NPC-Formula One engines, Oil, cooling etc... Options

[ChrisReale]

Is there a forum or web site that goes over F1 engine specs? What weight of oil doo they use to protect at 18,000rpm's What temp do they run at? I cannot find anything on them....

[lapuwali]

Be forewarned that much of what you'd find publicly available will be wild speculation, or fairly out of date. No one is telling much about the current engines.

I doubt that anything special is required from the oil to protect the engine, even at these seemingly elevated speeds. Common street bike engines do 13-14K these days, and there have been a few that do a good bit more than that. STREET engines, mind. The main trick is they solved the valvetrain problems by going to pneumatic valve gear (now more than 10 years old, so plenty of data available). Keeping the bottom end of the engine together is just a matter of exotic materials, like titanium and MMCs (metal-metal composites, where a lighter metal is used as a substrate to hold a matrix of stronger metal, saving weight w/o losing strength). The ability to turn such revs is actually 40 year old technology. The real trick now is getting them to last, which judging from this first race, most of them have solved.

Look through issues of Racecar Engineering, and pick up a copy of Peter Wright's recent book on F1 technology. You're going to get about as much as anyone is telling from sources like these.