Why a wide open rule book can’t work for pro racing series anymore.

So we frequently have conversations where people say that F1, Indy car, Sports car, NASCAR whatever should have basically no rules beyond safety. People keep pointing out how that can’t work anymore and point at the cautionary tale of the original Can-Am series but many people don’t agree.

In the thread on the accessibility of modern racing I resurrected last week Motomoron posted a link to this podcast which I found so fascinating I think it’s worthy of a new separate thread. Here's the link and BTW I've now started binging on this whole series.

We’ve all heard of Scott Tucker spending a million $$’s to win the D sport championship at the Runoffs in 2012, but the podcast has lots of the juicy details.

First off I don’t’ want to discuss Scott, his legal issues and/or the ethics of his business, let’s keep this to racing. I’d heard about it and thought it was a rich guy buying a win so he could move up the ladder. I hadn’t realized he was already a successful ‘Gentleman racer’ with a Silver license with some legitimate success in other series and this was a side project. When I heard about it before I always thought if I had a million bucks to blow on racing I’d blow it being a small fish in a big pond like racing Indy Lights or Sports cars rather than a big fish in an insignificant pond. Turns out he was both.

But the warning part of this comes from the fact that the D sports rules were basically wide open as it was, and listening to the podcast and some of the figures mentioned by Jeff Braun at the start on what they spent base lining the original car I’d bet it was more like $2 mil than $1mil they spent.

Let’s look at the highlights of what they did in eight months. If you listen and I’ve got some figure wrong sorry, I listened to this three days ago, but I think my point is still valid.

Baseline an existing car on kinematics rigs, shakers, modeling, simulators. No problem, any pro team already has this info.
Run simulator testing on every set up for the base car so they know what they have. Again this is what pro teams do.
Buy two of the best engines from the two best engine suppliers in the series as base line and back up.
Hire an engine guy to go through the rules and design an engine especially for the very loose rules. This is where it starts to get silly. As the rules are so open I think they said they had something like six different basic engine configurations and tested tested tested them. Now this is where completely open riles can be an issue. While F1, Indy engine suppliers and sports cars kind of do this, there are rules in place to stop it getting out of hand. All the single seater series dictate the basic layout of the engine to stop them going totally overboard. IT already costs something like $25m for an F1 engine deal. If it was totally open what would the costs be? $50m, $75m, $100m??? They ended up with a 670cc turbo engine that made 350hp and needed a computer to start and stop it or it would melt if just turned off.
Then then they had 44, yes forty four (I wish it had been 42) computers running CFD on the bodywork for weeks and weeks on end. Again this is what F1 does and you can’t get on the back of the grid for less than $50mil. Imagine if the aero was wide open for IMSA (United sports car) You’d price it out of existence overnight. You can already outspend any team within the confines of the rules, but if there were none the first manufacturer to commit a billion $$’s would kill it overnight.
Then they ran a DOE with the different chassis, suspensions, engines and aero set ups on the simulator for days and days on end until they came up with what they decided was the best set up so they designed and built it.

The net result of what in pro terms was a small cheap project was a car that with a gold pro driver, not Scott, was capable of lowering the lap record in testing (so not official) by over 10 seconds and building a space frame 670cc car that was able to set times that would have put it 2nd on the grid a few hundredths off the time of an LMP2 sports racer and was nudging 200mph in an IMSA race, all to be able to be the first SCCA car to break 2 mins at the track.

Some people hate the guy for what he did. I personally think it was mega cool, but it really shows that open rule books can’t work in modern racing with the computing power and technology available. Just imagine what would happen if for instance LMP2 prototypes had an open rule book just keeping the size, weight and capacity limits in place. How much power could you get out of a 5L V8 these days? 1,000-1,500hp? What about unlimited aero, It would be easy to build a car these days beyond the physical capabilities of a human to drive around corners without blacking out even without a banking. IF you weren’t limited to ‘only’ beating 2 mins, ‘only’ having $2mil and ‘only’ having 8 months to do it in, how the hell much could you spend?

No wonder that pretty much every series except F1 and LMP1 limits either the number of companies who build chassis or go to a spec class. These days with open rules no one could possibly to keep going. You might got a great series for the first couple of races, but as soon as someone had the budget they’d build a car so far beyond anyone else’s budget ability the series would die.

