(KVRC) Variante

[variante]

A no rear wing concept. Looks very clean and sleek. In a few days we will know more.

As long as i manage to solve balance problems keeping the efficiency high enough, i won't use the already developed rear wing.

Wonderful! I guess some numbers: dr=1500N, df=7500N... maybe?

Hell! I hope i've cut more that 500N of drag getting rid of the front and rear wing!

[CAEdevice]

The rear wing of my low df configuration (you can see it mounted on the front engined car) has a total drag lower than 200N, the original one (high df) was around 800N.

Do you mean that your numbers are about dr=1000N and df=7500N? Impressive! I could only obtain a df/dr ratio around 4.7.

[variante]

Do you mean that your numbers are about dr=1000N and df=7500N? Impressive! I could only obtain a df/dr ratio around 4.7.

Efficiency of 7.5? Unfortunately not... Drag is hopefully low enough, but downforce comes down as well...

An efficiency of 4.7 is only 0.2 better than Mantium's high downforce configuration, and 0.3 better than my first high Df beast: you've got to improve that value! Use less wing, maybe... Let's wait for the race to discuss about the best solutions to adopt, anyway.

About efficiency: one of the most difficult aspects of these "very high efficiency" races is to understand where to stop cutting downforce in order to decrease drag. More specifically, there is a configuration of maximum efficiency (which doesn't correspond to the lowest drag setup!), that we should seek and which is very hard to achieve...

Also, it's interesting to notice that if you manage to keep constant your efficiency and increase downforce at the same time, you get slightly better laptimes (given the current track configuration and engine performance). Problem is that at high levels of downforce, an incresingly inefficient amount of drag is required... An good challenge for us!

Finally, let's not forget that, for the incoming races, we could achieve the same laptime improvement either cutting 1 point of drag or adding 5 points of downforce!!

[variante]

Last iteration (hopefully) of the Variante Livore. It's the point of contact between the first, high downforce, version and the latter, low drag, version.

Despite the promising performance of the low drag approach, the medium DF configuration was chosen in order to achieve greater correspondence between private CFD runs and official ones (as the correspondence problem reached its apex with the low drag setup). This configurations should also guarantee greater efficiency and more room for future refinements, as well as a more predictable behaviour as i've been working with a similar car layout since the beginning of the championship.

I'd like to underline that CFD issues forced me to design this car mostly by eye...so...








In case it doesn't perform better than the last iteration, at least it looks much better...

[CAEdevice]

I am going to run with a car that uses the same concept (included the side impact template included into the sidepod), but yours looks much better.
I guess some numbers (trying to imitate Machin): drag = 1450N, df = 7250N, ratio = 5.

[LVDH]

It looks very good.
My favorite parts are the engine intakes - beautiful.

[machin]

Yeah, very nice, as always. I'm sure I'm not the only one is not at all surprised to see your car sprout front and rear wings for the points scoring rounds!

[variante]

Probably...but I'm quite surprised myself about that, actually

[JJR]

Eye catching design Variante.
I like it.

[MadMatt]

Much more simple than the first designs, yet much nicer. This looks like what I thought the cars would look like, so fair play. Very elegant! No vortex tricks at the front then?

[variante]

No tricks, unfortunately. These tracks drain all your attention towards efficient refinements (not saying that vortex management isn't an efficient way to produce DF, but it's not the priority anymore...especially if you can't rely on CFD output...)

[variante]

2015 KVRC Championship won.
And again, congratulations to everyone who participated. This has been an exciting season, dynamic and full of technical innovations. The level was pretty high for an amateur challenge, despite the absence on the grid of cars like Chris' and Matt's (hope next year we won't suffer from such absence!)

Technical insight left apart for a moment, I'd like to simply share some images I had fun creating to celebrate the victory

[CAEdevice]

Congratulations Variante! Your car was not only one of the fastest, but it also have a great design!

[machin]

Yeah, awesome car, always near the top. Can't wait for the technical insights!

[variante]

KVRC 2016 is starting and it's time for another Variante racer, the title defender Rancore





It is an evolution of last year's car, despite my efforts to produce a whole new design. Unfortunately, I couldn't manage to develop it as much as I wanted. Still, the car has reached a decent level of downforce, solving some of last year's problems (concerning aero balance, especially). I decided to go for the same bodywork layout, intead of a more classical approach, because of the greater flexibility it gives, even though it is much harder to control and optimize.
Anyway, this is not a definitive version of the car (because of lack of time), and many bits have not been tested yet, so expect qute a different iteration for the next race (with better renderings!).

Comments are welcome!