How We’re Wired to Love F1 V10s

wait, just listen to this, this is one of the best sounds a motorsports fan can hear, it's a 2005 2005 Ferrari F 200, the one Michael Schumacker and Ruben's Barow Kell drove and it's one of the cars with best sound of all time, but as the Pistons are ascending. and down and all those explosions are happening. What's really going on that makes a V10 like this sound so good? I've always wondered, so I did some research to find out if it's just personal preference or if there's something scientific about V10s that makes our brains

love

them, we were lucky to have

v10s

in F1 for 16 years, from cars like the 1989 McLaren MP45 to the 2005 Ferrari F 2005, but let's go back to see how we ended up with these beautiful engines in F1 in the first place because before that, the engine regulations in Formula 1 were much more flexible, which meant that we saw some extravagant designs, for example in the 1950s there was a huge variety in engine configurations including inline four and 8, v12 and 16 and even a huge v twin, something normally only seen in Then, In the early 1960s, R manufacturers introduced a small maximum capacity of 1.5L and most teams used small V8s, but then in 1966 things opened up again.

Normally aspirated 3 liter or 1.5 L turbo engines were legal, most teams used a V8. mounted behind the driver, but some teams experimented with big inline power and even an h16, okay, pause for a second, have you ever seen this h16 engine? Well, just look at this technical drawing. brm came up with this crazy idea of ​​creating a 3L engine by basically smashing two 1.5L V8s from his car from the previous year, but you might be wondering why go to all that trouble. I get into why engine manufacturers choose a certain number of cylinders later, but the gist is that brm wanted a 3L engine with each piston as light as possible to allow it to rev higher and faster without falling apart. .

The more pistons you have, the lighter each one can be, allowing them to move up and down faster, but more pistons means a longer engine. Imagine trying to fit a V16. or even an inline 16 in a race car, it would be ridiculously long, so brm stacked the engine to save space and opted for an H configuration, however this turned out to be a complete failure, the engine consumed fuel and oil and did not He was able to finish 27 of his 40 races, but kudos to the innovation, which is the kind of engineering we

love

so much in the late 70s and 80s, Formula 1 had this amazing turbo era where engine configurations had no restriction, but in 1989 the RW manufacturers decided to put some limits, CT the engines to 12 cylinders and restricted their size to 3 and 1/2 L and in my opinion, this is where the real magic happens with the sounds.

The highlight for me is the 1989 McLaren Honda V10 that had that engine. best noise ever and they weren't just v10 at this time we didn't have v8 and v12 in the mix either, this all continued until 2000 when the rules changed and allowed only v10 and v10 were not only used in formula 1 , they were actually used a lot in sports cars like the Toyota TS010, the POE 905 and the Delara SP1. Jud. I've driven many cars with that fantastic Jud V10 engine and let me tell you, it's not only fast. It also sounds incredible and while we're on the topic of sports broadcasting, I have to give kudos to the Audi R15.

It was successful in winning Leemon, but as it was a V10 diesel it didn't have the same sound before we delved into why. They sound so amazing. Let's consider V10s to be a solid choice for engine design. You might think that more is always better. So why not go for a V16 or a V24? Well, let's change this for a second. Let's imagine we are working with a maximum engine capacity of 3 liters, but we can play with any configuration we want, so take a single cylinder configuration as an example, it needs a giant and heavy piston, so the connecting rod and crankshaft too They should be reinforced to support all the That weight, this setup would produce a lot of torque, but by the time you start the engine and get the piston moving, all that weight would probably destroy the engine pretty quickly at any kind of RPM.

Now if you add more cylinders, you can. Spread that 3-liter displacement across lighter pistons, which reduces moving mass. Think about it. Lighter pistons with the same material strength means you can move them faster and then you can reach higher RPMs and RPMs are crucial for engine power. RPM determines how often the engine can complete a power cycle, basically how often fuel explodes each minute, higher RPM means more power cycles per minute which translates to more overall power and more speed; However, there is a limit: push the RPM too far and mechanical and thermal stresses will start to kick in, so of course the power is great, but why not just add endless cylinders like a V12 or even a V36?

Well, adding cylinders is beneficial, but only to a point, and more cylinders means more complexity; think of all the extra valves and longer crankshaft you would need. and a longer crankshaft drastically increases the risk of it bending and in Formula 1 reliability is king, there is no point in being fast if you can't finish the race, there is also the problem of the length of the engine, which if too long will make the car a mess overall. cornering at a certain point, adding more cylinders makes the engine too heavy and long for a race car. Designers like Adrian Neui try to keep F1 cars well packaged and aerodynamically efficient.

