I don't understand one thing: why do all cars have to be exactly the same? Here's a better idea: just set some specifications on the vehicles, and let the teams do their best to work within those specs. At the end of the season, all cars are open-sourced, so you can see what the others did. Come next season, the teams will have incorporated the best practices from the previous season and improved upon them. Rinse, lather, repeat.
Racing goes electric: At the track with Formula E, the first e-racing series
61–70 of 85 posts
Re: Racing goes electric: At the track with Formula E, the first e-racing series
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Definitely, this is a huge opportunity for innovation if they would open it up. I would like to see there be no rules on the cars except that they must weigh in under a certain number.
We did something like this for a while. We quickly learned that we are more than capable of building machines that reliably kill their drivers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_B Maybe self driving or drive by wire cars would lead to a revival, it really was racing unleashed.
Does it make me a bad person that I don't care that much? Because for me, the drivers are mere formalities - the engineering is the thing. The game-theoretical penalty for losing a driver is losing the race, and casting a dour outlook on sponsors, aside from the emotional component of losing a team member. If that proves insufficient, you can raise this disincentive with fines and deposits, without imposing any hard limits on the tech.
Risk and dedication in the face of physical injury is a very substantial component of professional sports. Essentially every boxer and many/most football & hockey players enjoy the benefits of repeated traumatic brain injury. Olympians sacrifice large chunks of their lives to developing the physique and reflexes necessary to win - quitting doesn't get the first quarter of their lifespan spent rigorously training back. Some of our most celebrated sports are devoted to violent confrontational combat, like MMA, with every injury possibility that entails, and we have turned the simulation/infliction of injuries into a billion-dollar soap opera in WWE (go watch 'The Wrestler'). Nobody wants to go back to gladiatorial bloodsports where ten men enter and one survives per round, but we are more than willing to sacrifice a lot of the lives of the participants for the sake of the sport, no matter how much we like to pretend otherwise. It is monetarily impossible to go through so much driver flesh when the races cost millions of dollars to enter.
The direct veneration of bodily sacrifice to the act of winning is something that draws audiences by the billions, even if it's not to my taste generally - but a sport which shows me what I want to see (the human mind at its best rather than the human body at its best) at the expense of modest risk factors isn't such a turnoff.
Re: Racing goes electric: At the track with Formula E, the first e-racing series
#63I don't understand one thing: why do all cars have to be exactly the same? Here's a better idea: just set some specifications on the vehicles, and let the teams do their best to work within those specs. At the end of the season, all cars are open-sourced, so you can see what the others did. Come next season, the teams will have incorporated the best practices from the previous season and improved upon them. Rinse, la…
It's like NASCAR, not about the car but the skill of the driver.
Otherwise it becomes who has the better funding to afford the best engineering team and money for the lightest and strongest parts.
Re: Racing goes electric: At the track with Formula E, the first e-racing series
#64I don't understand one thing: why do all cars have to be exactly the same? Here's a better idea: just set some specifications on the vehicles, and let the teams do their best to work within those specs. At the end of the season, all cars are open-sourced, so you can see what the others did. Come next season, the teams will have incorporated the best practices from the previous season and improved upon them. Rinse, la…
It's like NASCAR, not about the car but the skill of the driver. Otherwise it becomes who has the better funding to afford the best engineering team and money for the lightest and strongest parts.
But even NASCAR has teams of engineers trying to find legal (or questionable) tweaks. At this stage, when technical advances are needed, having a more open model might be better.
Re: Racing goes electric: At the track with Formula E, the first e-racing series
#65I think they should just remove the drivers and let the engineers compete freely. That would be much more interesting to watch than the current yawn-fest of "which human will make the least mistakes on mostly identical cars"...
It's rather difficult to do that and keep some semblance of safety.
Ultimately I think the simplest way to keep things sane would be to do something along the lines of "you have amount of MJ worth of for the race" (which would then spawn all sorts of related rules about what exactly counts as fuel, but meh. Such is life.).
Re: Racing goes electric: At the track with Formula E, the first e-racing series
#66Excellent interview with Formula E founder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrTbdKe0XTo Best quote, when asked if he thought we could end our dependence on oil: "The stone age didn't end because we ran out of stones." Really important to understand that this is just the first iteration of their plan. Goal is to get to single car for a full hour race within a few years. Agag says they now have many major cities approa…
80dB is below the legal limit for street vehicles in many states. That's pretty quiet. I've owned a few cars with exhaust louder than that.
Re: Racing goes electric: At the track with Formula E, the first e-racing series
#67There are limits on everything: acceleration, maximal speed and even noise. Formula E will be boring same way as Formula 1. Identical cars circling around the track.
Identical cars make for better, more exciting racing. It comes down to driver skill instead of who can invest the most money. That said, I think restrictions like F1 are better because they lead to interesting innovations.
Re: Racing goes electric: At the track with Formula E, the first e-racing series
#68What I want to see is not heroic drivers like NASCAR, nor heroic billionaires investing in very similar tweaks, like Formula 1, but a diversity of creative conceptual engineering, competing in the same challenges, for lots of money. Things like DARPA sponsors: The Grand Challenge in self-driving cars, and the Robotics Challenge. The Ansari X-prize also applies. BattleBots was a decent attempt at a sport along these l…
Sounds like you would love the World Endurance Challenge! They have, I believe, 6 different classes (I think DHH races in GT-Amateur) as well as an experimental car, often a deltawing, that races with the field. All 6 classes have a ton of innovation and a ton of variety. The top class contains both an 8 cylinder toyota and a 4 cylinder porsche. I've been an F1 fan for awhile and have really been loving WEC lately.
Re: Racing goes electric: At the track with Formula E, the first e-racing series
#69My kind of car sound:
Re: Racing goes electric: At the track with Formula E, the first e-racing series
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Definitely, this is a huge opportunity for innovation if they would open it up. I would like to see there be no rules on the cars except that they must weigh in under a certain number.
We did something like this for a while. We quickly learned that we are more than capable of building machines that reliably kill their drivers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_B Maybe self driving or drive by wire cars would lead to a revival, it really was racing unleashed.
Honestly, a self driving car race would be more interesting to me, especially if there are no rules (except maybe a budget cap).