David Coulthard criticized the system used by Formula 1 to determine which team has the best engine on the grid, as Red Bull was once again chosen as the superior one.
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ADUO stands for ‘Additional Development and Upgrade Opportunities,’ which monitors the performance of each power unit on the grid. The tests create a ranking system, with development tokens granted to manufacturers that are more than 2% behind the reference performance.
It turns out that the tests only measure the internal combustion engine power, leaving out the electric component, even though they point out that the latter makes much more difference in overall performance. “There is an old saying in Formula 1 that aerodynamics is sovereign, that has always been kind of the mantra,” he said on the Up to Speed podcast.
“We always tend to talk about aerodynamics instead of raw power, and there have been examples of teams that won world championships without having the most powerful engine. But I feel there was a missed opportunity; the FIA explained that the teams asked for the simplest possible mechanism, which ended up being restricted only to the internal combustion element of the power unit. For me, the question is not even about being fair or not, since everyone agreed to it; the question is: why?”
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“It’s like saying we are going to, I don’t know, set a limit based on a specific part of the body in athletics, even though the whole body is used in the competition itself. Therefore, the power unit as a whole is not just about internal combustion. It also involves the capacity to store electrical energy,” he continued.
“For me, actually, the issue is that this does not seem to be the fairest mechanism to monitor power unit performance, as it focuses only on the combustion engine. The power unit also involves managing electrical energy, recovering and delivering that energy, which is extremely complex.”
“We know, from the McLaren case earlier this year, that they were frustrated: they received the same power unit but only got all the information about it the week before the race. There was not enough time to run simulations and define the best energy delivery strategy. So, we ended up in this classic scenario where we all think: ‘This really doesn’t seem to be the best solution,’” he concluded.
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