I miss open chassis wars in Indy, F3000, F3, prototype racing etc. as much as the next person, but I just doesn’t see how it’s possible to make it work these days, especially with declining eye balls on motorsport as it is with people simply falling out of love with the concept of automobiles in droves.

I listened to that podcast driving the R63 back from Florida. It's and absolute must listen for anyone. I need to download the whole series before I drive this summer.

Great thread! Thanks!

Rog

It's worth mentioning that apart from the cost problems you've mentioned there's also safety, both for drivers and perhaps more importantly, spectators/bystanders. If you make the cars faster they can carry more kinetic energy off the track and toward spectators, so basically the speed of a car on a given track has to be limited - either that or you have to increase runoff room, and even if you have all the land and construction money in the world, too much runoff room is bad for the spectator experience. Example: Not a lot of people go out to Bonneville to watch streamliners streak by on the horizon through their binoculars. The speed and runoff room match here.

The driver safety downsides of increased speeds are obvious. Another factor that has to be controlled for driver (and to some extent, spectator) safety is cornering speed/stability. Downforce, and especially underbody downforce, improves cornering speed, but as it increases carries increased risks with a loss of cornering stability. If you snap a wing or go over a bump the downforce could be suddenly reduced and you'd lose traction, so the cornering speed has to be low enough to allow for this. This is why downforce is commonly limited by rules about the size of aero surfaces and underbody downforce is very strictly limited, with rules against sliding skirts, suction devices etc because better sealing to the road means more unstable underbody downforce.

FSAE is a notable exception where gigantic wings are allowed because the limited engine power keeps vehicle speeds low, and runoff room is ample on FSAE courses.

A lot of the spending shown above would also apply to a more regulated series. Instead of getting big gains from a big array of computers running CFD calculations, you would get tiny gains. Instead of testing six engine configurations to determine which was best, you'd test one (specified) engine configuration to chase one or two horsepower.

Thanks to that big spend, you got a step change in performance. Great value for money, honestly. In a more regulated class, spending that same amount of money would get you a slight advantage on the field - unless everyone was spending that kind of money. In which case you'd have to do it just to keep up.

It's like the Challenge. From my outsider's view, what wins the challenge is cleverness and sheer hard work. Both of these are currencies, and since you can't spend money you spend them instead. If you want to win at the challenge, you have to spend a lot of them. Money's just the way of keeping track of how much cleverness and hard work you put into the build

I didn't read your novella. A wide open rule book can definitely still work in racing. It's a called a damn spending cap and revenue sharing.

Just like the stick and ball professional sports teams do in the US, so NYC/LA/Chicago can't continually buy all the talent with their massive budgets while the other 22 bottom markets field terrible, weak teams.

That was one of my favorite of that series. Anyone who has not listened Dinner With Racers needs to do so. Hopefully they can get a second one put together.

z31maniac wrote: I didn't read your novella. A wide open rule book can definitely still work in racing. It's a called a damn spending cap and revenue sharing. Just like the stick and ball professional sports teams do in the US, so NYC/LA/Chicago can't continually buy all the talent with their massive budgets while the other 22 bottom markets field terrible, weak teams.

Yes I agree with this. The NFL for example has a "salary cap" it makes sense for racing to have a spending cap, it would have the same effect.

F1 keeps talking about a spending cap occasionally. It's a lot more difficult to implement when you're fielding a race car that is the result of hundreds of people's theoretical research and manufacturing instead of limiting the salary of 20-odd individuals.

z31maniac wrote: I didn't read your novella. A wide open rule book can definitely still work in racing. It's a called a damn spending cap and revenue sharing. Just like the stick and ball professional sports teams do in the US, so NYC/LA/Chicago can't continually buy all the talent with their massive budgets while the other 22 bottom markets field terrible, weak teams.

How do you regulate it?

Do you count the computers? The CPU time? The high end simulator time, and/or cost?

Even in stick and ball sports- spending caps are not perfect- they have their own loopholes and problems.

But also- stick and ball sports ARE spec series. There are a lot of rules telling you how to play the game.

z31maniac wrote: I didn't read your novella. A wide open rule book can definitely still work in racing. It's a called a damn spending cap and revenue sharing.

