Mercedes Is Owning This Formula 1 Season

Hardcore fans don't care about this noise. They're there to watch a race not listen to it. Sure it enhances the atmosphere but it's the racing that's important and judging by todays race that's only getting better.

CVT's were previously used but they were banned pretty quickly.

Trick engineering in F1 usually just tricks the regulations or the kinds of physics that only apply to racing prototypes. An example of tricking the regulations would be the double-deck and blown diffusers that were just clever interpretations of the rulebook. Tricking physics is a bit more interesting, a good example would be McLaren's F-Duct which used fancy fluid dynamics to turn a driver's leg into an on/off switch for drag on the rear wing. They basically ran a duct from the front of the car all the way to the wing, with a hole cut into it by the driver's leg. Cover the hole and pressure sucked air through to the wing, smoothing it's profile and reducing drag. Very cool, except I don't know many family sedans that need over 1 ton of downforce at 150mph.

The timing of this innovation in turbocharging couldn't be better. Every manufacturer is trying to gain efficiency with small, turbocharged engines. Small displacement engines are efficient but consumers don't want to trade half their horsepower for 5-10mpg. So companies like Ford and VW are slapping turbos onto these engines and cranking boost levels through the roof. The Fiesta ST runs 21 lbs of boost off the showroom floor. That kind of boost means a lot of heat (the same issue Mercedes' F1 engineers were faced with) so engineers are using every trick in the book to keep temperatures in control (direct injection, temporary overboost, expensive aluminum intercoolers).

What Mercedes' has done isn't so much about the innovative layout, it's that they've made it work without turbo lag. Bring whatever technology they've developed to combat the weight of the turbine shaft to the road and you've made it possible to operate on lower octane fuel while making more power from even smaller displacements.

This is what I like to see from motorsport.

If your combustion chamber grows too hot, you can suffer from pre-ignition, where your fuel-air mixture ignites sooner than it should. This results in wasted power and increased temps as the engine has to compress the now-expanding combustion charge.

What often follows pre-ignition (provided nothing has melted or blown up yet) is detonation. In normal combustion, you have a flame front that expands smoothly from the ignition spark and causes a smooth increase in pressure. It occurs quickly, but it's not an explosion. Detonation is the opposite. Pockets of fuel-air mixture in any part of the combustion chamber ignite explosively, sending out sharp shockwaves that are too fast to be absorbed by the rotating mass of the engine. If the detonations are too powerful or too frequent, they can cause catastrophic damage.

There's plenty more that can be explained on the subject and I'm sure somebody can find something to correct, but that's the gist of it. The engine is already hot enough, higher intake temps make things worse, go too far and you get abnormal combustion which results in spontaneous disassembly.