2022 pecking order speculation

[Ryar]

For all that uninformed, irrational talks of Red Bull being in title fight in 2021 has compromised their 2022 car, it just shows how it can be managed. Regardless of the performance outcome, it's impressive to see the outcome of the amount of work that has gone in to come out with so many radical pieces on the car. It's interesting if we could know how many iterations they had to run of the car from the basic concept to where it is now, which can help understnad the work effort put in.

On the other hand, Mercedes W13 seems to be a very conservative design (at least whatever is apparent till now), evolving through the existing philosophy without going for any radical, visible changes. As some people claimed, Mercedes was working on this car since 2020, it's hard to imagine where the work effort was put in and if it was all just optimizing the existing design without trying anything new on the upper body. There may still be a lot of secrets under the hood and the underbody. But that applies to RB and other teams as well. So by the looks of it, RB seems to have done more iterations to get to where they are and Mercedes has simply continued on the same road.

[SiLo]

For all that uninformed, irrational talks of Red Bull being in title fight in 2021 has compromised their 2022 car, it just shows how it can be managed. Regardless of the performance outcome, it's impressive to see the outcome of the amount of work that has gone in to come out with so many radical pieces on the car. It's interesting if we could know how many iterations they had to run of the car from the basic concept to where it is now, which can help understnad the work effort put in.

On the other hand, Mercedes W13 seems to be a very conservative design (at least whatever is apparent till now), evolving through the existing philosophy without going for any radical, visible changes. As some people claimed, Mercedes was working on this car since 2020, it's hard to imagine where the work effort was put in and if it was all just optimizing the existing design without trying anything new on the upper body. There may still be a lot of secrets under the hood and the underbody. But that applies to RB and other teams as well. So by the looks of it, RB seems to have done more iterations to get to where they are and Mercedes has simply continued on the same road.

Unless you work for either of these teams, there is no way of knowing what either of them did in terms of iterations, or why they pursued specific aero routes.

I don't know why everyone wanks themselves silly over Newey designs so much, especially when there are interesting concepts up and down the paddock. The Alpine and Alpha Tauri look similar, the Aston has even more extreme undercuts. Just because Mercedes design looks like a continuation, doesn't mean it is slow, or that they have done less work that any other team on the grid.

People are easy to conflate bigger and more aero surfaces with faster cars and that is not always the case.

[AeroDynamic]

Mercedes efforts seem to mostly be about packaging concept and exploiting the floor at the rear.
RBR has more creative looking aero ideas at the moment.

this doesn't surprise me. RBR has always been working with Newey, best in the business for leading aero ideas many times.
Mercedes has good aero but I think where they lead is engineering, particularly under the hood.

[Henri]

Mercedes looking good.. ferrari look impressive too

[Ryar]

For all that uninformed, irrational talks of Red Bull being in title fight in 2021 has compromised their 2022 car, it just shows how it can be managed. Regardless of the performance outcome, it's impressive to see the outcome of the amount of work that has gone in to come out with so many radical pieces on the car. It's interesting if we could know how many iterations they had to run of the car from the basic concept to where it is now, which can help understnad the work effort put in.

On the other hand, Mercedes W13 seems to be a very conservative design (at least whatever is apparent till now), evolving through the existing philosophy without going for any radical, visible changes. As some people claimed, Mercedes was working on this car since 2020, it's hard to imagine where the work effort was put in and if it was all just optimizing the existing design without trying anything new on the upper body. There may still be a lot of secrets under the hood and the underbody. But that applies to RB and other teams as well. So by the looks of it, RB seems to have done more iterations to get to where they are and Mercedes has simply continued on the same road.

Unless you work for either of these teams, there is no way of knowing what either of them did in terms of iterations, or why they pursued specific aero routes.

I don't know why everyone wanks themselves silly over Newey designs so much, especially when there are interesting concepts up and down the paddock. The Alpine and Alpha Tauri look similar, the Aston has even more extreme undercuts. Just because Mercedes design looks like a continuation, doesn't mean it is slow, or that they have done less work that any other team on the grid.

People are easy to conflate bigger and more aero surfaces with faster cars and that is not always the case.

You have derived conclusions that aren't there in my post. I clearly said, "Regardless of the performance outcome" and " if we could know how many iterations they had to run". You clearly didn't seem to have read my post. My statement is as laymanish as it can be to derive any conclusions out of it.

