Fuel affect nearly nonexistant?

I'm sure this is already modelled but for some time I have noticed the impact seems fairly negligible too. If this is increased then the performance of the hard tyre will probably need to be improved.

Logic: If people are on the hard tyre they are doing longer stints, if the fuel costs much more then they will be considerably slower, making hard tyres useless vs the softs which are already competitive and are usually combined with much lighter fuel loads.

http://www.jamesallenonf1.com/2010/06/f1-strategy-cutting-it-fine-on-fuel/

I think we modelled it on this originally then reduced it. Anyway, according to this 1kg of fuel at Turkey was worth 0.05 per lap in 2010. Converting that to iGP litres gets us 0.0381s per litre in lap time.

This means, at Turkey, the difference of 230L in Andrew's example, should be a whopping 8.763 seconds per lap. So it's about 4 times too low at the moment. If we simulate this realistically the tyres will need to be revised completely too.

I never implied it was too difficult. :P In fact, I have been tracking down as much data as I can since making that post because it needs to be revised before tonight's races if we want to have it properly tested by launch.

I've found a lot of information, including 2-3 credible sources that confirm the figures in my post above. Williams give a bunch of interesting stats on top of what we need, such as engine power loss (-6%). That might be useful for the future.

Anyway, I'm going to compile a document with all of the information we need to revise the simulation and forward it to Andrew. Hopefully it can be implemented in time for tonight's races.

We spent a good amount of time testing this last night and balancing things to include the new fuel weight penalty, and it seemed to work quite well in every scenario we ran in the end. We also improved the balance of tyres across changeable weather conditions.

For the races tonight these new values should be implemented.