Vehicle Dynamics · Demo
Harvest under braking, spend on the straights — find the biggest deployment the lap can actually pay for.
The strategy
The trace shows the steady lap your strategy actually delivers — find the biggest deployment with no red derate zones.
Per lap, at steady state
2014 rules: 120 kW MGU-K, 4 MJ battery, 2 MJ/lap harvest cap, 4 MJ/lap deployment cap — the MGU-H answers to none of them.
In plain terms
A hybrid Formula 1 car carries a battery the size of a lap: about 4 MJ, roughly one second of engine-power worth of energy for every ten seconds of racing. It refills two ways — the MGU-K turns the rear axle’s braking into charge instead of brake heat, and the MGU-H milks the exhaust whenever the engine is working — and it empties one way: extra shove down the straights. The strategy question is brutally simple: what is the biggest spend the lap can pay back? Overspend and the battery runs dry mid-straight — the derate — and the car is suddenly 160 horsepower poorer at the worst possible moment.
The lap is a fixed 90 s sequence of straights (60 s), braking zones (11 s) and corners (19 s), integrated at 0.1 s steps under the 2014 power-unit rules: MGU-K , energy store , harvest capped at 2 MJ per lap, deployment capped at 4 MJ per lap, MGU-H uncapped at a representative 40 kW on throttle (half in corners). The readouts come from the steady-state lap — the model re-runs the lap until the final charge equals the starting charge, which is the only lap a race strategy can repeat. Energy is conserved exactly:
What the model leaves out: a lap-time figure (energy is reported in MJ, not tenths), thermal limits and charge windows, and circuit-to-circuit lap shapes — and the MGU-H’s 40 kW is a representative figure, because the teams guard the real numbers. The Mercedes W05 page in the Formula 1 timeline shows the same machine from the hardware side.