Dude, that is positively brief for some of my threads, It's almost a twitter post in comparison to when I get on a roll.

z31maniac wrote: Just like the stick and ball professional sports teams do in the US, so NYC/LA/Chicago can't continually buy all the talent with their massive budgets while the other 22 bottom markets field terrible, weak teams.

F1 has spent years trying to figure out a cost cap and can't make it work. In stick and ball sports you can say a salary cap of $Xm no problem, but due to rules you limit the number of people on the field/pitch/court/course at one time so it can work. What do you do in racing. If you limit the F1 budget to $10m then Ferrari stops making engines and Fiat set up an engine department and spend $500m designing engines which they put Ferrari badges on and sell to Ferrari, Torro Rosso and Manor for $1 for the seasons. IF you limit the number of computers or hours that can be used simultaneously for CFD they just buy more powerful computers to run more faster. You can't limit bits per second as the industry changes so rapidly you'd be revising the rules weekly. Or if you do then they outsource their carbon work to Joe Blow carbon works who just happen to have 999 Cray computers running simultaneously on CFD. Introduce a mandatory 2 week vacation even and while work stops at the factory the suppliers are still working 24/7 and you can't shut off Adrian Newey's brain from thinking up new ideas to test when back. Price cap brakes and Carbon Industries will sell the favored teams their brakes as part of a sponsorship deal for $0.01 a set. I cannot see how you can enforce a cost cap, and neither can the FIA, the F1 teams, CDC Capitol etc. They've all been trying for 10 years.

alfadriver wrote: But also- stick and ball sports ARE spec series. There are a lot of rules telling you how to play the game.

Yup. Imagine if football (sorry soccer) just had a 'ball of Xmm diameter' in the rule book. Fancy pants united would work with a high tech company the make a ball with an internal pump that deflates partially until a sensor detects the tip of the shoe of one of their players is close when it suddenly inflates to x PSI in a couple of milliseconds. Or it has smart material that changes it structure, or opens up variable diameter tubes that pass through it to reduce wind resistance as it's in the air, or had GPS tracking to make it fall to earth at a certain point or or or. OK, it's a stupid example, but that's what I thought of in the 1/10th of a second after reading Eric's post. Imagine what real engineers could do with a rule just stating 'ball' given a few million and some time. The technology didn't exist even 10 years ago to make my stupid ideas come true even with a weight limit, but I guarantee I every one of those ideas is possible now.

Adrian_Thompson wrote: What do you do in racing. If you limit the F1 budget to $10m then Ferrari stops making engines and Fiat set up an engine department and spend $500m designing engines which they put Ferrari badges on and sell to Ferrari, Torro Rosso and Manor for $1 for the seasons. IF you limit the number of computers or hours that can be used simultaneously for CFD they just buy more powerful computers to run more faster. You can't limit bits per second as the industry changes so rapidly you'd be revising the rules weekly. Or if you do then they outsource their carbon work to Joe Blow carbon works who just happen to have 999 Cray computers running simultaneously on CFD. Introduce a mandatory 2 week vacation even and while work stops at the factory the suppliers are still working 24/7 and you can't shut off Adrian Newey's brain from thinking up new ideas to test when back. Price cap brakes and Carbon Industries will sell the favored teams their brakes as part of a sponsorship deal for $0.01 a set. I cannot see how you can enforce a cost cap, and neither can the FIA, the F1 teams, CDC Capitol etc. They've all been trying for 10 years.

I was actually going to make a post about a spending cap, I'd actually spent my hour running errands thinking about what I was going to say to not sound like an idiot when I mentioned it, because I haven't heard the podcasts, and don't really know the in n outs of the industry like you specifically and some others on the board do. This specific example though shoots a big hole in my thought process.

A summary of my thoughts was similar to LeMons racing, jst a higher cap. Safety gear and tires NOT included in budget, but cap the teams all at say $20 million for team development. Allow full use of all existing tech, maybe add a catch all addendum that TEAMS could pull together, BUT be limited to ONE car. So Porsche and Audi could work together, pulling their budgets together and have a $40m team when all is said and done, but ONLY one car. Instead of Porsche and Audi both being in the field competing, they have idk Sebastian Loeb is the first name that comes to mind, driving on behalf of BOTH teams, or team Poudi as it were.

