Teams set their cars up in the lowest drag configurations of the season, and pray that their engines can deliver enough bhp to slingshot their cars to speeds of over230mph, That’s what it takes to stand a realistic chance of winning.

You might imagine chassis men and aerodynamicists would feel a bit out of things, having to play second fiddle to the powertrain boys. That’s not really the case: after all the sport is called motor racing, not aero racing or carbon tub racing. It’s certainly true, though, that aero and chassis people get frustrated at times with the way the sport’s administration always choose to limit the overall speeds by curbing cars – never engines. In fact, teams and the FIA agreed a few years ago that there would be stability in engine regulations until 2007. A parallel situation in car design would certainly make the life of a Formula 1 technical director a good deal easier.

In reality, the situations aren’t the same. It takes years of massive investment to produce a winning engine. A manufacturer simply cannot afford to develop a technology as complex as , say, pneumatic valves if there was a serious risk that he’d have to discard it because the rules changed.

In any case, we team people are always impressed by the way the engine builders keep finding more power. We keep expecting them to slow down, to come up against a limit, but it doesn’t happen. Every season they find another 30-odd horsepower. I was at McLaren in 1989 when the team took delivery of the very latest Honda unit with 700bhp. We thought it was amazing. But that was a 3.5 litre engine and it weighed 170kg. Nowadays they’re talking 800-820bhp from 3.0 litres, weighing 95kg. The real gains are enormous – and Hockenheim is the one place where they are demonstrated to the full.
I suppose you could say the modern era of engine design began when Renault developed the pneumatic valve for its 3.5 litre v10s in the mid–‘90s. That meant that engines could rev beyond the 13,000 to 14,000rpm at which steel springs break up. It was the passport to much more power. Clearly, the higher you can rev, the more explosions you can produce per second and the more power you can produce. The latest rev limits are running at 18,000rpm, and there are whispers that a few will soon go beyond that.

This brings a new set of problems. At peak revs, you engine’s mixture doesn’t have long to burn, so ignition technology is complex. Friction was the big one. It rises as the cube of engine speed, so it’s pretty obvious you can’t merely take components used to rotating at 13,000 and spin them at 18,000. They’ve got to get smaller, lighter and generally less friction. Pistons, already tiny in road car terms, became even shallower. Bearing surfaces were made as small as possible, and oil became almost as thin as water. And engine designers put enormous efforts (with the help of exotic materials) into reducing the inertia of the moving parts.
There were some odd problems: engine men had trouble working out what went wrong when an engine blew, because if an engine’s doing 300 revolutions a second when it lets go, there’s not much inside that’s recognisable by the time it stops.
Mind you, in the past, teams haven’t known much about the details of their engines internals. Suppliers have always been very secretive about improvements they’ve made between races. If we ask they’ll just say ‘lighter bits’ or ‘less friction’.

We do get engine maps, showing the power and torque performance, but exactly how they do it, we’re a bit hazy about.
It’s changing fast, though. We’re already far more involved with packaging our engines than we every were, and the process will accelerate with the involvement of the big car companies (Jaguar, Toyota, Renault). Integration can bring lightness, which is a big advantage. The whole car (including driver) still has to weigh 600kg, but if there is weight to spare, you can use it to improve the chassis performance – probably by putting it directly under your driver’s backside.

Cooling is another area where co-operation between teams and engine builders pays off. If your engine can produce peak power by running at 130oC, instead of the usual 100oC, your car will need smaller radiators which means it’ll have better aerodynamics, less coolant to pump and less to carry. And because engines keep getting smaller, mounting them is now an exact science. In the Ford DFV days, mountings were fixed, debate over. Today’s units are tiny by comparison and weigh half as much, but they still have to support the car’s gearbox and take all rear suspension loads, so proper integration with the chassis is essential.

There has been debate in past years over the direction of gearbox design: six speeds or seven, transverse or longitudinal? It seems to have died down a bit lately, and most teams use longitudinal six-speeders. They’re the simplest and lightest. The potential space saving of a transverse layout isn’t needed at present because today’s engines and fuel tanks are so small so space isn’t at the premium it was. A lot of teams have done tests and simulations of six speeds against seven to evaluate performance gain against the extra complexity and weight. McLaren and Ferrari have gone the seven-speed route.

It won’t be long, two or three years, maximum – before engines and gearboxes are sharing castings and lubrication systems, and are made by engine manufacturers. After all, they’re the experts at mechanisms with rotary shafts and gears, and all manner of oily bits. Traditionally, teams have produced gearboxes because they’re so critical to chassis design, but the growing influence of the big companies in the sport will dictate change, I believe. Teams are bound to welcome this because they have more than enough to be getting on with. They’ll want to be reassured, though, that the ‘box is well enough designed to carry their rear suspensions. And they’ll also want to know that the extra work hasn’t diverted their engine people from other important jobs.

It’s all very well to employ 20 blokes on a nice, new, gearbox concept, but if the engine power suffers as a result, it won’t look nearly so good. One of the irresistible truths about Formula 1 is that no car ever went slower when you gave its engine more power.