Ferrari staged a special launch event for its new Formula 1 power unit, the 059/3, in late 2013. It was the fi rst new F1 engine from the famous Italian constructor since 2006, so perhaps it was not surprising that its arrival was met with such fanfare.
At the launch the bare V6 engine was shown lacking exhausts, turbo, hybrid system and many other parts, but once the power unit was fi tted to a car, initially a one-off GT car test bed and later the 2014 Ferrari, Marussia and Sauber chassis, it took on a very diff erent appearance.
The exhaust manifolds took a tight route curving upwards around the cylinder head in a three-into-one layout on each bank of the engine with a curiously large wastegate sat above the turbocharger. The turbo itself did cause some consternation when it first appeared as it did not feature a separate ballistic cover like that of the Mercedes and Renault, rather it was built into the
main turbo housing instead.
Overall the concept of the Ferrari 059/3 was clearly heavily influenced by the demands of other departments and Ferrari technical director James Allison admitted as much at the roll out of the 2014 Ferrari: ‘Our engine department have been aggressive and bent over backwards for us on the chassis side to produce an engine that can be packaged tightly and can be cooled with radiators that are not too big.
Our car has quite a neat bodywork package and the radiators are quite small and that is a result of what the engine guys have done. The engines are incredibly busy compared to the V8s, and the Ferrari has been rather exquisitely packaged.’ Its tight packaging came as the result of a few unconventional design decisions: the charge air cooler was mounted in the V of the engine, and the
oil tank was mounted in the transmission rather than in the more conventional location at the front of
the block. The MGU-K was also mounted at the rear of the block.
In races, the Ferrari 059/3 seemed to be a reliable unit but it was also said to be overweight and underpowered and the Italian manufacturer reacted with not a little aggression. The head of the engine programme Luca Marmorini was forced out, as were two team principals.
A new focus was placed on improving the power unit for 2015, and from the very fi rst test at Jerez it had clearly paid off . ‘The power unit has, along with the rest of the car, been an area of extremely high effort to improve,’ Allison says. ‘We had a number of issues with last year’s engine and power unit. Early on in the season the power delivery was not particularly sophisticated, and it was quite tough for the drivers to get the type of throttle response that they
wanted.
It was improved a lot during the season and we take that a step further this year.’ The hybrid system was also highlighted as a weakness by Allison and was another area that was fundamentally revised for 2015. ‘The amount of electrical energy that we were able to recover from the turbo was not really good enough for producing competitive power levels during the race. That’s one of the reasons why
Ferrari’s qualifying performance was relatively strong compared with the race performance
last year.
That’s an area where we’ve tried to change the architecture of the engine to make it a better compromise between qualifying and racing performance’, he says. ‘Then, there is plain simple horsepower. A tremendous amount of work has gone into all aspects of our combustion efficiency
to try and make sure that in this fuel limited formula, where every team is only allowed to burn the same amount of fuel, that every single compression stroke, every single ignition stroke, is extracting the maximum amount of horsepower and putting it on the road.’
New Power Unit
While not stated by any Ferrari engineers, it seems that the compromises made on the power unit to favour the chassis and aerodynamic demands went too far. But Ferrari was clearly minded to move away from the concept in 2015.
The new power unit (PU) did not have the big launch of the 2014 variant and only a subtle name change. But the Ferrari 059/4 was a very different machine, according
to Luigi Fraboni, Ferrari’s head of engine operations. ‘We started with last year’s power
unit as a basis, but we developed it to a much better product, but we realised that there were others better than us so we reworked everything. A big effort went into combustion, we looked at the turbo, getting the most out of the energy recovery and we did a lot on the oil system.
We looked at better knock control too, and we had to get better correlation between the software and how the engine worked in reality. In the end, we ended up with basically what is a completely new engine.’ The 059/4 saw a number of visually obvious changes, most notably an all new exhaust layout with the manifolds now running low along the flanks of the engine block to the twin entry turbine, which now appears to be mounted in a lower position in the bell housing.
