Do F1 cars no longer have 7 speed gearboxes? Is this since they've scaled back the revs?
And I thought that Loews, being the slowest corner in F1, was also special in that it's the only corner on the entire calendar in which 1st gear is used.
curious to the end,
Sander
They do, but maybe the simulation above doesn't show when the 7th is being used? or the circuit is too slow for them to reach the 7th gear?
One thing I'm sure of is that the cars have 7th gear. Maybe others can explain why it's not shown there
Slowest circuit on the calendar, so I'm betting they never need 7th. Max downforce on the cars at all times because even with all that downforce on the cars they have enough power to reach the max speed they need to reach while still having the downforce for the twisty bits.
You can change the gear ratio at your team's discretion, but you normally have finalized the optimal gear-ratio setup before each weekend. You'd never choose not to use 7th in an F1 car, because shifting gear takes just some hundredths of a second.
Not going too deep into it, around 17.5k rpm is maximum drive output from the car. This is a function of torque * rpm, and torque is probably max around 12-13k rpm. This means you want to stay around the optimal rpm (thus getting the most force, thus accelerating fastest) most of the time. This means if you only have 6 gears instead of 7, you absolutely will not be able to stay in the optimal range as long. You'll hear when you're onboard that the gears are each much shorter this weekend, by how rapidly they change gears. 7th gear is not shown on the map, simply because the only part you reach 7th is through the tunnel, and there's just no map node there.
Other than that, you set your gear ratio up to suit the corners of the track. If you find yourself toping 4th gear 0.3 seconds before a corner, it's not optimal to change up, only to immediately change down under breaking, so you make 4th gear a bit longer. You also want to hit the right place of the torque curve during some corners. I made sure to hit lesmo 2 at 12k in 4th gear on Monza during my last rFactor race there, because that's max torque, and it helps control the car through the corner with pedal-induced oversteer.
All in all, too many gears, and you'll loose time by the fact that you get no drive from the engine right when you're changing gears. Too few, and you'll lose out in acceleration, because you have to start with lower revs in each gear. Take Indy - the gears there are like 5% all within max rpm. You'll pretty much hear no difference in engine note when they change gears, because they always keep a really high speed, so you need to maximize acceleration within that zone.