#F1 2008 Challenge full

The engine was capable of running at 20,000rpm momentarily, but to run it consistently at that speed throughout a long race seemed impossible.’ Other teams seemed to be pushing hard the rev limit to ascertain engine loads during the early stage of each race. The engines development continued into 2006 with track testing, and then on into the racing season itself, as Sakurahara expands: ‘During the early part of the season we focussed on reliability, using slightly reduced revs without sacrificing too much in terms of power. It took us a while to flatten the curve out.’ The torque curve is not smooth on a V8 and that created challenges from the point of traction control. These regulations meant that the Honda team would have to check the materials, positions and details very carefully at the design stage.There were also some other issues for the engine team, as well as the V8-related problems already mentioned, to overcome as senior technical director, Shuhei Nakamoto, explains: ‘In the early stages of development it was hard for us to produce torque efficiently because of the ban on variable trumpets. The geometric centre of the engine in a lateral sense will be considered to lie on the centre of the crankshaft and at the mid point between the centres of the forward and rear most cylinder bores longitudinally. The regulations were tight and very restrictive, even the cylinder spacing was fixed at 106.5mm (+/- 0.2mm).Ī really difficult part of the regulations for the designers, however, were those regarding the engines centre of gravity, as laid down in article 5.5:5.5 Weight and centre of gravity:5.5.1 The overall weight of the engine must be a minimum of 95kg.5.5.2 The centre of gravity of the engine may not lie less than 165mm above the reference plane.5.5.3 The longitudinal and lateral position of the centre of gravity of the engine must fall within a region that is the geometric centre of the engine, +/- 50mm. Only two inlet valves and the same number of exhaust valves would be permissible.

It had to be a V8 engine of no more than 2400cc, with a V angle of 90 degrees. The new engine regulations would limit the freedom of Sukurahara’s team on overall architecture of the engine, and also the materials they could use. Then the focus of the development stage was to try and solve the vibration issues inherent in a V8 engine,’ explains Sukurahara.

#F1 2008 Challenge full

‘The initial concept of the engine was to create a package with greatly improved body joint rigidity, which would surpass the V10 in terms of power-per-litre running at full revs in the opening race of the season. Design of the RA806E, the eventual full race engine, started in January 2005 and it first ran in July of the same year. The vibration issue could potentially have lead to a range of problems that would keep both the engine and chassis design teams busy. The engine development project team was run under Kazuo Sakurahara, who revealed to RE:‘The most worrying problem would be a level of engine vibration which the design team had never experienced before.’ The first prototype engine was run in the back of a development car at Mugello in September 2004, so the team could gather data on performance and the effects of the increased vibrations caused by a V8 on the surrounding systems. Honda already had some experience of building racing V8s for the IRL but those units would be little help in developing a 20,000rpm Formula 1 screamer. For Honda work towards the 2006 season started in 2004 when it became clear that Formula 1 was to switch from 3.0-litre V10 engines to smaller, less powerful 2.4-litre V8s.