Quote Originally Posted by Mirek View Post
F1 is irrelevant, their system is designed only as an additional boost and it is limited by energy per round. Stock Toyota hybrids are also close to being irrelevant becuse they are combined with Atkinson-cycle engines and CVT which means the engine can run in near-constant RPM where it has very high effciency.

3,9 kWh is tiny because in reality it is enough for some 20 km of liaison cruising or for 2,5 minutes of full power (4 km @ 100 km/h average speed).
Here you just totally contradicted yourself in your own post.

2,5 mins of 100 kW full power is tiny and irrelevant on stages that are usually 10-15 mins? (out of which surely less than 50% are on full throttle).

So if the car does not use that power it will not be slower?
(whether a car without the whole system onboard is faster or slower is another question that is much harder to answer and surely depends a lot on stage character and surface)

For the first part. Point is that at minimum you only need a battery that is big enough to store the energy you get from braking (or from petrol engine, but that is less relevant on a race car) until you use it. Which is why a "tiny" 1,6 kWh battery in Toyota is enough to make a difference. Why are you even writing about how the Toyota hybrid drive is set up? It has completely zero relevance to the topic here, it only answers why it reduces fuel consumption a lot, but that's not what we are discussing, we are discussing whether the hybrid for Rallly1 does anything. Ref:

Quote Originally Posted by denkimi View Post
It was never meant to be anything but PR.

They can now claim that it are hybrid cars which, technically, they are.
The above quote that you agree with is simply not true. This is (or does not need to) be just a "PR sticker" that does nothing to how the car drives except for adding weight and it certainly does not need a bigger battery to make a difference.

If we go back to simple explanations again. The "tiny" battery is more than enough to store braking energy and with some 60-70% efficiency (braking->battery->power) it means that for each 10s of full braking you get 6-7 seconds of full power (100 kW). Without having any energy in the battery before stage start.


Off course all this depends on how and when you can use that electric power. I read somewhere that it will only be allowed on "some allowed corners". If true that indeed does destroy a lot of the potential sports-wise, but in that case it's due to the rules and not due to how the system is designed.