Seems wild that they can code and deploy an update of a critical-seeming component in the field like that. I thought such a firmware update would need extensive QA in the lab, along with root causing why this bug slipped through their processes anyway.
But maybe that's the difference between shipping a controller for F1 versus shipping one for an industrial or consumer product? shrug.
> Seems wild that they can code and deploy an update of a critical-seeming component in the field like that. I thought such a firmware update would need extensive QA in the lab, along with root causing why this bug slipped through their processes anyway.
These cars are in a perpetual Q&A state, they are getting modified between races. That's true for the "big teams", small teams don't have the resources, they're just "happy to be there". That's why it's possible to see stories like Brawn GP[^1]. That's what makes the sport fascinating, because the overtakes are not as much as one would hope for a ~2-3 hours race. But every little thing counts. In the last race 1st and 2nd had ~103ms diff or something like that for example, which is something that didn't happen for 15-20 years (maybe more).
> That's true for the "big teams", small teams don't have the resources, they're just "happy to be there".
This isn't really the case anymore. There's a budget cap, and all of the teams are financially sound most of the time. While the poorer teams might bring fewer upgrades in a year, they still bring upgrades all year long, and R&D is a continuous process in every F1 factory these days. Smaller teams also get additional R&D, compute, and testing time compared to the big teams.
Actually there is a budget cap so small teams have the same resources of big teams. However big teams have an advantage. They assembled a better team and a better network. This is from the team principal of Williams, one of the teams at the bottom of the rankings https://www.the-race.com/formula-1/cost-cap-creating-two-tie...
> Actually there is a budget cap so small teams have the same resources of big teams.
Not really. The budget cap does not include the salaries of active drivers and the three highest paid non-driver employees, as well as some other odds and ends.
Article you linked is absolutely unreadable. Just rambling „cost cap is not bad, we have sustainable sport but smaller teams are worse off”.
Two important informations are buried like „now smaller teams take podium 5% of time instead of of 10%” and „cost cap administration is a burden” and they there are no clear guidelines on what is in the cap and what not.
In most major league sports in the US, there is some form of salary cap, but it really only applies to players. Organizations can spend money on other things as they wish. That applies to coaching, front office, facilities, etc.
The 103ms difference is also due to a software glitch, Russell (the winner) said his car wasn't boosting in the final straight at the last lap, Verstappen (P2) was catching him with an energy boost. And the glitch was probably because there was a yellow flag, because a driver (Bottas) crashed, because his car didn't behave like the previous laps and sent him into the barriers...
I've watched F1 for more than 2 decades, from the paragraph above I realize this year's F1 is basically comparable to AI slop...
That was my take - there was a low-power mode/rain mode that was killing power in unexpected ways. Probably trivial to unclip that flag or comment out that bit of code and run "normal mode" instead.
What IS annoying is nobody bothered to test this "rain mode" (or whatever setting it was that they removed between the aborted formation lap and actual race start) prior to racing in Sepang on the cusp of monsoon season.
Essentially there wasn't enough power going to the turbo which was causing it to spool down. They just allowed more of the electrical power to be used in order to keep the cars running.
Yep, the chassis, PU, and aero are all updated almost constantly, with major upgrades a few time per season.
Williams even rolled out completely new chassis (with full homologation/crash) mid-season this year because the first design couldn't come down to minimum weight.
I'm wondering how good the simulators are. At the start of the season, they were still learning the systems trying to figure out why they were losing power in the straights. So depending on the driver, issues may or may not become apparent. That's like trying to debug why an email can only be sent to a recipient less than 500 miles away.
The simulators have the ECU in the loop but of course most of the inputs are simulated and they come from models for car dynamics and all kinds of behavior that have a lot of correlations and assumptions built in. As in a flight sim, some of the models are empirical (more like curve-fitting than simulation of physics). Losing power in straights is something a team would be highly motivated to see predicted in the simulator as that’s within normal conditions. But it’s not surprising the simulator can’t predict some edge cases, you’d need to get a lot of things right in the modeling and think of weird inputs.
What they probably could do yesterday, on top of checking a ton of telemetry, is understand which inputs were weird and put those into a simulator and get some hints for the FIA to work with. If you’re not aware, the FIA provides the ECU to all teams so that the telemetry used to check compliances and power modes are fair across all teams, and things like traction control are not there. This is why the FIA had to provide the firmware update.
Anthony Davidson who is the Mercedes test driver said that the teams can simulate these scenarios and it seemed that the Mercedes cars were not affected so it seems that other teams hadn't done similar testing in various scenarios.
Piastri and Norris, both on Mercedes engines, seem to have been affected. Not to mention the start of this season where McLaren allegedly forgot to upgrade the firmware on their Mercedes engines and couldn't run more than a few laps for two races.
McLaren uses Mercedes PUs, but aside from the mandated FIA ECU software and anything Mercedes needs them to run, they mostly write their own control software. AFAIK, this is true for all the teams that buy their PUs.
