Quote:
Originally Posted by sperry
Except that the steering wheel contains the ECU logic, gearbox logic, diff logic, instrumentation, radio, and pretty much every other control computer that runs the car. Which is the point... if there's a computer problem, they can replace the whole thing by swapping the steering wheel.
There's a reason those wheels cost like $50,000.  |
Oh, and this statement is looking to be less true.
If the ECU is in the belly of the car, I'm not sure how replacing the wheel fixes a computer problem, unless there's a way to upload maps from the wheel to the ECU. All I know is, when there's an electronics problem, they swap the wheel to fix it... and by regulation, it's illegal to send any changes to the car by radio... all changes have to be done by the driver in the cockpit. And the ECUs are spec ECUs used by all the teams, where the teams are only allowed to modify the maps in the computer, and not the software itself.
So the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. The ECU runs the engine and the wheel is a dumb i/o device (buttons and displays), but it also has the ability to act like a memory device the ECU can read from for maps? Who knows. It's probably just a USB 1.1 device.
