Re: Apple have lost their way...
Sorry, turbochargers, direct injection, water injection, honeycombs, ceramics, composed materials and much more were used in aviation far earlier than F1. It was a great loss for F1 engineers when combat airplanes went to jet engines because they no longer had a source of high performance technology.
Anyway, superchargers were in use far earlier (even before WWII) than the years Renault adopted it (in the '80s lighter turbines could be made, though, compared to those of the '30s...). Much depended on the rules - how much large can be a supercharged engine compared to an aspirated ones, and thereby how much power can be delivered.
Yes, there are some specific technologies that had to be developed, but F1 rules has been towards creating fast dinosaurs in the past years. Under many aspects, the rules of LMP1 brought much more interesting developments than F1 - and much more towards what future cars could be, instead of the high octane petrol only in F1 - again, much alike the 100LL used in aviation engines...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
