Lotus back in Formula One painted in Green and Yellow

Lotus presented its 2010 Formula 1 race car, the Lotus T127, last Friday. It took 16 years since 1994) to have a Lotus in the FIA Formula 1 World Championship. And it's certainly a nice touch that the car is painted in green and yellow (again). Whether it will be competitive with its Cosworth engine and the xtrac gear box, we will see. But it certainly brings a bit of history and tradition back into the formula 1 circus.

Picture of the week - Formula One in the Past

When you observe drivers of old cars you can see just how much force and body movement was involved in steering vintage racers. Steering wheels were big, the clutch heavy and the gear change a challenge. One reason why it looks so impressive though is that you actually can see the driver while today, you barely see his helmet. This picture was taken at this year's AVD Oldtimer Grand Prix on the Nurburgring.

Toyota following Honda and BMW exiting Formula 1 - no success despite all the money spent

It's really kind of a pattern. Big car manufacturers want to expand their image of building sporty cars. They enter the Formula 1, throw big money at it and are fairly unsuccessful. With the overall business not doing well they decide to pull back and exit the racing series. We have seen this with Honda, then with BMW and now Toyota!
There are many questions you could ask, for example, would they have canceled their racing engagement if they had been really successful? And, why haven't they been successful, given all the money they invested? Let's take Toyota. They were known as having the biggest budget of all the teams, they had it all under control, the chassis, the aerodynamics, the engine, everything. And still, besides some memorable results, the expected success didn't come.
On the other side you have Brawn GP who inherited the developments and ideas of the Honda team and won, despite a smaller budget and initially a lack of sponsors, the formula 1 championship. A private team showed the established factory teams how to do it.
Is it really about individuals that make the success? Designers like Adrian Newey, team leaders like Ross Brawn, drivers like Sebastian Vettel and maybe Jenson Button? It seems to be like this. With with all the big teams walking away the Formula seems to become again what it once was, a series for semi-private teams competing with what they were able to build.

Does the end of KERS mean that Hybrid technology doesn't work in motorsports?

With BMW having said good bye to KERS there's only Ferrari left using a hybrid module in Formula 1 in 2009. While McLaren-Mercedes may use its system once or twice again this year, the KERS technology seems to have lost the fight and its competitive edge. For next year the teams even announced that they most probably will drive without KERS at all.
How can this be, given that KERS contributes 80 horsepowers and substantial additional overtake potential? And what's the impact on the hybrid technology usage for other cars?
First it must be said that a formula 1 car is a highly optimized and tuned vehicle where every gramm of weight and where it's being put can make a huge difference. Secondly it's all about aerodynamics and putting an additional device with cooling needs may limit the engineer's freedom substantially. And thirdly the limits when driving such cars are astronomically high and any inflencing of braking behavior can mean to add a couple of tenths of a second per lap and decide on 3rd versus 15th place on the starting grid. Taking all these things together most teams acknowledged that having one technology less to worry about allows them to focus on the rest better. This doesn't mean the technolgy doesn't work. Actually it works quite well and teams like McLaren and Ferrari, but also Renault showed the benefits of additional power on a straight a couple of times. In other race series such as touring cas or GTs the established level of quality certainly would make cars using KERS highly competitive. But for formula 1 the compromises to take into were too big to create winners. Too bad, as this is quite a bit of negative PR for hybrid systems as such. But if you are looking at how perfectly these systems work in the Mercedes S400 Hybrid, the Lexus, Honda Insight or Prius, there's nothing to worry about and in the future we will see hybrid systems in almost any model range of any manufacturer.