Returning to convention the oil tank appears at the front face of the block in common with the layouts used by other PU manufacturers. However, it is the changes that cannot be seen from the outside that seem to have brought the biggest impact on performance, especially in terms of combustion. The work here is not just limited to the shape of the piston crown and combustion chamber itself
but has seen Ferrari rely on two long term technical partnerships.
The introduction of direct injection in 2014 was something of a step into the unknown for Ferrari and it turned to electronic specialists at Magneti Marelli to help, but even for them it was a steep learning curve. Roberto Dalla, motorsport director at Magneti Marelli, said: ‘We started on the project using the experience of our production car products, they were way ahead of us in terms of experience and technologies as we had not done a GDI system for motorsport. So we took onboard their experience, but not their product, as a basis. We decided to start over and build a brand new 500bar injector for F1 V6 engines.’
The injector pictured below is the same as that used on the Ferrari V6, though likley not in the exact configuration used currently.
Bespoke Injectors
‘It is very customisable by design as we know every customer wants its own solution,’ Dalla says. ‘They want different nose lengths, larger or smaller sizes, things like that. It’s not only the nozzle section that changes a lot it’s the whole thing because it all interacts, the whole dynamic of the injector has big influence on combustion’. Ferrari is not the only PU manufacturer to use the Marelli injector, and this has seen many variations of the design being developed.
‘There are different types of developments going on, the mechanical developments can take some time but the customisation of the nozzles and other related parts to change the fuel spray can be done very quickly, in perhaps two weeks from concept to delivery, and that’s really important for the engine builders,’ Dalla says.
‘They are doing so many variations, in the last two years we have done maybe 70 or 80 different nose configurations and perhaps even more nozzles. Now we are passing the experience from the F1 project back to production cars.’ The fuel injected by the Marelli injectors is also a key area of development, and Ferrari is working as it has done for many years with Shell to develop the ideal fuel for the V6 engine.
But here too some of the working practices of 2014 have changed to improve performance. ‘We have done a lot of fuel work on these power units, it’s a big area because you can change it as often as you like without using any tokens, and developments in that area make some things possible in terms of combustion that would not be otherwise doable,’ Fraboni explains.
‘Last year we were developing in parallel with Shell, but this year we have set targets to them in terms of performance and especially knock. They now know where we want to go and what we want to achieve with the engine and they have to get there. So each time we go to the dyno they will bring a number of candidate fuels to test to make sure we have the best for the races. I think now it
is a very close relationship.’
The Significance of fuel development has increased substantially
The significance of fuel development has increased substantially with the introduction of the new V6 engines and this can be seen by how closely the manufacturers are working with suppliers, Mercedes with Petronas and Renault with Total. Says Guy Lovett, innovation manager at Shell Motorsport: ‘The fuel development has been an intense area of activity since 2013 for us. That is not to say that we have not done anything with the oils but the proportional gains have been greater in terms of the fuel.’
The possibility to improve performance with the V8s was always there with the fuel, but the opportunities then were probably that much greater with the oils. ‘We have seen with the new power units that the balance has significantly shifted, the new V6s are incredibly responsive to fuel, they have a different appetite for fuel to the V8s and that is an area where we have exploited our experience with turbo engines from other areas of motorsport.’ Technology also transferred from production cars into the racing fuel for Ferrari as well as the expertise from other series such as WRC and WEC. ‘
We have benefited from some of the road car fuel development for GDI engines, though the applications are a bit different,’ continues Lovett. ‘The temperatures are a bit higher in the racing engines tip temperatures, but the detergent technologies are the same in the road fuel as the race fuel. It’s actually much easier in F1 where we are developing a product for a
single engine.
We have intimate details of every aspect of the engine and we have complete information sharing. It’s a one team approach now. That lets us get into the minute details of the formulation to let us optimise to the design, on production cars you can’t do that. But there is some commonality between the applications so the motorsport technologies are extracted and applied back to the road car products at the pump. It’s why Shell is in Formula 1, it’s not just marketing, it’s real technology development.’
