Skip to main content

Formula E - Attack Mode explained

By
Recently, after one of the heartbreaking Formula 1 races,  I was watching highlights of a Formula E race when I came across an interesting concept called the "Attack Mode". Now for those of you who are unfamiliar with Formula E, it is a sister series of the more traditional and popular Formula 1 (F1) car racing competition. The difference is that the Formula E cars are battery powered electric vehicles. This series was started in 2011 to promote cleaner, environment friendly cars with the same spirit of competitive racing.

For those of you, who are bored by Formula 1 and its Drag Reduction System (DRS) which gives a free overtake if you don't hit you speed limiter, this is an innovative way of bringing "action" to racing.

In standard racing mode, all the cars are limited by a maximum power of 200 kW. So, during the race, all drivers are at the same level in terms of battery power. This increases the emphasis on driving skills rather than machinery/technology/engineering. From season 2018-19 onward, to make the racing more competitive, the organizers have come up with this great concept of "Attack Mode" wherein a driver will get additional 25 kW of power i.e. 12.5% increase in power for a limited amount of time. But there is a catch!

To get into the "Attack Mode", a driver needs to press a button on the steering wheel to arm the car and drive through an activation zone "off the racing line". When drivers leave the faster racing line and take a longer, slower route to get into the Attack Mode, they may lose track positions! And then, when they get into Attack Mode, they can use that extra power to try to get back the positions they have lost and possibly mount an attack on the drivers ahead of them.

Furthermore, the drivers have to execute a minimum number of Attack Modes in a race. Also, there is an upper ceiling on the duration for which you get the power boost as well as the maximum number of Attack Modes that can be used. Another interesting point is that this information about minimum, maximum number of Attack Modes and the duration of power boost is released by the organizers, only 60 minutes before the race. So, there is no overnight strategy decisions. Everything from racing preparation to race strategy with Strategy Plans A, B, C, etc need to be made in 60 minutes! And of course you don't know the strategy of your opponents so it is quite possible that they may have already trumped you in those crucial 60 minutes!

This is a nice video which explains the Attack Mode


In conclusion, qualifying will not be as much important now as the race. And even in the race there will be more importance to driving skills and strategy rather that just engineering. I only have one challenge for the Formula E organizers. Fit that Activation Zone at Monaco and I'll leave F1 :P
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Using static IPs in Linux

By
It is often a requirement to assign static IP addresses to some important and permanent network interfaces. This is to avoid setting up a local DHCP server or relying on IP given by your network provider which may not be stable. This post shows steps to configure static IPs in Linux using Ubuntu 16.04 and Ubuntu 18.04 distros. We are considering two distros as network configuration has changed significantly in Ubuntu 18.04. There are two general steps to be followed: 1. Configure the network interface and assign a static IP. 2. Restart interface for the changes to take effect. Ubuntu 16.04  The current interfaces on the system are as follows: As can be seen, enp0s8 interface does not have any IP. Let's assign a static IP to it. In case you already have an interface with a DHCP assigned IP, you just need to change that IP and make it static. Edit the /etc/network/interfaces file and add the following code block. Prefer using the IP address range available for pri...
Post a Comment
Read more

Local domain name resolution using /etc/hosts

By
The /etc/hosts file is a powerful mechanism for managing the information about hosts in the local network in the absence of a local DNS server. Setup We have 4 VMs in the local /24 network. The following are the details: vm-1-ubuntu-16-04 - 10.0.1.11 vm-2-ubuntu-16-04 - 10.0.1.12 vm-1-ubuntu-18-04 - 10.0.1.21 vm-2-ubuntu-18-04 - 10.0.1.22 The VMs are reachable via their IP address but not by their hostnames. This is problematic because we have to remember their IP addresses everytime we want to access these hosts. It is would be much simpler to remember and access the servers by their hostnames. For that we need some sort of mapping between the IP addresses and their corresponding host names. There are 3 common ways of achieving this mapping. Setup a DNS server which handles resolution for your local network. Use an existing DNS server of the local Internet Service Provider (ISP) or any other higher level ISP. Note that a public static IP address is required for this s...
Post a Comment
Read more

Simple HTTP Server in Python

By
Have you ever come across a need to share a file over a local network to a number of machines? Have you ever felt the need to share output of a task in text files available at a web-endpoint? Often, there is a requirement to quickly setup a light-weight web-server for such requirements. Python provides the easiest way to setup a simple HTTP server for such use cases with a single command. Python comes pre-installed with Linux as many of the linux libraries use python in background. Therefore there is no extra overhead of installing python. With support for python2 getting stopped in April 2020, many of the newer versions of linux distros come with default python3. Therefore this post will focus on setting up an HTTP server using both python2 and python3. We will be using Ubuntu 16.04, however it will work for majority of the linux systems where python comes pre-installed. Preparation Steps to follow before starting the server: Make sure you are in the directory which you want ...
Post a Comment
Read more