The Differences Between an IndyCar and a F1 Car
openwheelworld.net67 points by 1659447091 3 days ago
67 points by 1659447091 3 days ago
Ironically, a lot of this is only relevant until... this Sunday. After Sunday, the F1 season is over, and 2026 cars will be very different.
2026 cars will have less downforce and less drag (closer to Indycar) but also "active" aerodynamics (elements on both the front and rear wings can flatten on-demand to reduce drag, or raise to produce more downforce) and a hybrid power unit closer to 50/50 split between ICE and electric horsepower than the current 85/15 split for F1 cars or 80/20 for Indycars.
F1 next year will probably be chaos because there are so many different aspects that teams may have gotten wrong in development.
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There are some inaccuracies though regardless. I am pretty sure that teams do not go through multiple sets of brake pads in a weekend. They last several races, no different than Indycar.
> hybrid power unit closer to 50/50 split between ICE and electric horsepower
Fun fact, at those ratios it would make a lot of sense to use an electric continuous variable transmission (eCVT) - connect the engine and the motor with a planetary gear set to the wheels, done. The electric motor spins backwards when going slow and forward when going fast. Those eCVTs can be lighter, more efficient an deliver more power across the entire range. But they're illegal in F1 - because they make the car sound boring.
Interestingly there are discussions about moving back to having the majority of the power from IC engines as soon as the end of the decade, with synthetic fuels. Personally I can’t wait.
I would like that too but it's highly unlikely to happen. Audi and GM just entered the engine business in F1 for the start of 2026 and they invested shit tonne of millions into engine R&D specifically for the new turbo-V6 regulations, so moving the goalposts again so soon would just rug-pull their investments.
Also the end of DRS. Good riddance.
Not really.
> Z-mode means the front and rear wings are closed which generates more downforce for the corners. In X-mode, the drivers can open the flaps which will reduce drag and increase speed.
The problem with DRS is the zones and only being able to use it when close behind another car. My understanding is the X-Mode can be used pretty much anywhere and anytime.
I think the cars reflect pretty well the intended ethos and "vibes" of both competitions. Indycar still feels a bit like "dudes racing cars" while F1 has become a corporate hi-tech extravaganza.
Both have their appeal, but I feel Indy produces better actual racing for the spectator despite being slower and less refined technically. I do watch both.
The best comparison I can think of is that in a Indycar race, it's every driver against each other, meanwhile in Formula 1 you can feel it's the whole team that's actually taking part in the race, and the car on track is just the tip of the iceberg of the process.
Used to be a big Formula 1 fan as a kid, growing up in Niki Lauda's home town (of 2000 people). Formula 1 lost it when they moved away from the V10. And when they started putting kids in the cockpit instead of real men.
They put a few full NASCAR races recorded solely from a drivers perspective up on youtube every once in a while. I never appreciated that sport until I started watching those. It's far more brutal and compact than I ever had expected with the shift in perspective making all the difference. It's "dudes racing for their lives."
In general the driver's perspective has always seemed underused to me. In F1 at least (where the cars are insanely stiff), unless there are overtakes in progress, watching from the trackside cameras just looks like cars driving round a track. Whereas from the driver's view you can see the car reacting to the track and the driver reacting to the car.
People complain a lot that the TV coverage spends too long on the driver's girlfriends. For me I think it spends too long looking at the cars (from the outside)!
I guess part of this is just that the image quality from onboards is not so sleek. But if it was up to me I think like 60-70% of the airtime would be from onboard.
There should be an option to watch every sport from the player perspective. Broadcast perspectives rob viewers of a true appreciation of the game.
My favorite perspective switch is in tennis. There was a video of a match between federer and djokovic (now taken down) that was one of my favorite videos on youtube. Their skill is so much more obvious when you don't optically compress things.
