|
Last year at the Melbourne Grand Prix I was staying at a friends near the track. We were awoken around 7am (the flight got in early hours hence the sleep in) to the fantastic sound of a screaming F1 car. It was magical, the first time I had ever heard a modern F1 car and the excitement to get to the track was almost too much to bear.
This years cars sound interesting and for me it does hark back to the original turbo era, which is nice, but it just isn't quite special enough. It is not unique enough.
Sound isn't everything and I would agree about the volume not needing to be 135dB and enough to hurt, but it is a very important part of F1. I have been watching every snippet of footage I could since the start of testing (and even the test mules) and while I have been trying to convince myself it is "OK", I find I am still far from convinced.
During the AGP my wife didn't even ask me to turn it down and between the last race in 2013 and the first race of 2014 we have had a baby who was sleeping during the race! That is simply unacceptable...
People say "they need to fix it", "they need to make them louder", "it will be fixed before the end of the season", etc. But what can they do? There is no muffler in there to remove. These are complex PU's and that is just how they sound. It is the nature of energy recovery and the turbocharged engines that don't need the revs to generate power. It reminds me of the old 2 litre WRC cars, low revving heaps of torque but boring.
I still have a vague hope that as the engine builders find efficiencies and better ways to burn the fuel that they might start pushing the revs up to find more power. I understand they don't need to at this point, but to get more power you have more boost or more revs, both introduce potential reliability issues but both will generate more power (if they can do it on the current fuel flow rates). They had a graphic up in practice and I was watching it on slow motion. Some of the engines were pulling 12krpm before changing, but some were only in the 11's. They have a way to go for 15krpm, and I think if they do get up there it might give the solution a lot of people are looking for.
|