Is that a bulletproof plan? Obviously not, you've already pointed out some gaping holes in it. But to an outsider, on paper, it sounds like it could work. Obviously nothing EVER transfers from paper to reality 100%, but it sounded feasible at least.

Adrian_Thompson wrote: F1 has spent years trying to figure out a cost cap and can't make it work.

No, they can't get the big teams to agree to spend less and give up their advantage.

They already have enforced vacations (August break), limits on CFD time.....how do they regulate that if you're going to bring up bits per seconds.

Keith, personnel is covered in Mercedes/Red Bull/Ferrari's $400+ million per year budgets. And it's be part of the budget cap too, that way they can't offer James Allison $10m/year to jump ship somewhere else. If they do, it impacts the rest of the budget. Same for the drivers.

Alfa, I don't but into the "it's not perfect so it won't work." It would be better than currently. That's part of the reason I've tuned out on F1 when I used to religiously watch practice, quali, race, read the news/analysis, etc. Right now we have teams at the back of the grid with literally 1/10th the budget of the top teams. That's why they only last as long as someone is willing to lose money, then they are sold, change names and the process starts over again.

I'm tired of seeing one team find the secret sauce, then dominate (because the rules are so restrictive other teams can't claw back what they lost) until the make a big rule change again.

In the last 16 years, what only 2 of the non-mega teams have won (If you can count Renault's back-to-back with Alonso as not a mega-team). The only reason Brawn won is they developed the double diffuser and it was a massive advantage until the other teams figured it out. And once they did they, Brawn lost their dominance, but Button had already built up an impressive points lead.

To stir the pot a bit: If he used 44 computers running for several weeks on end to optimize the aerodynamics - is that a case of too much computing power, or not enough?

z31maniac wrote: Keith, personnel is covered in Mercedes/Red Bull/Ferrari's $400+ million per year budgets. And it's be part of the budget cap too, that way they can't offer James Allison $10m/year to jump ship somewhere else. If they do, it impacts the rest of the budget. Same for the drivers.

But what about the suppliers? Where's the line between a supplier and the team, as posted earlier? Testing time was severely limited to cut costs, so computer time and simulator time became big line items on the budget. Same with wind tunnel testing. It's a hydra, the whole enterprise is so complex that as soon as you limit one area another one pops up. You can't just say "you are only allowed to spend $x per year".

Keith Tanner wrote: You can't just say "you are only allowed to spend $x per year".

Why?

Give them a max budget and require open books.

Refer to Adrian's earlier post.

If you limit the F1 budget to $10m then Ferrari stops making engines and Fiat set up an engine department and spend $500m designing engines which they put Ferrari badges on and sell to Ferrari, Torro Rosso and Manor for $1 for the seasons. IF you limit the number of computers or hours that can be used simultaneously for CFD they just buy more powerful computers to run more faster. You can't limit bits per second as the industry changes so rapidly you'd be revising the rules weekly. Or if you do then they outsource their carbon work to Joe Blow carbon works who just happen to have 999 Cray computers running simultaneously on CFD. Introduce a mandatory 2 week vacation even and while work stops at the factory the suppliers are still working 24/7 and you can't shut off Adrian Newey's brain from thinking up new ideas to test when back. Price cap brakes and Carbon Industries will sell the favored teams their brakes as part of a sponsorship deal for $0.01 a set. I cannot see how you can enforce a cost cap, and neither can the FIA, the F1 teams, CDC Capitol etc. They've all been trying for 10 years.

To me a wide open rule book equals dead people. Look at Group B.

Not taking this topic too far afield but z31 disproved his own point regarding spending versus success in sports, especially baseball. Even in football, the 17th largest market defeated the 25th largest.

Remember, Kansas City (the 33rd largest media market) won the World Series. They prospered because they exploited a market inefficiency. When everyone else paid too much for on-base percentage, team speed and defense became relative bargains. In a cap-limited environment, they exploited that which is free or cheap or unregulated. Denver did the same thing in football by not overspending on quarterbacks but having a ferocious defense capable of stopping everyone.

