Where’s the sound gone from F1?

We’re pretty passionate about any form of motorsport at Full Throttle Raceway, it’s no wonder when you consider the line of business we are in. So you can imagine how disappointed we were at the sound of Australian Grand Prix last week, the scream of the F1 engines from 2013 has disappeared and it’s been replaced with something that’s muted, monotonous and mind-numbingly boring! We have question…

What’s gone wrong?

Fans of F1 will know all about the changes to the sport for the 2014 season, one of the biggest upheavals was the switch from 2.4 V8 engines to turbo-charged V6 units, all 1.6 litres of them!

The new engines are smaller, they’re turbo hybrid units and they’re so much quieter than the old V8s. Last season the cars would screech around the circuit and they’d leave the hairs on the back of your neck standing up, one race in and this season already feels like a snooze fest.

There’s a good reason the engines sound less exciting, the sound produced by the new V6 lump is a good 11 decibels lower than the previous V8. Trever Cox a sound engineer at Salford University has explained the difference, he says a 10 decibel change is like a halving of sound, so you can see why the new engines seem so quiet.

The new turbos are a turn-off in our books, we want the noise back! Sadly that’s unlikely to happen, for the foreseeable future anyway. We guess we’re stuck with the dreadful noise of F1 this year, so we’ll make the most of the noise at Full Throttle Raceway, our engines sounds amazing, if you don’t believe us, arrive and drive one day and you’ll see what we mean.