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Comment by zebrafish | Hacker News Reader

Formula E already exists. As a PR play, other power unit manufacturers may follow Honda. Volkswagen put a lot of pressure on them with their announcement last year. However, I don’t think (and hope) that ICE racing will go anywhere. The engineering challenges and reliability challenges are part of racing that EVs remove from the equation. I don’t understand why EVs can’t have their place as personal and commercial vehicles and racing can keep ICEs in competition vehicles.

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> I don’t understand why EVs can’t have their place as personal and commercial vehicles and racing can keep ICEs in competition vehicles.

I'm sure ICE racing will continue in one form or another, but Formula 1 is enormously expensive; manufacturers justify it in terms of the prestige it brings them and the R&D work that can trickle-down into road cars. If the engine technology is completely different then both of those benefits become a lot more questionable.

The teams use less than $50 million on engines yearly. The remainder of the budget is spend on the cars chassis, aero, suspension ect. That cost would not go away with a switch to an electric power train.

Q: Are chassis/aero/suspension innovations relevant to ICE cars? If so, would they still be relevant to EVs given that EVs have different constraints (e.g. EVs have a different weight distribution to ICE cars, as batteries are heavy and non-moving, whereas (SPECULATION) fuel tanks have fuel sloshing around inside like a bathtub)?

Formula 1 chasses are way different to standard car chasses so presumably yes, but it really seems like an assumption to be careful about.

Disclaimer: The following is my own speculation, and not to be taken as hard facts! I don't think it's the technology in the cars that are relevant, as much as the tooling around developing the car is. For instance advances in CFD simulations will help in developing cars, ICE and EV. In any case, road relevance is an odd reason to do racing, as rarely do anything directly trickle down to the road car division.

> Are chassis/aero/suspension innovations relevant to ICE cars?

F1 chassis/aero/suspension innovations are more or less completely irrelevant outside F1. Switching from ICE's to EV's wouldn't change that.

The issue is going to be that racing is where vehicle manufacturers go to push the limits of their cutting edge technology. Which they don't fundamentally create for racing but for the versions of it that trickle into production vehicles. If everyone starts expecting the decline of ICE vehicles in the market, who is going to be putting a lot of resources into continuing to improve them?

> their cutting edge technology. Which they don't fundamentally create for racing but for the versions of it that trickle into production vehicles

Nah. Open-wheel racing has not been about actual research, already, for more than 20 years. The standard-bearer itself, Ferrari, was a racing team first and a manufacturer later; even today they are not in F1 for research but for marketing purposes (merchandising is basically their prime source of revenue). Open-wheel is largely a show, and it will continue to run as long as the show gets viewers, one way or the other.

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