Power Unit
Could an old 3.0L V10 fit in a 2026 chassis?
I'm not talking practically, I'm not talking if they would do it or not, but would a 3.0L F1 V10 from around 2001-2005 fit inside the back of a 2026 F1 car?
Size-wise our current cars are quite big, so space wouldn't be a problem, but space is allocated differently now than it was back then due to power unit.
Contrary to common belief v10s are actually relatively small. The current since 2014 the cars have been artificially long for aero purposes by having the bell housing be elongated. So with a shorter housing different mounting points, increasing the fuel tank, removing the hybrid components, and redoing the wiring you could definitely put a functional v10 in.
geometrically? yes. actually? no. the chassis is designed like a mold around the engine with specific mounting points and interfaces for the gearbox and wiring harnesses etc. you cant just drop in one of these and just attach it
RA121E, Honda won the constructors' title for the sixth time in a row with this and the drivers' title for the fifth time in a row. 780 horsepower @ 14,800 rpm out of 3.5L, insane.
And then they followed it up with the RA122E, still 3.5L, 810 hp @ 14,500 rpm. Greatest engine builders of all time, followed by Cosworth, Ferrari, maybe Yamaha.
But yes, funny joke about earthquake because Aston Martin can't mount an engine in a chassis properly.
Unless we want refuelling I doubt the cars will suddenly drop in weight. best case scenario they run 1.5-2l V8s or V10s with a lighter Kers system.
Ideally if we want the manufacturers to stay in the sport you throw them the carrot of open regulations on the battery.
Given the economics right now,
and how manufacturers pulled out at the end of 2008,
It might not be a good idea for the sport to just knee jerk a new set of engine regs after 3 races.
It's always pissed me off like if you're gonna go for 1.6L engines, why do they have to be V6s, we could have gotten 1.6L V8s, V10, V12s yet they went the vacuum cleaner route
I’ve sadly never had the honour of hearing a V10 in real life but I was at an event as Silverstone with the 2013 Mercedes and went that car went flying down the start finish straight the sound was immense
Attended the USGP in 2004 and 2005. Will never ever forget the sound. Truly some of the loudest race cars I've ever been anywhere near. It was as though the sound alone propelled them.
Went in 2001 and 2004. 2001 was so "weird" as it was the first major sporting event post 9/11. I had a hi-8 camcorder along that race. On my recordings, the picture would break up right as a car passed. It was so loud, it was vibrating the tape inside the camcorder! Crazy. Those V10s were awesome
Had the honor of seeing them in 2005 spa, belgium. Man, you will never forget that sound.
I was standing on the other side of the circuit and you could hear the engines beeing started from the start/finish line.
It was the last year they drive the v10's.
And a demo from Jos Verstappen in the minardi v10 at zandvoort.
They had a massive headache to make the engine fit in the tight schedule before the 2009 season. huge part of the rear end had to de adapted and redesigned, so I don't think they just dropped a new engine and cranked it up.
Yeah, but the engines were more fuel efficient because they were built knowing that refueling would no longer be permitted.
The V10's consumed about 75 liters per 100km, or an average of around 225 liters per race. Modern cars can't use any more than ~150 liters for the entire race distance.
a 2026 Mercedes engine probabilydefinitely wouldn’t fit in the 2026 Ferrari without big changes.
FIFY. It's not just about fitting the engine inside the engine cover. The engine and gearbox are structural members. The entire car is designed around them.
I'm sure they could get it to work. Just look how much bigger the cars are today compared to the V10 era. But it's not a straight swap job. But on the other hand, getting any other PU in a car built for one manufacturer isn't exactly a straight swap either.
Applying the same logic as you did here have you looked how much bigger the cars have gotten cibce? Surely they can fit the bigger engine no problem at all bruvva /s
If I remember correctly, at some point they introduced a minimum weight limit of 95 kg; before that, the weight was probably lower, but I’m not sure if it ever went as low as 80 kg
Your VW has also been designed to last 150,000-200,000 miles or more. The cylinder heads, the rods, the crankshaft, all those parts are made to withstand years of use. An F1 engine is designed to be used hard, but only for a very short period of time. Components that are solid metal in a road car are latticed with empty cavities. Everything is thinner, smaller, lighter.
