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F1's Vettel leads, Verstappen and Grosjean crash at Silverstone

SILVERSTONE, England — Ferrari's Sebastian Vettel pushed Formula One title rival and home race favorite Lewis Hamilton off the top of the British Grand Prix practice timesheets on Friday while Max Verstappen crashed. Hamilton, winner for the past four years at Silverstone, had started the day by leading a Mercedes one-two in the sunny opening session. Vettel, who leads the Briton by a point in the championship after nine races, put in a lap of 1 minute 27.552 seconds in the afternoon to end the session 0.187 faster than his fellow-four-times world champion. That was still slower than Hamilton's morning time of 1:27.487, however, with Vettel third then and half a second slower. Hamilton's Finnish teammate Valtteri Bottas, with a new engine in his car after last weekend's mechanical retirement in Austria, was second and third fastest respectively in the two sessions. Australian Daniel Ricciardo and Kimi Raikkonen traded fourth and fifth places while Max Verstappen, winner in Austria for Red Bull, was sixth in the morning but crashed after lunch without setting a time. The 20-year-old Dutchman had ended the first session early after he was told to stop the car. Haas's Romain Grosjean had a heavy crash at the fast first corner, slamming into the tire barriers after failing to close the drag reduction system (DRS), in the morning and did not take part in practice two. "The car is destroyed," the Frenchman, who was unhurt in the impact, said over the radio. "I'm very, very sorry guys. I think it was the bump. I missed the (DRS) button." Team boss Guenther Steiner said the team needed to rebuild the chassis. Grosjean's team mate Kevin Magnussen and McLaren's Fernando Alonso were called to see stewards for a "potentially dangerous maneuver" after an incident between them early on but stewards ruled there was no further action needed. "Magnussen tried to hit me two times - in one and three," Alonso reported over the radio. "Very dangerous."Reporting by Alan BaldwinRelated Video: This content is hosted by a third party. To view it, please update your privacy preferences. Manage Settings. Image Credit: Reuters Motorsports Ferrari Mercedes-Benz Racing Vehicles F1 Lewis Hamilton Sebastian Vettel Kimi Raikkonen silverstone Max Verstappen british grand prix Romain Grosjean

Ferrari patents a fancy and fascinating electric turbocharger

While turbocharging has improved vastly over the years, and it has enabled cars to become both more powerful and more efficient, there's always room for improvement. Turbochargers scavenge exhaust gas pressure and use it to turn a compressor that forces intake air into the cylinders. However, as the patent points out, this means the intake compressor and the exhaust turbine are physically coupled, and have to spin at the same rate. Ferrari's design divorces the two, and it's a happy breakup. The key is hooking up the two components of the turbo to their own individual electric motors, with an energy storage device in between. It's different than the electric supercharger systems you have seen on certain Audi products, for example. Those systems recover energy like a hybrid, store it, and then use it to drive an intake compressor. It supplements conventional turbochargers that harvest energy from the exhaust. In systems like Audi's, the electric supercharger is supplementing the sequential conventional turbochargers when they're not operating efficiently, at very low RPM in particular. It works well, but it's complicated, and it is a workaround for the limitations of a conventional turbocharger. See below for an animation of the Audi system. This content is hosted by a third party. To view it, please update your privacy preferences. Manage Settings. Usually, optimizing a turbo is a compromise between figuring out what RPM is ideal for each side to spin at to generate power. A smaller compressor generates boost more quickly, but loses efficiency at higher RPM. But there's way more energy in high-RPM exhaust gasses. By hooking up the turbine to an electric motor instead, you can harvest energy from the exhaust throughout the rev range, and particularly when the engine is pushing lots of gasses through. And you can store that energy in a battery if it's not needed at that moment. The intake-side compressor also has a reversible electric motor attached. It is not physically connected to the turbine, so it can operate at any time the computers decide it's beneficial. As engine RPM increases, the compressor doesn't have to increase its speed beyond its optimal range, so there's less energy wasted. And at low RPM situations, when a conventional turbocharger wouldn't have enough exhaust gas passing through its turbine side to generate useful boost in the compressor side, the electric motor can spin up Ferrari's divorced compressor to provide some boost.

Ferrari 458 Speciale speeds toward Frankfurt

When the doors open at the Frankfurt Motor Show in a few weeks, there'll be loads of new cars and new versions of existing ones. And as far as the latter category goes at least, this will undoubtedly be what show-goers will look forward to most.
What we have here is the Ferrari 458 Speciale - the successor to the 360 Challenge Stradale and 430 Scuderia, and the hard-core version of the 458 Italia. It was expected to carry the name Monte Carlo, but then Ferrari has never been fond of letting the press dictate what it would call its cars. But forget the nameplate: what really matters is what it's got to offer.
For starters, the award-winning, high-revving 4.5-liter V8 has been retuned to deliver 605 cv (596 hp by our standards), up from 562 hp in the standard 458, while torque remains the same at 398 lb-ft. But the other side of the power-to-weight ratio (quoted at 2.13 kg/cv) is the extra mass Ferrari has cut out of the equation: the 458 Speciale's dry weight is quoted at 1,290 kg (2,844 lbs), representing a significant drop from the 458 Italia's 1,485 kg (3,274 lb) curb weight.