As Keith points out, the Challenge works the same way. Spending is limited but ingenuity and effort are not. I would also add testing because Challenge winners tend to be well-sorted cars. Some make multiple appearances before they get the win because it took that long to get the right combination. In fact, there are many ingenious Challenge competitors but the market inefficiency is testing time.

Ferrari spends about $500,000,000 a year on its F1 team. However, they haven't been champs for years because the market inefficiency is aerodynamics and the driver's ability to keep his tires on the car longer than anyone else. They're all fast but some drivers are better at tidiness. Again, exploiting a market inefficiency.

Scott Tucker won by spending an insane amount of money to win something that has a much lower intrinsic value than the amount of money spent. No one else in their right mind chose to do that (at least to that degree) so the market inefficiency in D Sports Racing is hubris.

There is no unlimited racing because there are no unlimited checkbooks. Eventually, factory support wouldn't even be enough. One would need government support to continue. Even more than lack of spectator safety, which could be negated by banning live spectators and making the whole thing a purely media event, which is the way expensive racing is going.

So if you squeeze the racing balloon on one end (spending, rules), the other end (ingenuity, talent, time) expands. If a racing series has no constraints, the balloon pops.

The engine idea is ludicrous.

They already do limit CFD. Keep up with the times.

Joe Blow the carbon guy is going to work for free? Doubt it.

The suppliers continuing to develop will be reflected in cost. Keith, let me guess, when FM puts more R&D into a product, it SHOCK, costs more doesn't it?

Sure, Newey's brain doesn't stop working, but the money to build prototypes and test them in the 60% scale wind tunnel does have a limit.

Brakes, that's the only one that seems plausible. But even then, both drivers in the same team don't always use Brembo or CI for the entire season, switching back and forth, sometimes multiple times throughout the year.

Again, the cost cap hasn't gone into the rules because the big teams don't want to lose their advantage.

MadScientistMatt wrote: To stir the pot a bit: If he used 44 computers running for several weeks on end to optimize the aerodynamics - is that a case of too much computing power, or not enough?

Too much for D-sport, not enough to get the simulations done quickly

"The only reasonable numbers are zero, one and infinity." - Bruce MacLennan

Often true with anything relating to computers...in this case, you want infinity processing power on one computer so that you spend zero time waiting for the results

Jerry From LA wrote: Not taking this topic too far afield but z31 disproved his own point regarding spending versus success in sports, especially baseball. Even in football, the 17th largest market defeated the 25th largest.

A case study does not a generalization make. Also, baseball doesn't have a spending cap.

Anomalies will happen, look at my Brawn example. They found a loophole in the rules and exploited it.

My point is that it helps level the playing field.

Enforced vacation only works at the team not the suppliers.

What about Sponsors selling or giving parts to teams.

What about shell companies developing parts and them being sold to the team.

All these things come up all the time in other businesses and even with millions and billions of $$'s trying to prove these things its never easy to prove the truth. Look at the 08 financial melt down. It's well established what happened. How many people have actually been prosecuted and sent to jail. Different situation yes, but let's face it Racing has a murkey past already so I have no doubt that at least some people involved would have no issue cheating the system. How do you prove that company A was really an part of team A when they spend $100,000,000 designing and building a widget for team A's car after company A has sold it to company B who is bought out by company C in the Cayman islands which sells it to company D in Kenya to company E in Delaware after which company E goes bust and Company F buys the tech at auction for $0.000001 on the $1 and sells it back to team A. The FEC, CIA, IMF, FBI, Interpol, Scotland yard cant prove this E36 M3 in court for far less $$ amounts than the F1 grind. I'd say it's impossible.

JOhn Paul Sr finally shot a guy before they put him away for 25 years after funding his racing from the early 70's to 1983. People knew he was in the drug trade but they couldn't prove it for years and years. Don't you think people like that could set up a dozen front companies to do development work and launder it instead of $$"s.

After listening to the podcast, it sounds like they were trying to build the engine to the limit of what could work without F1-style preheating - so it would've had super-tight tolerances and would've needed a careful and gradual warm-up, and would then need the electric water pump to run after shutdown to make sure it cooled evenly.