Fuel goes under the microscope at Canadian Grand Prix
Engine wear is a concern for every vehicle owner, but it is heightened exponentially for teams on the Formula One circuit, where every millisecond counts in the race for the checkered flag.
That’s why, during course of race weekends, the oil and fuel used by Red Bull Racing is tested, and retested to ensure there are no unforeseen issues once the race starts.
Testing is done in partnership with ExxonMobil, official fuel supplier of Red Bull and Torro Rosso.
A trackside lab, tucked away under the tents behind the team garages at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, serves as a quality-control centre for the team’s fuel and lubricants.
Manning the machines is Dario Izzo, a racing technical adviser for ExxonMobil who travels to each stop during the F1 season. Izzo checks the oil’s performance and shares all the data with team engineers so they can identify any potential engine issues.
“We have a set of machines that are able to check the chemistry of the fuel and the chemistry of the oil,” Izzo said.
The Esso Synergy race fuel is checked for any signs of contamination, which would not only be a problem for the cars, but also be flagged as a violation by the governing Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile.
“The FIA, at the beginning of the week, will receive from me a sample of fuel, a sample of engine oil that I declare as the two products we will use for the week,” Izzo said. “They already know what the chemistry of the fuel is, so they will double check it.”
“The fuel part is to maintain quality control,” said David Tsurusaki, global motorsports technology manager at ExxonMobil. “The fuel is coming in very clean drums and the quality control at our plant is at a very high level anyway. But something could happen that we don’t know. So we check every single drum.”
On race weekends, ExxonMobil supplies 27 drums, each containing 54 litres of fuel, as well as 80 litres of engine oil.
The Mobil 1 motor oil is tested to identify what Izzo called wear elements, essentially microscopic pieces of metal, in the parts per million, that come off the engine during the course of usage.
“We test oil out of the engine every time the car is getting into the garage,” Izzo said. “All the data are sent back to Red Bull and Renault (the engine supplier) engineers, and they know exactly where it is coming from.”
Results are tracked and charted, and any anomaly would show up as an abnormal spike in the PPM (parts per million) number of a particular substance, Izzo said.
“Generally, you watch for wear, but also for contaminants,” he said. “Because ... if there are contaminants in the oil, how the oil will perform?”
Tsurusaki said the testing adds a layer of data on top of the mountains of information already gathered by team engineers during a race.
“We feed them another piece of data that says the copper level is high. Where could the copper be coming from? It gives them an indication of where to look,” he said.
The results also help ExxonMobil refine and develop the next iteration of its engine oils and fuel.
“If they show us parts after six or seven races that are wearing out, we have to find some way to improve that,” he said.
The oil is tested using a spark emission spectrometer, which essentially burns off a sample of oil.
“There’s an optical sensor that is reading the colour of the light. Through the colour of the light, it knows what metal is burning,” Izzo said. “It is able to detect 31 different metals.”
While the oil remains the same essentially all season, the fuel is constantly being refined as the engine is upgraded throughout the year.
“When they change the engine design, the changes that they do could change the performance. And we want to optimize the performance,” Tsurusaki said.