The same goes for baseball, where the broadcast camera purposefully uses telephoto lenses to spatially compresses the frame, keeping both pitcher and batter in focus. Watching pitches from the batter's perspective is mind blowing. Those pitches move so much more than it looks like on tv, and travel so much faster.
imo, the default view for baseball should be a fixed camera behind the ump and, for tennis, a fixed court-level view behind players.
Some of the most racing fun I've had in video games was actually NASCAR games.
The whole race was constant jostling for position. There was almost always someone within a car length/width, and zero room for error. From what I've seen on TV and YT, it seemed pretty spot on.
Unfortunately I was also bad at driving with a PS2 controller so I was the danger on the track.
Interesting.. I agree on the description but my experience was opposite. I enjoyed F1 much more, though I really enjoy all the technical stats and talks with the teams/engineers that develop the cars and find it to be an equal part of the whole thing as the actual racing itself.
This is the last season with Renault as a F1 engine manufacturer. Their team (Alpine) will use Mercedes engine from 2026.
There will be many changes next year. Audi enters as manufacturer with its own team (they bought Sauber.) The two Red Bull teams will use their own Red Bull engine, with the help of Ford. Honda will power Aston Martin. The new Cadillac team will use Ferrari engines and build its own engine for 2028.
The table lists F1 cars as having "Carbon fiber brake calipers".
This is glaringly incorrect. All current brake calipers are machined from aluminum, specifically Aluminum-Lithium or Aluminum-Copper alloys. There is a rule denoting bulk elasticity modulus limit on brake calipers of 80 GPa, which was set just at that to allow the more exotic Lithium Aluminum alloys but to dis-allow Titanium alloys or anything else stiffer (There was experimentation with Titanium calipers in the past.)
Absolutely no calipers are made from composites, CF, graphite, or otherwise. Discs are Carbon-carbon.
The reason these series always get compared is because Indy’s tight rules make it less compelling while F1’s more open rules make it less competitive.
WEC (and IMSA a bit) solve those problems but they have so many drivers and teams that it takes a lot of dedication to follow along.
In the end you end up wondering if your favorites could hack it in the WRC.
I think that an ideal race league would use WRC-inspired homologation rules and little else (except for some safety features)
Any chassis size. Whatever aero you want. Any engine size/configuration. The only constraint is that it needs to be something you can put into production.
we’d get to see a Cambrian explosion of weird race car variants that would make race day strategizing wild. and we’d really get to showcase cool creative engineering. And we’d eventually see the benefits of that engineering trickle down into normal production cars we all drive
I favor little regulation and tight cost caps. Example: you get 100 millions, 100 kg of this kind of gasoline per race, do whatever you want.
Any chassis size is probably not a good idea because cars collide with each other and they must do it safely. So maybe rules should define a box that cars must fit into, with the parts that get in touch with other cars at given places and with given shapes. Example: we don't want spear like nose cones at the same height of the heads of drivers of other cars. No halo can protect against that.
The problem with little regulation is that manufactures will be frightened to enter because it's easy to have a championship in which the one with the bright idea wins all the races and the other ones are scattered 2, 5, 6, 7 seconds behind.
We had something like that with the CanAm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Can-Am
A lot of innovation and crazy designs.
> tight cost caps. Example: you get 100 millions
The effect of that in F1 was a huge increase in team profits and significant decrease in real wages for ordinary employees of those teams.
It's been done. Look up the Can-Am series. At best, it would last a couple of years until the cars got way too fast for the tracks, and the manufacturers were no longer prepared to invest in it because there was no commercial return in it for them.
The idea that there is any significant relationship between what makes a good production car, even a sports car, and a racing car was always dubious and today is frankly nonsensical.
The way to make a car fast round a race track basically comes down to the amount of downforce it can produce, and the power of the engine. Downforce is almost completely irrelevant to road driving, as taking corners fast enough to generate cornering forces of over 1G is frankly suicidal on the road.
As for engines, aside from the fact that the internal combustion engine is doomed in road transport (despite what the current administration thinks), producing an engine with performance that exceeds what even good drivers are capable of handling without electronics doing the job for them was solved at least 20 years ago, and continues to be a solved problem despite tightening of emissions standards.
