is extremely limited, so the primary role of the sim is to develop the car and how it feels to the drivers, mainly so the setup feels perfect to them.
System-level bugs etc must have their own testing but sim is mainly for driver-engineer testing. Many drivers also don't like using the sim at all like Hamilton.
I think simulations play more into the strategy than on the power curves of the cars (though they probably calibrate that on pre-season training)
I believe they likely used software they already had or just changed a software. As from what I read, it removed a certain system and limitions in the software which is used to ensure teams aren't cheating (traction control), which was triggering in error due to the strange conditions of the race. So all they were doing is disabling this system
It was probably just "config" changes or changing some hard-coded constants. So relatively straightforward.
> just
Sometimes we bring down whole services with "just" config (looking at you, DNS).
It is big difference if a "one in a million" bug is deployed to two vehicles or a million vehicles.
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.
Except here, where it's kind of the point of the sport in the first place?
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
I think that's what he is saying that the anti-cheat falsy detected it as traction control
or if it is there, it is definitely, surely, cross my heart, not enabled in prod [1]!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_cheating_during...
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.
https://youtube.com/@actuallyven
I mean, the article literally says a firmware update was deployed mid race to remove power limits, is the article wrong?
Teams confirmed it was a firmware update on the broadcast. Article is correct.
Disabling code is usually safer than enabling, seems they were able to pinpoint this rather quickly.
They rolled out a prepared safe defaults version with lots of checks, including the crashing one, removed.
It was probably just a json with settings.
it has to be parameters only
I think those engineers had some memories of their FSAE / FSUK days during that patch.
This must be related to how Toto turns off George Russell’s car if it’s looking like he’s still a potential threat to the golden child, Kimi. Kidding. Kind of.
Signed, a bitter George Russell fan.
I'm amazed that there's real life fans of George Russell. Kidding. Kind of ;)
I like that George seems to be in a better headspace. He was like that posh brit talking others down with a know it all attitude, but since the summerbreak he has been way more relaxed and less antagonistic.
Having Lance Strulovitch as a peer probably helps grounding your ego
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.
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.
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.
In 2020 Hungarian GP, Red Bull rebuilt the front end of Max's car, /on the grid/, after he crashed out during a recon lap[1]. They had 20 minutes, but but finished comfortably early with 25 seconds to spare. Max finished that race in second position.
[1] it was a wet race so the race start was delayed after the initial recon lap.
Move fast and try not to break things.
Every race is a different car, maybe a different engine, with different software, basically.
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.
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?
As far as I'm aware the FIA can inspect whatever element of the car they like.
The FIA has this software to stop teams from creating a form of traction control (which has been banned for a good while now)
Why? To increase chances of crashes that produces more views?
Traction control was allowed before 2008. The problem was that it trivialized some aspects of driving - drivers could floor the throttle through turns at little to no risk. (I suspect there may have also been some concerns that drivers who pushed traction control too far could have easily ended up in unrecoverable situations.)
There's some interesting discussion of the history and technical aspects at: https://www.f1-forecast.com/pdf/F1-Files/Honda/F1-SP2_25e.pd...
> Why? To increase chances of crashes that produces more views?
Why not allow traction control? To increase crashes?
Why not allow "lane keep assist"? To increase drivers crashing into walls?
Why not allow "automatic braking"? To increase drivers slamming into walls and other drivers?
Why do we still have the human in the car when a brick on the accelerator could do the same job? So when the cars crash people feel there are real stakes?
(Presumably they've decided they want the sport to be about the drivers to some extent.)
There’s room for debate but automated safety features on a racetrack isn’t like having them for normal highway driving. What if an edge case isn’t found in testing and automatic braking causes a crash instead of prevents it? How do you consider all edge cases when there’s 22 cars driving at 300km/h?
Aside from that it’s preposterous to think the FIA wants crashes or less safety. A large chunk of regulations are for safety and historically the drivers fight against many of the safety measures (in other words, FIA is historically not the ones blocking safety measures).
Crashes don't directly make for a better race; what matters is the amount of actual competition, and for that you need variation.
If every driver drove exactly the same way, then the race would be 100% down to basically just team strategy and the car itself. For fans of strategy that might be fine, but I think most people would find it much less interesting.
Basically, there's an endless struggle between "how much do we let automation control?" If there were no such rules, the role of the driver would be far less than it is now, which would effectively reduce competition.