Fuel flow
One technology not a major feature on the road but increasingly so on the race track is the use of
fuel flow limits, either by restrictors such as in GT500 racing in Japan, or by flow sensors in
WEC and Formula 1.
‘I think the challenge with flow meters is an interesting one,’ Lovett says. ‘The balance of how we formulate the different fuels does subtly change, so parameters like anti knock and flame speed, which are good for performance, are typically not so good for energy density, so we need to continuously optimise the fuel to get a good calorific performance within the given flow and consumption limits. The same is true for the WEC.
The challenge there is that the fuel works across all the different demands of the different manufacturers, so they all had to work together with us to get an optimum fuel.’Shell does not only supply Ferrari with its fuel, but also other bespoke products. Indeed, according to Lovett it supplies every fluid apart from brake fluid to the Scuderia and its customer teams, Sauber and Manor.Interestingly the latter retained the older 059/3 power unit for 2015 and Shell still supplies it (via Ferrari) with its 2014 product.
Lubricants are clearly still a major area of engine development and not just in terms of reducing friction, Fraboni explains: ‘The oil also has an effect on the detonation so it’s very important not only for friction reduction and performance but also reliability.
If you want to reduce the cooling on the car then there is a lot to do with the oils, the flow rate, things like that, you can use the oil formulation to close up the radiators a bit too’. With only four complete power units allowed per car per season in F1 each engine 059/4 power unit installation – this picture graphically illustrates the mind-boggling complexity of a modern Formula 1 car has to operate in a variety of conditions, from the high speed tracks at Monza and Spa, to the heat of Singapore and the high altitude of Mexico City. Rather than using a bespoke oil for each venue, though, as was once the case in F1 (during the V10 era) Ferrari and Shell claim to stick to roughly the same spec for a number of venues. ‘
We tell Shell what we want to do and then we try things out on the dyno,’ Fraboni says. ‘Sometimes you take something that you know is marginal to see if it is worth risking it. Basically though we run the same oils, for quite some time, the engines have to do a lot of races so we don’t change it too much each year.
We need an oil that can survive all the conditions.’ But the fuel flow and fuel consumption limited formula of modern Formula 1 (and LMP1) places a serious emphasis on increasing efficiency, and that does mean that reductions in friction do result in big rewards on track.
‘We are always hunting friction reductions because of that,’ Lovett says. ‘With a finite amount of fuel going in [100kg], any efficiency gain you can make is heavily rewarded in lap time. It’s a big
win, that remains our key drive for lubrication. We want to reduce the viscosity of the oil as much as we can, as long as we avoid metal to metal contact we can reduce friction.
But it’s not that easy as every component has differing demands. It’s not just about viscosity; there
are other parameters to look at. We have to protect these engines. If we take viscosity down
too far we get into issues with durability and wear, and ultimately an expiration of the engine
before its design life.’
Surface coatings
In recent years much has been made of the development of surface coatings and they have now become an essential part of a racing engine’s design and construction, the Ferrari V6 included, according to Lovett: ‘We are right with Ferrari working on the coatings,’ he says.
‘We like to call it co-engineering, so we optimise our lubricants around the latest surface coatings and surface finishes. A DLC [coating] contact is very different to a metal-metal contact, ideally we would like to have six different lubricants in the engine for different areas but you cant really do that!’ One new area where Shell is making a bespoke product for Ferrari, but is unwilling to disclose details, is in the energy recovery system, which requires a special cooling fluid.
As said, information on this is not available. The 059/3 was not the first hybrid power unit for Ferrari, the 056 V8 also featured a hybrid system in 2009, 2011, 2012 and 2013, and one of the key suppliers to that project was once again Magneti Marelli. ‘We started in 2009 with a solution on the MGU-K,’ Dalla says.
