Sunday, March 12, 2006
F1 NOW 1.3% SLOWER
The Formula One season begins today in Bahrain, featuring cars some 200 horsepower down on last season’s outputs. Here’s something I wrote in 2004:
Every year, Formula One rule-makers introduce laws to slow cars down, and every year technicians devise ways to make them faster still. Within minutes of hitting the track on Friday, Michael Schumacher had posted the fastest lap seen at Albert Park; on Sunday, Schumacher’s first flying lap broke the race record. If rule-makers legislated that engines be made of cheese, and vehicles be formed from four-tonne blocks of uranium, perhaps a month would elapse before Ferrari or Williams or Renault came up with a cheddar-powered radioactive behemoth capable of lapping Albert Park in less than a minute.
You’d think a 200hp reduction would blow lap times out by, I don’t know, a light year* or so. Wily designers, however, have recovered speed with aerodynamic and structural advances. The result: Schumacher’s pole time is only one second slower than his fastest qualifying lap in 2005.
(Go visit Mahmood for local F1 views—and much else.)
* UPDATE. I stand corrected.