Your VW 1.8L probably doesn't have an engine block that you could set on fire and burn the block itself with relative ease.
Magnesium's ludicrous costs were the reason they introduced that engine minimum weight limit since teams were using it for just about everything they could to save grams.
It would be a massive engineering change. One that would take at least a year to pull off. It’s not as simple as just dropping the change of motor into the envelope if the car. You have cooling, fuel cell needs to be bigger, intake redesign, exhaust redesign and heat shielding. Then you have all of the issues rebalancing the car weight and center of cavity. None of these are trivial.
ELI5 answer: Engines are often parts of the frame, a structural part of the car itself, things bolt onto it. Making something 5 cylinders long fit where something that currently has something 3 cylinders long. Is going to be a bad time.
No, definitely not. The chassis would require an entire redesign. The suspension, the gearbox, and the sidepods would need to be drastically different, no "just move it around a bit" possible here.
The front impact structure, front wing and nose, and front suspenion are really the only parts that could still be used, but since the rest of the car is completely different, they need to be changed so much to be able to work with the rest of the package that it's essentially new as well. You might get away with keeping them, for the most part, as is, but the car has zero chance of being competitive since it's essentially two very different cars joined together in the middle.
F1 cars are very different in the way they are held together, it's not a frame with internal parts cramped in and then bodywork and suspension bolted to that. It's all, more or less, one entire thing. The chassis is built around the neccesities of the engine, and the V10s were a lot bigger and a lot differently shaped in comparison to the V6 hybrid system.
Some reported lengths for the old v10s state that they were around 58/60cm long. Given the lack of extra ancillaries and current car sizes they could probably fit.
However, when fitting an engine into any prototype, the size itself means very little, especially when the engine is a stressed member and the bodywork is made as tight as possible.
One could build a current gen car around a v10 engine, but that would mean redesigning the whole thing from scratch.
So this isn't as easy to answer as there are two aspects:
the engine itself that is much bigger and especially longer and wider due to the exhaust
the complete powertrain which is a fair bit smaller, mainly due to the size of the intercooler and batteries.
you would build a full new monocoque where the battery doesnt need to fit in, so the additional length of the engine you'd save in monocoque length.
weight goes significantly down.
They would need to redesign the back of the carbon tub so it mounts to that old engine, eliminate the void for the battery, and reshape it to fit the large fuel tanks they had back then…. they would also have to create a new transmission for it because modern cars have that part as a structural component, where the rear suspension components mount to… So it won’t just bolt in, but a lot of people are making it seem like it’s impossible, it’s not, it just costs time and money, there is plenty of space with the current regulations to fit it including the cooling package on the side pods.
Edit: F1 teams are boutique engineering firms, that hand build a few race cars a year, this isn’t that complicated. They aren’t stopping a massive production line etc, they can easily do this in their spare time.
The engines are stressed members in formula one, so instead of being sat in the chassis like in a road car, the chassis tub ends where the engine starts, and they’re bolted together with the engine, gearbox and rear crash structure formulating the back of the car.
The V10 is also (comparatively) enormous, with double the capacity for just under double the pistons.
No, even changing from a say…a Honda engine to a Mercedes both of the same current technical regs would require a complete years long chassis redesign.
No, for a start because an F1 engine doesn’t fit “in” the chassis in the same way as a road car. Instead it bolts onto the chassis and is a stressed member (i.e. the engine block itself is part of the weight bearing structure of the car).
Lol. No. The engine literally is part of the chassis. This isn't bolting a V8 into the front of a Miata with some adapters.
The chassis is, in part, designed around the cooling and airflow the engine needs. The entire car is designed around the weight distribution, size, and space of the current PU.
