BMW advocate increased engine life

That is the view of BMW motorsport director Mario Theissen, who believes that rushing through a major overhaul of new power unit regulations will only serve to drive up development costs.

Although he concedes that a potential move to smaller turbo or super charged engines would be right for F1 in a few years, he believes that expanding the life of current engines from two to three races would help a lot.

"On the engine side we have to be careful because on the one hand we want to drive costs down for the independent teams, but we have to be careful not to drive costs up for the manufacturers," said Theissen, with more technical meetings about future rule changes due to take place at this weekend's Italian Grand Prix.

"If you lift the engine freeze in order to develop cheaper engines, probably the development costs will be higher than the savings. So our preferred route would be to try and see what we can do in further increasing engine life without unfreezing it.

"We see a potential to go to a three-race engine without unfreezing it, that would help the independent teams without incurring costs on our side. Maybe just having an engine speed reduction, perhaps just 1000rpm less, should help."

Theissen believes the introduction of longer life engines would give the sport breathing space to come up with suitable regulations for the long term.

"In principle we support a move from multi-cylinder aspirated to smaller turbo engines," he said. "But we don't support an early switch because that would incur big development costs that we cannot afford.

"The next generation engines, I expect them to be smaller in terms of displacement, the number of cylinders and turbo charged or supercharged.

"In the long term future I see us moving from a combustion engine and gearbox to a more complex power train including a combustion engine that will be smaller, a power unit, an energy storage unit, a complex transmission, and a tailor made electronics to control the whole thing."