Why a decades-old tradition had to be curtailed

It was Lewis Hamilton who, in 2018, coined the term 'party mode', to describe the engine settings that gave maximum performance, and in doing so brought to fans' attention procedures that actually go back way before the introduction of the hybrid power unit in 2014.

Even the venerable Cosworth DFV had some adjustability on its fuel injection, and some historic racers still know that the trick to starting these was to click the cam on the fuel metering unit to 'full rich' and then back to 'one off lean' when the engine warmed up. When racing at altitude, in Mexico for example, the engines ran better with the cam set at 'full lean'.

The advent of electronic engine controls initially just controlled the spark settings, and then only to a single pre-programmed map of engine speed. However, as microprocessors became more available in the 1980s, sophistication soon grew.

Much of this was driven by the complex mapping needs of developing turbo engines. High boost settings and increased air mass flow required totally different fuelling and ignition characteristics to those required when the driver was just picking up the throttle mid-corner.

Even as those systems developed, the thought of the driver changing anything other than possibly the turbocharger boost setting was unheard of.

In 1986, when working for Benetton with our customer BMW engine, we actually had to open up the electronic control unit (ECU) and change a chip known as an EPROM if we wanted to change the engine management settings.

These chips were programmed in hexadecimal and it didn't take me long to figure out how to re-programme them for additional performance. This was totally unapproved as we officially only had two chips available to us - one for qualifying and one for racing. My self-programmed chips allowed us to race something more like qualifying settings and qualify on maps that were only dreamed of by the works team.

After we locked out the front row in Austria, the late Paul Roche, head of BMW Motorsport and in charge of the engines for the works Brabhams, got an inkling I was up to something and demanded the chip we'd used for qualifying. I was expecting such a challenge and some sleight of hand meant he went away to interrogate an absolutely standard chip rather than the one we actually used...

The return to normally aspirated engines did not remove the need for electronic engine controls. In fact, the ability to build better and better transducers to measure engine parameters allowed the engines to be run much closer to their reliability limits, in the knowledge that the electronic systems could protect them if they measured conditions that could lead to detonation or if they were in danger of over-revving when the driver missed a gear.

A technical directive issued in August 2020 put an end to the party. From now on drivers must use the same basic mode from the start of qualifying to the end of the race

Of course, along with this better control came huge improvements in efficiency from having fully mapped engines and also the ability to control to very precise limits. With engines running at 20,000rpm each cylinder required an injection of fuel and a spark 166 times a second. It is hard to believe this could have been achieved consistently without electronics. The sophistication also allowed some novel strategies.

For example, at Renault we were doing most of the torque modulation without closing the throttles, to keep high gas flows through the engine and thereby enhancing the effect of the blown diffuser we were running at the time.

For the 2.4-litre, V8 engines first introduced in 2006 it was decided that the controls were becoming so sophisticated, and therefore difficult to police, that a standard ECU running standard software was required from 2008. The tender went to McLaren Electronics and the TAG310 was introduced. This brought a level of standardisation as to how engine modes could be used.

In 2014, although the hardware remained standard, more freedom was given on the control software to manage the complex turbo hybrid engines. A 48-page manual was issued by the FIA to assist in determining how the engine could be controlled, as well as many technical directives that went into finer detail. This is still the way the controls are governed today, albeit with the power unit document now forming part of the 370-page appendix to the technical regulations.

Typically, a driver was able to select a multitude of modes and one could hear engineers instructing drivers to move to different modes when there were problems. To keep things simple, around four or five multi-dimensional modes would be put on a single switch.

A qualifying, or 'party', mode might increase the boost, advance the ignition, take the fuel flow to the absolute maximum, open the wastegate and give maximum electrical energy deployment, among other things, with a single driver selection. A 'safe' mode might move the shift lights to a lower setting and reduce the maximum torque available to give extra margin to the engine.

A technical directive issued in August 2020 put an end to the party. From now on drivers must use the same basic mode from the start of qualifying to the end of the race. There is still the option to turn the engine down for genuine reliability reasons, but if this is done a noticeable drop in performance must be observed and once engaged there can be no return to a more performant mode.

Drivers can still use electrical energy mapping and the 'overtake' button in the race. With the former they can store electrical energy and then release it to attack or defend position, and with the latter a small extra boost of torque is available by opening the wastegate and giving maximum electrical deployment.

I do believe that having competing cars with different performance profiles does lead to less deterministic racing, but I also believe that the tactical deployment of performance should be in the hands of the driver and not an engineer who is merely verbalising what some software has determined. Have we got the balance right?

Only time will tell.