Finalizing F1 Engines for season 42

Current reality of new engines development by the teams forces us to do some changes to the proposed systems. Here is the whole explanation of that and maybe also some interesting information for F1 team managers.

1. If a weaker team does not have so much money than top tier teams and cannot afford to have as many employees, they can build one part at a time and do it with all employees, not to do 3 projects and split resources. 2 seasons are not enough to build the whole engine? Why do you think I wrote during the first few seasons supplier engines will be better and teams will improve after a few seasons? Yes because 2 seasons are not enough... But 4 seasons are much better for this, teams will not have so great cars as they have to use resources on engine and build other parts when there is no engine project, and not so great engine during those first seasons, but should benefit after some seasons. Put all effort into the chassis when the engine is close to potential. This WAS a great (but missed) opportunity for weaker teams as stronger teams tried to build engines in these 2 seasons (and lost potential faster because of splitting resources among more projects). This way this not so rich team can get to the same or better level as top team after some seasons.

2. It is already known that potential decrease is based on intellectual failures of designers. So it is not affected by the project budget or facilities, just the quality of designers. That means better designers assigned to the project, the potential drops slower, while with worse employees potential drops much faster. This makes my words from 1 stronger (1 project at the time takes more time to finalize a full engine BUT decreases potential slower and gives a better chance to build a good engine). This argument is valid only when teams are really trying to maximize quality as close to potential as possible, if you do for example aero parts and you really do not have to maximize quality, then it does not matter so much how fast is potential dropping.

3. Another way to optimize the costs/result is to find which part has the most effect on the final engine and which part is easiest to build. Maybe there is a part where it makes more sense to build just weaker (not above 95% / rather only 90%), save money and invest elsewhere. And when I say "maybe" it obviously means one of the 4 engine parts is more difficult to develop and costs more while it gives less to the final engine.

4. There are some teams which have no chance to build a good engine unless they start projects from scratch since their potential is already bad. In the meantime there are teams which will have quality engines at the beginning of season 42, and there are also teams which will have good engines but little later.

5. Very good engine built by the teams is expected to be 95.5% - 96% - it is possible that one or maybe 2 teams will go slightly above 96%. At the moment the best developed engine seems to be in range around 92.5-93.5% (including the parts currently under development) but we can expect improvements until end of the season.
UPDATE (2021-03-31 16:34 CET): Best built engine is expected to be slightly above 97%.

6. I think since there will be no really "cheap" engine, the rule to force teams to use one supplier engine for at least 5 seasons is not really needed. And since it was not meet with ovations I think nobody will be against the decision to cancel that.

7. Here are the following choices for supplier engines and will be added to official list of suppliers in next few days.
- 95% high quality engine for high price - 10M per season (costs little bit more or about the same than teams would pay for building own engine with all 4 parts at 95% which includes project budgets, engine department costs for 8 seasons, part of employee costs)
- around 94% solid engines which will be stronger on some tracks while weaker on others - 8.5M per season (this price is slightly cheaper or about the same than what would teams have to pay for developing such engines)
- around 92.5% not bad/not great engine - 6.5M
- "cheap" engine with quality 90.5% - 5M (much cheaper than what teams would have to pay for building such engine - gives big time boost to budget to build better chassis or other parts - but rather reasonable opportunity to save for the future).

8. Since some teams already invested money in engines but have no chance to match the quality of that 92.5% engine so that would be a tragic 8 seasons of racing there will be a chance for recovery. Even if the result of development did not lead to quality F1 engines, there are still inventions which have value for production car manufacturers etc. Teams can sell the knowledge to third parties and get back the project budgets (not any part of employee salaries or facility maintenance costs). Teams can do this and sign a contract with the engine supplier of their choice. Deadline for this decision is before day 72 this season.

9. Tanking is acceptable but only in a reasonable way and for reasonable punishment. It can help save money for doing good development after some seasons and for achieving short time success, but while doing this sponsors do not want to pay so much money to the teams who are dead last in every race or totally uncompetitive. Currently we have a limit on team rating set to minimum 500. This limit will be ignored if the team has both cars slower than 104% of best time in Q1.
If we use the limit on this season`s qualification at Paul Ricard where the best time in Q1 was 01:35.119, the limit would be 1:38.923.
This will start being valid from the beginning of season 43. If the team with the rating under 500 becomes competitive they cannot go lower with rating than their rating at that moment...

10. We are working on new F1 financial system inspired by real F1 - Costs Cap. Real life F1 is changing and our version will change too. That means tanking will not make much sense in the future. Altough we do not want to completely remove advantage gained by good management in previous seasons so we will spend a lot of time to look for good solution taking all aspects to the system. And one of the goals would be to simplify the financial system to make it better understandable. Stay tuned!