A meeting was held between the FIA, commercial rights holders and potential future manufacturers to discuss the engine regulations for the 2021 season. During the meeting, it was decided that Formula One will continue to use the V6 turbocharged hybrid engine.
The plans for the new engine regulations are still in the early stages and it will take more than a year for the specifications of the new engines to be finalized and released. This is, in part, to prevent the current teams from gaining an unfair advantage on potential new engine suppliers by getting a head start on engine development.
The sport is set to keep the current 1.6-litre V6 turbocharged hybrid engine that controversially replaced the former V8 engines at the start of 2014. To increase the sound output generated by the engines, the engines will be running 3000rpm higher than the current specifications. The current engines are limited to 15,000rpm, but rarely exceed 12,000rpm under regular track conditions.
The motor generator unit-heat (MGU-H), the part of the engine that converts wasted heat to energy, will be removed from the engines. This is to simplify the engines and reduce the cost. Several new design parameters will also be added to the inside and outside of the engine, making the engines more standard among the teams. This should reduce the cost of developing the engine, while also helping to reduce the performance gaps among teams.
While the MGU-H will be removed from the engines, the motor generator unit-kinetic (MGU-K), the part of the engine that converts wasted movement in the engine into energy, will be more powerful. The ERS system will change and become like the previous KERS system, when the driver can manually deploy extra stored powered from the system to the car.
Further meetings will be planned to discuss changes to the fuel regulations to make them tighter than the current regulations, but those meetings are still in the works and will be just a small part of the future planning that will be done for the 2021 engines.
