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Global Motorsport Technology Manager, ExxonMobil Lubricants & Petroleum Specialties Company, on the secrets of Mobil 1’s continued success in Formula 1™
'; ?> What would you say are the secrets of Mobil 1’s continued success in Formula 1™?This makes it a brilliant learning platform because you’re always under pressure to be innovative, to come up with new ideas and solutions. We’ve helped make the car more reliable, and even more importantly we’ve helped make it quicker. Also, longevity is very important now. We’re talking about thousands of miles on each engine, rather than a few hundred, and the engines are making more power from a smaller displacement. The power density and stress on the oil is much, much higher. The components within the engine have got smaller and lighter. The ‘box’ we have to work in has become smaller and smaller as the regulations have been tightened, so we’ve had to become more creative in our thinking. There’s a big list of things you can’t do – so you focus on a smaller number of items but with far more intensity.
And you’re not just helping with basic longevity – you’re helping to keep the engine at peak performance through its whole operating life. You get over 700 horsepower out of the engine when it’s fresh off the dyno and you’d love it to all still be there when you need it, on the last corner of its final race. For us, it’s all about keeping the engine running like new. With our Mobil 1 road car products we help our customers achieve engine life of hundreds of thousands miles; with a Formula 1™ car the engine has to last three races, but the goal is the same. You combat performance degradation if you keep the engine running like new.
How important is it for you to be working with a front-running team that is capable of winning races and championships?
It’s a joy to be able to bring performance improvements into a highly competitive environment where it helps make the difference between winning and not winning. Every improvement is incremental, maybe as small as just a few milliseconds, but they add up over a race and you can measure them.
There is a lot of very clever science and technology in racing at this level and we can determine exactly what performance benefit you’re bringing from a particular innovation… the car is literally a high speed moving laboratory for us. That’s why we’ve had such a good long-relationship with McLaren. As well as being a sponsor we've added value technically. We’ve put performance upgrades on the car every year. And we really want to win as much as they do.
How does the relationship with McLaren work on an operational level?
We have regular communications because once we’ve identified a performance improvement, we have to prove it out on the dyno from a reliability point of view, and that can take several months.
So we have a pipeline of developments coming through, and of course it’s possible that by the time you’ve proved out a new product, you’ve already found something that will supersede it. Next year is going to be extremely exciting and demanding because of the transition to turbocharged V6 engines. We’re very much built into the planning process that McLaren are operating. The combustion pressures are going to be very high, with potentially higher loads on the crankshaft, and higher localised temperatures in the turbochargers and so on. Ultimately, it’s not just about dropping something into an engine to make it go quicker, it’s about designing the lubricant and engine together. We call it total system engineering.
What effect does racing have on the Mobil 1 products you can actually buy?
The Mobil 1 racing oil of today is highly specialised and very specific to making McLaren’s cars go quicker, but the understanding you get while developing it is very valuable.
The people we cycle through the racing programme and into commercial product development have a much richer knowledge, understanding and skill set. We develop Mobil 1 racing oil in the same lab as all our commercial products and people move between the two programmes. There have been ingredients that we tried first in racing and then later added to commercial Mobil 1. Formula 1™ pushes the boundaries of our technology. Last season we developed a new gearbox oil that set new standards for friction reduction – previously people had thought it just couldn’t be done. There’s no question in my mind. It’s incredibly valuable.
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