There's some debate but it's kinda settled, it's the pinnacle of motorsports so no driver aids, they are moving away from hybrids, realizing road car relevance/parity is no longer the direction
I don't think it is the hybrid per se that is the issue. It is the heavy computer directed control of harvesting and deployment that it is disliked by both drivers and fans.
I am not big in F1, but my understanding is that the primary goal is to have the driver be more relevant over the car/firmware producers.
Then why not have standardised vehicles and have the driver be the only variable?
There have been series' like that, but its equally bad, in the other direction. In that scenario drivers qualify in speed order, then they do the race in the same order. It's not much fun to watch.
Every track is the same because all the cars have the same strengths and weaknesses.
In other words, there are too few variables.
Good races are where teams are involved to make the best car, drivers are involved to execute the best driving, strategists are involved to make the best decisions, and luck creates jeopardy for all.
With different cars (any they are remarkably different given the extensive regs) some do well at high speed tracks, others prefer corners and so on.
I mean that's pretty much the IndyCar spec and they have pretty decent racing. They've done things like embracing underbody aero to cut down on dirty air to allow them to follow closer, low downforce specs on ovals to force them to race the track. Even a spec car, a drivers ability to communicate setup issues to the team, the team to implement them, the budget to do it. F1 is some of the best in the world, but none since Mansell have really came over and dominated, not even Alonso.
Current IndyCar is pretty good compared to the IRL years, this isn't an argument to make F1 a spec series. I was IndyCar for close exciting racing, I watch F1 for the engineering battle as well as the drivers. I think for a lot of F1 fans, the off track drama, the development of the teams through out the season, and the cool ideas they come up with to try to push the boundaries are about as good as the on track entertainment.
The spectacle is still very important, there is nothing like seeing F1 cornering speeds in person. IndyCar isn't close, they have their oval thing with ultra high sustained top speeds, but not even close to F1 on a road course. When you see how fast an F1 car can change directions, it genuinely boggles the mind that a human is behind that. And they've really dropped the ball in that aspect this season. The fans aren't happy, the driver's aren't happy. Something needs to change.
> I mean that's pretty much the IndyCar spec ... but none since Mansell have really came over and dominated, not even Alonso.
Didn't Alonso's first attempt at the Indy 500 (with McLaren?) result in him making it into the final qualification category, and see him leading the race until his car blew up, forcing him to retire? On his first attempt?
Because then it's not Formula 1 anymore, Formula 1 is about the prototype engineering competition paired with the driver's competition. Without one of them it's a different motorsport.
It's called normal race?
F1 seems to be the result of a tension between normal people wanting to see the driver in control, and engineering teams wanting to one-up each other in tech. The two ideas don't actually mix, but like with two fluids that don't mix, you can still pretend they do if you keep stirring.
Because that’s also not desirable all the time either. There are lots of one make series out there but they can be pretty mixed in how fun they are to watch. I was at Croft a few weeks ago and the BTCC rounds were incredible, close racing with overtakes and near miss crashes.
The Porsche GT and GT Sprint Cups (911 and Cayman respectively) were a lot more like a procession where the faster drivers quickly ordered themselves and drove away from the rest of the grid. Granted there were fewer cars starting, which didn’t help, but it still didn’t make for exciting viewing.
that would make the engineering fans unhappy, it's in the DNA of f1 as much as driver skills, plus they still need to beat their teammate.
Presumably because they also see at least some value in technical innovation.
It's possible for driver skill to be important without being the only thing that matters.
They have that, it’s Indycar.
F1 has always been about the combination of excellence in driving and in engineering.
Generally, the way F1 was originally supposed to work is that manufacturers develop tech to skirt regulations, which then means that tech makes it eventually into consumer cars. A lot of the core technology in modern cars (TC, ABS, Turbo control, e.t.c) got properly developed in F1 before it was brought to the masses.
Traction control removes of the most fundamental skills of a driver. It’s like allowing ABS.
What I do find interesting is GT3 cars have both ABS and traction control these days and they have great racing. I believe prototypes have TC but no ABS. I realize the mix of talent is much different, especially in GT3 where there are Pro/AM teams and stuff like that, but I'm not sure TC makes that big of a difference on the racing. I don't think ABS should ever be allowed in open wheel as it inspires too much risk taking in overtakes. The whole reason NA F1 revved so high was partially to help keep the power band reasonable exiting slow corners.