‘We understood then that the voltage was very important so the evolution of that 2009 solution saw us go down in voltage because under those regulations, at that time with the experience we had then, going down in voltage allowed you to reduce the battery size
and improve overall car performance.
In 2011 we were able to use a battery that was less than half the weight of the battery we used in 2009, because of the pursuit of that voltage reduction.’ The 2009-2013 MGU-K was a 60kW device
and proved popular, and a variant of it was believed to have been fitted to Peugeot Sports stillborn 908 LMP1 hybrid.
But in 2014 the importance of the hybrid system on overall car performance increased drastically with the new power unit rules. ‘In 2014 with the introduction of the MGU-H
there was a paradigm shift, the way the MGU-K was used changed completely and we moved in
the opposite direction as a result and increased the voltage to over 450v because the overall
car package would be better with a higher voltage,’ Dalla continues.
‘Going up in voltage and the higher power motor [120kw as opposed to 60kw] and the different type
of usage. But we had to develop a highly customisable solution again, both for the motor and the control electronics.’ As you might expect with the increase in both voltage and power the 2015 specification MGU is much larger and heavier than the 2009-2013 version, but tipping the scales at
10kg its weight has certainly not increased in proportion to its potency.
‘The biggest step has come in the control electronics, and here there are still big gains to come in that area,’ Dalla says. ‘At the moment the weight is about 3kg. We have a big constraint with this part, the capacitor. From 2014 to today it is an area we have plans to improve and we have some clever ideas to come which will reduce the weight substantially.
The power modules will be completely revised, so I think we will show a very big step in the near future.’ Dalla goes on to point out that the developing technologies in motorsport energy recovery
systems are rapidly becoming a great area of focus for all concerned, not just for their on track
performance, but also their wider relevance. ‘In the current regulations there is this
wonderful element, the link between MGU-H and MGU-K which is a very open door and there
are very few constraints in this area.
‘These electric motors have more than 95 per cent efficiency. Introducing this technology to road cars will take time but it will happen, with 95 per cent efficiency you will see its importance in series production grow and grow, as focus on fuel consumption intensifies,’ he states with detectable excitement. ‘What really excites me is the ERS-H because there is the potential to recover so
much waste energy, you will see it tomorrow in Formula 1 and down the road in series production, but you can reduce the importance of the battery in a hybrid car, because right now the battery is the weak point,’ Dalla adds.
Work in progress
While Dalla enthuses about the potential of ERS-H his company does not supply the full system to Ferrari. The MGU-H often shown on the internet as being Ferrari’s solution, with the MGU-H mounted between the compressor and turbine, is in fact just a demonstration part from Marelli and not the Ferrari solution at all. Indeed, in general the design of MGU-Hs in Formula 1
remain largely secret.
But Dalla stresses that the importance of them and indeed the MGU-K is likely to grow in the very near future, perhaps even by 2017 as Formula 1 contemplates its own existence. ‘The power units have moved from 32 per cent efficiency with the V8s to 40 to 45 per cent efficiency. Thats wonderful, now Formula 1 is looking to what comes next, and the idea of a more powerful power unit, 1000bhp or more easily, is an interesting idea.
‘I’m pretty sure that will come, but the big question in meetings now is how to reach it. If you reach it with the fuel it’s easy, but you lose that efficiency which you have worked hard for, and it’s bad in terms of image, so I feel sure that the power increase will come from the ERS. It’s the only way to do it,’ Dalla concludes.
Ferrari’s power unit is still very much a work in progress. Even in 2015, new fuel and oil specifications are still to be introduced, and some of the development tokens will be spent on combustion and reportedly a new MGU-K, as the Italians try to continue to close the gap to the seemingly less dominant Mercedes. ‘The engine is still at the beginning of its development and we are still having new ideas each week, there is still much more to come,’ Fraboni says. Which is surely a warning the Scuderia’s rivals will take very seriously.
By Sam Collins
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