I imagine this is handled at a team level though, Red Bull were giving Max instructions over the radio to keep the revs at a certain level. Presumably if the team had simulated these conditions they'd have discovered the potential problem and then come up with a process to mitigate it.
One of the mercedes literally broke down and did not finish the race. They might not have faced the issue during the first time they went out in that race but Merc reliablity has been very shaky. And ofc Ant will talk only good things about Mercedes. But this is not the type of things they use the driver simulator for, it is to help the drivers train. These types of issues don't make sense to spend simulator time on with the driver in it
Seems a lot better place to learn than in the middle of the race and earning $0 for the race. Isn't that the entire point of a simulator to learn things that are too expensive to learn in the real world?
There's more than one type of simulator, and F1 has certain 'spending caps', after a spending war bankrupted bunch of teams.
Wind tunnel time and aerodynamics simulator time are included in the cost cap, as are car parts and most staff (but not driver salaries, travel or marketing)
Drivers can spend all the time they want in standard consumer sim racing rigs, practising the tracks. But when it's the type of extra-high-fidelity simulator that lets you make the car better - that's subject to the cost cap.
I assume someone is already offering an extremely high-fidelity CFD simulator (or a wind tunnel) to help companies shoot awesome videos of their cars, for purposes of including them in TV spots, of course.
CFD simulations came at around 2010. Redbull had the best of them, that's why they took over from Mercedes-McLaren those years.
I worked on engine and powertrain simulations, and my compiler was used for vehicle and driver simulations. This was built for Honda, but Honda left, bought by Mercedes, and won them several championships.
In fact there is a very specific cap on CFD simulations beyond the normal cost cap, to prevent an HPC arm race. Used to be an actual flop cap, but of course teams found way around it, now it is more complicated.
> Seems a lot better place to learn than in the middle of the race and earning $0 for the race.
That's... not how it works at all, though. There are no prizes for individual races and the championship money is also pennies to the teams.
Mercedes's Kimi Antonelli is going to win the WDC anyway for sure at this point, given the points difference.
> Isn't that the entire point of a simulator to learn things that are too expensive to learn in the real world?
You're right but this is not those expensive things. Track time is extremely limited, so the primary role of the sim is to develop the car and how it feels to the drivers, mainly so the setup feels perfect to them.
System-level bugs etc must have their own testing but sim is mainly for driver-engineer testing. Many drivers also don't like using the sim at all like Hamilton.
the championship money is also pennies to the teams
The constructors championship money is absolutely a massive impact for the teams. Last place (11th) is estimated at ~$50 million, 5th place is estimated ~$100 million, and 1st place ~$140 million. For a team like Williams or Haas, every position they move up the ranking makes a substantial budget impact (both of those have estimated total budgets ~$230 million). Even for one of the big 4, with budgets in the $400 million range, the $40 million swing from 4th to 1st is not insignificant.
Heck, Otmar had to pay his staff out of his own pocket back in the day (I don't remember what cost-cap was in place back then - I think that was during his time at Force India). Those lower teams are more stable now that 20 years ago, but still struggle to get enough sponsor money to compete.
The problem was that the ECUs went into limp mode due to multiple factors triggered by the drivers driving slowly (slick tires, wet surface, new PU ... ) and the ECUs are programmed to go into limp mode to protect the ICE, since it had no battery anymore and no turbo boost. The update was simply disabling that failsafe.
It was very unlikely there was actual coding involved, as even the C++ build and test toolchain would run for ages (in my automotive days it would run for 45 minutes and that was just build, link and static analysis). In this case it's probably just a config change.
I believe they likely used software they already had or just changed a software. As from what I read, it removed a certain system and limitions in the software which is used to ensure teams aren't cheating (traction control), which was triggering in error due to the strange conditions of the race. So all they were doing is disabling this system
I have no idea if modern-day SV’s “tests pass… idfk, it’s a web app… LGTM I guess” coding ethos was the cause of this particular bug. However, it’s a great, relatively benign demonstration of why it has absolutely zero fucking place controlling extremely dangerous hardware shooting a human around a race track surrounded by people.
They didn't, it just needed a restart. From the first reports the first car's software genuinely glitched out because of the new track/rain/etc and had to be restarted, the other cars got anti-traction control triggered because going this slow for this long unspools the turbo, which got so bad the detection software made a false positive.
They did, teams confirmed there was an update being deployed during the delay after the aborted formation lap.
Restarting in Hamilton's case "fixed" it because it removed the condition it was in, if he would have done the lap again, it would have happened again.
The initial formation lap was aborted due to the glitch (caused drivers to slow to a crawl or stop). The cars all went back to the pits. Then there was a long delay while FIA/teams/ECU provider figured out what was wrong. And eventually fixed it via a software update.
But maybe that's the difference between shipping a controller for F1 versus shipping one for an industrial or consumer product? shrug.