As you say, the driver skill is very different between F1 and GT3. If traction control was allowed in F1, the teams would not settle for something like in GT3, it would become an arms race. In the end we might end up with racing determined by who has the best control algorightms, and not who has the best dirver/chassis.
The entire purpose of traction control is to reduce the driver skill required when cornering and braking. This is why traction control is omnipresent in consumer vehicles, because the vast majority of road drivers are awful.
FIA bans traction control so as to place more emphasis on driver skill.
We should allow batting machines for baseball players to hit the ball more reliably as well. Poker players should play with their cards face up. I agree.
Manually controlling to the limits of the car is a big part of the skill of racing.
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!
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!"
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.
I think it's been a long time since any motor racing was just about engineering the best possible car. The problem is that engineering got too good - the best possible car we could make would simply be far too fast to be safe. So F1 (and all motor racing) are always playing the rules to try and keep an even field (otherwise the best funded teams would be leagues ahead) and to stop the engineers from killing the drivers.
They want them to engineer everything except the things that replace driver skill.
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.
During the Sky commentary, Anthony Davidson explained the specific electro-mechanical interactions based on what teams were telling him.
The FIA absolutely do need the ability to enforce regulations, but perhaps they should be monitoring for traction control and then stewarding that, rather than managing parts of the ECU firmware...
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.
No this all happened during the formation lap. So teams could clearly push settings changes live.
The problem happened during the formation lap. They red-flagged the race and brought all the cars off the track. I don't know any more about the update mechanism than you do, but GP's theory is plausible.
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.
Things have been changed.
Yeah, I left around 2008. Thanks
That’s not correct.
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).
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.
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.
I want to remind a Slashdot comment from that news entry:
> Gentlemen, restart your engines.
For original story, see https://slashdot.org/story/06/07/05/2357227/microsoft-to-sup...
life imitates art.
So what does the ecu actually do? Can teams use any technology as an advantage?
> Can teams use any technology as an advantage?
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.
This is what Mercedes did, back in the day.
Ref: https://hackaday.com/2021/04/06/mercedes-split-turbo-was-a-g...
Think raspberry pi on steroids that are on steroids that are on steroids.
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.
https://f1chronicle.com/f1-standard-ecu-explained/
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
They may have just rolled back to a previous version.
Still waiting for 6.1 sol to patch a UI bug as am reading this
Is 6.1 Sol that bad? Or just slow?
Slow https://openrouter.ai/openai/gpt-6.1-sol#providers
vs https://openrouter.ai/anthropic/claude-opus-5.5#providers
Here is the team radio of Lewis Hamilton literally turning his car off and in again on the formation lap!
https://youtu.be/e1bPfbNn_TU?is=zrTGCKm_6klH0JwZ
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.
Yes. And wasn’t this the first wet race of the season as well?
> Lando Norris calling the electronic glitches "horrible" and further proof that F1 should move away from hybrids.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31RZ5wU-Fg0
There are typically at least two deaths every year. The last time there were no fatailties was in 1982.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Isle_of_Man_TT_Mountai...
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
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.
Which is indeed ridiculous and that's not what he said. The electronic side refers to the hybrid part. Most drivers have spoken out against that this season.
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.
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.
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.
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.
At end of the day, it is a motorsport and it will always have its risks.
Formula E and Extreme E have managed some pretty spectacular crashes without battery fires.
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.
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?
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"
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.
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.
The anus on the helmet represents which ai vibecoded the software in each vehicle.
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..
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.
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.
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.
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.
“Motorsport grade” auto components usually means crappy, and everything requires a software patch or constant maintenance to work correctly.
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.
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 ;).
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.
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.
Ah, that explains the incredible results Williams has had since then!
Now they also have 100k different ways to organize the data.
But now they can have beautiful Gantt charts to visualize exactly how far they are from the top.
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.
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".
It's all because of the bad idea of artificially limiting the regenerative breaking powered boost. Why even have that limitation, lift it and allow all the teams to a roll their own software, work on their batteries and electric motors and regenerative breaking. Make it just another field of competition like the rest of the cars engineering, sure you can have minimum and maximum specs but putting in place electronic controls to nerf performance flies in the face of the spirit of the sport.
Time to go back to NA engines, the hybrids don't give the rock concert wall of sound
Not going to happen. Most of the race tracks on the F1 calendar have noise limits nowadays. Yes, the classics - like Monza - included.