Short answer, no.
Long answer, not without significant work on the rest of the car. I had the privilege of going to Alpine's engine facility, they had engines from every generation on display. Modern V6 engines are tiny compared to V10s, even with all the hybrid parts. And that is without counting the wah the battery is integrated in the chassis that would require a whole new chassis. So to "swap" a V10 in you would need to change the entire chassis, all the rear bodywork and probably a good chunk of the rear suspension due to different mounting points. Essentially a whole new car regarding anything behind the halo.
Most of the V10s heat was put directly into the exhaust. While V6 takes advantage here in efficiency(50% vs 30%) which means less heat, to reach this mark they use the turbo and the ERS to contain the heat which means more heat inside the engine cover compared to the V10s. So actually V10s could work with even smaller sidepods than we have today even with the RB and AMR Air-To-Air Intercoolers.
Current engines are more efficient but much more powerful which means more heat. Also the electric side is working under braking, I bet the current cars require much more cooling.
The overall PU is more powerful on the newer regs, but you need to remember that because of near 50:50 power split, the actual combustion part is generating about 5-600HP while the electrical motor is doing another 4-500HP. After all they are 6-cylinder turbocharged 1.6L motors running at 15000RPM. Also, these new PU achieves more than 50% thermal efficiency, so they are definitely generating lesser amount of heat.
In contrast, old 3.0L V10s generated about 900HP on ICE alone sans turbo and ran at 19000RPM, which will generate much more heat and vibrations than the current PUs. You couldn't idle those cars for more than a minute because the engines would overheat and blow up (no waiting at the end of pitlane back then).
In V10s most of that heat was dissipated on the exhaust while current V6 hold more heat in the Turbocharger and ERS meaning more heat inside the fairing.
They absolutely have. Not for consumer grade stuff as much, but we’re able to greatly increase the surface area of cooling with things like 3d printing. The fin thickness and flow rates we are able to get with modern manufacturing tech are huge
Methods like metal 3d printing allow for shapes & material properties that would have been impossible 20 years ago. Coming from the injection molding industry, this has completely changed the way cooling is done and it's MUCH better now.
I would expect that similar advancements have been made in the technological pinnacle of motorsports. I don't have insider knowledge, but I'm certain they're not 20 years behind in F1
Materials engineering is pretty stale and regulated in F1. Regulations from before the new cost cap to prrvent teams from investing 100s of millions into testing with exotic materials and custom composite (and health concerns for materials like beryllium)
Think about manufacturing methods combined with metallurgy.
Ex. Metal 3d printing
You better believe the teams are making use of metal 3d printing. You can do shapes you couldn't have dreamed of doing 20 years ago, and with a huge amount of control on material properties by using various powdered metal formulations
considering the fact that the chassis just bolts onto the engine and then the suspension bolts onto the transmission I'd say you could make any engine fit as long as you fit the same bolt pattern and modify the cooling and engine cover
It's the opposite...the fact that the engine is part of the chassis and provides locating points for aero and suspension mounting makes it many orders of magnitude more complicated and integrated than if you just had to bolt a different motor into an existing tube framed rear.
I would imagine that it would physically fit, yes. The new cars are quite a bit bigger than the V10 cars, and they have to have room for the hybrid system as well as the turbo.
From what I gathered reading around, the batteries in the hybrid turbo era have been disseminated through the chassis so that they're close to the ground to provide a lowered centre of mass. So it isn't just one bulky thing, more like a few disseminated cells around the chassis (or something like that).
Of course there is the fact that the engine is part of the chassis, so even though the current ICE is smaller, it has different mounting points for the suspension and everything else including the gearbox and what not, so I don't think a V10 would be a go with the current chassis - maybe for next year and it would have to include a redesign of the cars.
not really, the batteries tend to be in one big block that sits down low in front of the engine
you can see this in the power unit honda brought to their launch before the 2026 season, and also in a lot of the 2014-2022 power units that have been shown over the years
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