About how much extra hp could be gained w/ the 4 degree C temp difference?

Figures quoted in the press have been given as five to ten, but not for more than a few laps until it warmed up.

Not a real big advantage.

About 1 second over the entire race distance was what I read, so no, not really. And with the margin of error on the test being supposedly +/- 2 degrees, they seemingly decided that it was right on the borderline, and therefore not worth penalising.

Rob, my calculations indicate 3.65 HP at that temperature. I've included a number of "assumptions" that are conservative.

If I push the calcs to their limit, and use liberal "assumptions", I get 6.25 HP at that temp.

Those calculations only consider that the temp stays the same through the entire lap.

It is not significant in any way, and does not improve any driver's performance, per my liberal assumptions, more than 2.25 seconds during a 21 lap stint.

If anyone wants to see the numbers, let me know. I can't include the chart curves as I do not know how to get a spreadsheet into HTML. Maybe as a picture?

Sounds like the right idea, just do a screen cap and save it as a jpg.... I'd like to see the maths.....

Wouldn't the performance gain be the first few laps after the stop, ie, while the fuel is still cool, relatively speaking? These few laps are where positions can be gained, so it actually seemed quite a clever way of 'cheating', if it was intentional. Until they were caught of course :P

That's a questionable assumption, I guess. We'd need to know the ambient temperature of the fuel cell, and the heat capacities of the fuel and the cell to find out how quickly the fuel would return to the 'operating temperature'. I suspect that this would not be a significant time - of the order of a few minutes, given the large heat sink at a relatively high temperature in the surroundings of the fuel cell.

I agree Piquet. But, but what you suggest we do, include 10 other assumptions to improve the accuracy? I think not.

Fair enough <peek>