It looks like it will be mild-hybrid V8s with turbos from 2030: https://www.motorsport.com/f1/news/first-details-of-2030-f1-...
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".
I'm not saying they're necessarily wrong in this specific case, but basically every change in every single sport ever is treated by the participants and "serious fans" as a horrible idea that will be the death of the sport.
Sometimes changes really are bad and are reverted, but more often the changes eventually get accepted and years later everyone involved treats it as an integral part of the sport.
Even "serious fans" almost always seem to be biased by the state of the sport when they started watching. Every change since that point is horrible and misguided, but they rarely argue for reverting changes that happened before then.
Can you repeat the question?
I was reading the whole text in THAT tone
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.
But yes, they completely made the powertrains to opaque for the viewer, and they definitely missed the ball on the sound aspect.
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?
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.
It is just entertainment, and advertising.
>I was at a GP in september, something you do very much for the noise
Why spend all that money when you can goto the local farmyard and watch them shuffle tractors around, if you close your eyes they're indistinguishable
> The F1 isn't just spectacle it's also something that should show real advancement in technology.
Maybe 30+ years ago. Carbon fiber parts, motors made of Beryllium alloys, the hybrid tech was interesting for a short while etc.
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.
NASCAR still uses classic carbureted V8s. I personally prefer that sound over the much higher-pitched F1 engines.
NASCAR Cup series has been using EFI since 2012. The other series still use carburetors.
It's a turbo that muffles the sound (and resulting reduced revs because high RPM was restricted due to cost reasons).
I don't follow motorsports very closely, sorry, but racing hybrids sounds extremely queer.
They might as well not do it at all.
You cannot greenwash auto racing as "sustainable" when by its very nature it need not exist. It's done for sport.
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.
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.
Someone on reddit showed a graph comparing both, and it's just ridiculous.
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.
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.
The PU development is under a separate cost cap.
These days F1 is one huge yawn fest. Who wants to see a bunch of millionaires drive cars around in loops in a fixed order? The whole thing could be replaced by a simulation really. Any real Racing left F1 decades ago.
Unfortunately the motorcycle counterpart MotoGP has been going the same direction. But At least in MotoGP they're now trying to control the aeros and electronics and bring back the racing and rider vs rider competition.
Make race cars analog again
Last full analog car must’ve been in the 50s
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?
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...
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...
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.
All that, yes. But they don't work too well if the battery runs out halfway down the straight... and there is too little charging.
I wasn't politicizing E vs ICE... but commenting on the particular specifications these rules mandate for F1. Specifications that are not fit for purpose.
There's no reason the battery should run out on the straight, though. You can charge at any point while driving, not just during braking. Obviously you're taking torque from the engine to do so, but that's a strategic consideration.
> Obviously you're taking torque from the engine to do so, but that's a strategic consideration.
but drivers dislike do not being in control the harvesting and deployment (which apparently would be too complex to be manual), while fans dislike cars clipping out on straights.
Regenerative brakes (maybe even on front wheels!) would be great, but they are not enough to charge the battery given the current split. MGU-H was also a great invention, but was phased out apparently for complexity.
Next year the power output split will be tweaked to make clipping less extreme, but won't solve allt he issues.
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.
"Meet the F1 developer who fix a critical bug in 50 minutes with AI agent"
2000 PRs per day btw.
"Glitch"? That sounds a bit too cutesy for this situation. How about something like "error"?
While this is "interesting" for nerds like me.
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.
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.
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.
Therefore this was the Bahrain F1, it just happened to take place in Malaysia.
really cool because this way, Bahrain could host an F1 race with a nice circuit for once!
Claude, make my car fast, make no mistakes
I have a chuckle every time the Williams is on the screen with its Claude sponsorship. Why don't they simply ask Claude to make their car fast, are they stupid?
My wife is tired of this joke.
Williams has Claude, McLaren has both Gemini and Groq, RedBull has Oracle, Aston has CoreWeave, F1 as a whole has AWS...
Tons of AI (and adjacent) sponsors!
Yes, there are definitely trends in which sectors sponsor F1. Most famously perhaps, the tobacco companies. Cryptocurrency was in vogue for a few years. Now it's AI companies.
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.
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 :]
I summarized it with Gemini because the website was too unusable while on mobile:
https://share.gemini.google/bwoJ65BshQkQ