If the engine doubles in length, any power gains will likely be lost due to worse conditions. aerodynamics, so

v10s

are surprisingly all about compromise, even if calling a 900 horsepower engine revving to 19,000 RPM a compromise may seem a bit strange, it's basically a balance between complexity, size, weight, consumption fuel and reliability, so let's find out the science behind why v10s sound so good, but before we do, I need to tell you about today's sponsor, shiny.org. If you like learning from this video, you will love it. shiny shiny is where you learn by doing with thousands of interactive programming lessons on mathematical data analysis and artificial intelligence, its way of teaching.

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Simply visit shiny.org driver61 to start your free trial today or scan the QR code on the screen. You'll also get a 20% discount on an annual premium subscription. So let's find out why v10s sound so good, most of the sound of a racing car comes from the engine, especially the exhaust system, after combustion the exhaust valves open releasing high pressure gases into the manifold exhaust, which needs to fuse these gases as smoothly as possible to obtain maximum power. As these gases travel down the exhaust, they create sound waves and these waves eventually reach your ears as that beautiful race car sound, but why is the sound of the V10 in particular so distinctive and so naturally pleasant?

Well, first I thought about the firing order, the sequence in which each cylinder fires, and it turns out that it makes a difference not only in power, but in two, Renault did a study in 2006 on its 2005 championship-winning engine, comparing 24 firing orders and found that the sound did change and the power varied by about 3%, from best to worst, based simply on how the cylinders fired. Firing order has some effect and that's one of the reasons V8s sound the way they do. The Deep Rumble comes from firing cylinders on alternating sides of the engine from left to right creating that characteristic sound.

Now the sound of an engine can also vary depending on the ignition interval, think of it like this: as the crankshaft rotates it triggers each cylinder to fire at certain points, the time between these points is what we call the ignition interval. For a V10 engine if fired evenly, each cylinder fires every 72° of rotation, which makes the engine sound smoother because the exhaust pulses are evenly spaced and therefore do not collide with each other. On the other hand, an engine that starts strangely has uneven timing between ignitions, which creates a roar like you would hear with a V8 where the exhaust gases are slightly uneven, which adds to that characteristic roar, for example.

So if the exhaust pulses fire clearly one after another, as they do with our V10, the engine tends to sound quite crisp, but there is another interesting thing about V10 engines, especially in Formula 1. They can rev incredibly high, Over 19,000 revolutions per minute, these high revolutions mean more combustion cycles per minute and therefore pumping out more exhaust pulses. This pulse frequency makes the motor sound not only loud but also gives it a sharp clarity because these pulses are so close together that they come out at high speeds, the sound you hear is crisper and clearer compared to the quieter and more spaced out sounds. which you can get from a lower RPM engine, but there are more humans who can hear sounds from 20 to 20,000 Hertz, this means we can detect up to 20 separate bangs or explosions per second before they start to blend into a single continuous note.

Now, if a single cylinder engine accelerates to 1200 RPM which fits within our human limit of 20 HZ, at that speed the engine noise almost coalesces into a low, soft note rather than a series of separate explosions, but Then, if you add a second cylinder, you'll be able to hear the engines tone twice as loud because it gains depth as you hear the bass note and octave. A third cylinder would introduce a distinguishable third note with three times the frequency of the low note which in musical terms is known as a fifth. A musical interval that follows the harmonic series is fine, so I hope you are still with me now whenever a new cylinder there is a progression in the harmonic series, but the magic happens with a V10 or, in theory, with any multiple of five cylinders.

Cinders with the fifth harmonic, the engine lands on a major third and people tend to like the sound of a major third because it naturally fits and sounds good. Smooth and happy, yes, science says V10s make our brains happy, so when you trigger a V10 you get the set of a low note, the octave, and the major third, resulting in an interval that It is widely considered a consonant, which is a combination of sounding tones. harmonious and pleasant together when played simultaneously in other words, it is pleasant to our ears, so why don't V8 and V12 sound as good?

They do not have the correct number of cylinders and are located at the wrong level in the harmonic series. They lack that. Third important, but if you've ever been to a circuit with a lot of v10 engines on the track, you know it's not just about science at the start of a race, you can literally feel those 20 F1 cars vibrating through you, you can smell the fire. Fuel up and feel the rush of passing cars, it's a total overload of the century and it's absolutely amazing. The B10s are awesome, but have you heard of the sports car that had four snowmobile motors, one for each wheel?

I talked about that and some other wild cars in my latest Canam video, check it out here and if you made it this far in the video, consider subscribing. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one.