In any case, while lighter, smaller, lower cars remain the preferred option for motorsport applications, all anyhbody wants to actually buy, particularly in the United States, is gargantuan SUVs and pickup trucks, which makes any application of motorsport technology for the road moot.
There is no power-network in existence, not in the medium-to-long term, that would allow tens of millions of cars (mauve hundreds of millions if we talk at the continent-wide level) to get all electric, the physics isn’t there and it won’t be. You’re correct though, it could be that the next US administration will try to copy the bureaucrats here in Europe and try to go the let’s-ban-the-petrol-engine route, which would, in practice, mean that only the well-to-do consumers (like most of the users on this forum) will be able to still have personal cars.
Electrifying the transportation sector is generally seen as a 15-25% increase in grid demand.
These are vehicles which most can schedule their charging to take advantage of low electricity prices and therefore low demand.
The uprating needed is quite insignificant.
For what it's worth, the most entertaining circuit racing in the world happens at grassroots level featuring slow, cheap cars that permit a lot of drafting.
The faster the cars get, in the main, the less overtaking occurs.
Watching a winner of 80+ NASCAR races ride along for a hot lap of the Australian Bathurst 1000 course is fairly entertaining ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLkLtBkUVuo
V8 Supercars on Mount Panorama don't disappoint.
Course map and lap: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANALNcF7QrI
> The reason these series always get compared is because Indy’s tight rules make it less compelling while F1’s more open rules make it less competitive.
I'm new to racing, but can you elaborate on this? How are F1's rules "open"? They seem just about as strict if not more so than IndyCar to me? At least I don't think IndyCar has "ahead at the apex" rules?
> In the end you end up wondering if your favorites could hack it in the WRC.
I'm glad I'm not the only one. Screw "Grill the Grid" or whatever nonsense they're doing on YouTube now; let's see the F1 grid do a rally.
There are technical regulations and sporting regulations. I'm not very familiar with IndyCar anymore but my feeling is that F1 got stricter on technical regulation but IndyCar is even stricter: only one chassis and more standard parts. However F1 sporting regulations seems to be tighter. The classic clash between Villeneuve and Arnoux in 1979 would be unthinkable now. Not only they would be black flagged and stopped for a GP but no driver would even think about doing those kind of overtaking attempts.
In the old Michel Vaillant comics the f1 and indy cars seem to be interchangeable, they compete in each other’s championships
Not sure if true given that it’s fiction, but they do seem to be based on reality
IndyCar is one of the coolest competitions on earth that nobody cares about. Not just the 500, which is amazing, but the full calendar schedule.
Its so interesting that the difference between Indy and F1 in terms of lap times is objectively marginal but subjectively extreme.
I would have guessed given the extreme cost difference between them there would have been a significant gap (like 30 seconds) but the fact that it’s only a few seconds difference is surprising.
Getting faster is hard and expensive really. You can be pretty cheap and still be quite fast.
On other side, F1 has for very long time kept speeds down when new innovative ways to gain it has been discovered. For some reason I can not understand drivers and spectators dying in accidents is bad look for the sport... As such it really is not best we could technically do.
Not really. F1 regularly changes the rules to make the cars slower for safety reasons.
F1 is on a completely different level than IndyCar. The drivers are also on a different level compared to anything else.
making a car go fast on a straight bit of road is relatively cheap. making a car take a corner a couple tenths of a second faster is very expensive. and there's only so many corners in a lap. add up those tenths - that's your few seconds of difference!
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This is an automated bot account
Sure looks like it. All the comments from this account are just some statements. No opinions or suggestions at all!
There seems to he a good chunk of them here these days - I guess they are easier than ever to make. I just down vote them and flag them and hope that disuades them creators.
It’s fascinating, what is the purpose? It spouts pure gibberish pretty much.
My guess would be it’s to have accounts with some comment history that can be used for spam. Otherwise you’ll always be spamming from accounts with green names.