For the kind of design that RB18 has, it must have gone through a lot of iterations, a hunch and by the "looks of it", W13 seemed to have simply evolved. I didn't say, which one is better either. Again, you didn't read my first statement for the context where I said, some people predicted Red Bull's title fight would have costed them development time for 2022, which clearly doesn't seem to be the case for the kind of design they have come out with. So there was no question of discussing Alpine or Alpha Tauri in that context.

[Sevach]

I'd say it's fascinating to see all these different concepts as opposed to all teams aiming at the same thing with different levels of success and refinement.
It's fun to be genuinely clueless on what makes these new regs "tick".

[SiLo]

For all that uninformed, irrational talks of Red Bull being in title fight in 2021 has compromised their 2022 car, it just shows how it can be managed. Regardless of the performance outcome, it's impressive to see the outcome of the amount of work that has gone in to come out with so many radical pieces on the car. It's interesting if we could know how many iterations they had to run of the car from the basic concept to where it is now, which can help understnad the work effort put in.

On the other hand, Mercedes W13 seems to be a very conservative design (at least whatever is apparent till now), evolving through the existing philosophy without going for any radical, visible changes. As some people claimed, Mercedes was working on this car since 2020, it's hard to imagine where the work effort was put in and if it was all just optimizing the existing design without trying anything new on the upper body. There may still be a lot of secrets under the hood and the underbody. But that applies to RB and other teams as well. So by the looks of it, RB seems to have done more iterations to get to where they are and Mercedes has simply continued on the same road.

Unless you work for either of these teams, there is no way of knowing what either of them did in terms of iterations, or why they pursued specific aero routes.

I don't know why everyone wanks themselves silly over Newey designs so much, especially when there are interesting concepts up and down the paddock. The Alpine and Alpha Tauri look similar, the Aston has even more extreme undercuts. Just because Mercedes design looks like a continuation, doesn't mean it is slow, or that they have done less work that any other team on the grid.

People are easy to conflate bigger and more aero surfaces with faster cars and that is not always the case.

You have derived conclusions that aren't there in my post. I clearly said, "Regardless of the performance outcome" and " if we could know how many iterations they had to run". You clearly didn't seem to have read my post. My statement is as laymanish as it can be to derive any conclusions out of it.

For the kind of design that RB18 has, it must have gone through a lot of iterations, a hunch and by the "looks of it", W13 seemed to have simply evolved. I didn't say, which one is better either. Again, you didn't read my first statement for the context where I said, some people predicted Red Bull's title fight would have costed them development time for 2022, which clearly doesn't seem to be the case for the kind of design they have come out with. So there was no question of discussing Alpine or Alpha Tauri in that context.

Maybe I should have cut the rest of the quote that was not relevant, but my overall point was meant to be that we cannot say Red Bull ran through more iterations than Mercedes, even if that's "how it looks". For all we know, Mercedes ran more and found that the one they went with was best.

[dans79]

Maybe I should have cut the rest of the quote that was not relevant, but my overall point was meant to be that we cannot say Red Bull ran through more iterations than Mercedes, even if that's "how it looks". For all we know, Mercedes ran more and found that the one they went with was best.

The idea thats you can look at any car and tell how many iterations the design team has gone through is ludicrous. All the cars are designed by teams of people with various backgrounds, design philosophies, and constraints.

[Ryar]

Maybe I should have cut the rest of the quote that was not relevant, but my overall point was meant to be that we cannot say Red Bull ran through more iterations than Mercedes, even if that's "how it looks". For all we know, Mercedes ran more and found that the one they went with was best.

The idea thats you can look at any car and tell how many iterations the design team has gone through is ludicrous. All the cars are designed by teams of people with various backgrounds, design philosophies, and constraints.

One can say, budget constraints and limit on CFD/Wind tunnel usage have hit some teams harder than others from making their usual development progress?

[dans79]

Maybe I should have cut the rest of the quote that was not relevant, but my overall point was meant to be that we cannot say Red Bull ran through more iterations than Mercedes, even if that's "how it looks". For all we know, Mercedes ran more and found that the one they went with was best.

The idea thats you can look at any car and tell how many iterations the design team has gone through is ludicrous. All the cars are designed by teams of people with various backgrounds, design philosophies, and constraints.

One can say, budget constraints and limit on CFD/Wind tunnel usage have hit some teams harder than others from making their usual development progress?

Of course, but that still gives no indication of iterations, because cad, and pencil and paper is still unlimited. If you have good empirical reference data, a lot can be accomplished in a desktop cad application, before you send it off to the server farm or wind tunnel! A lot of cad suites have low level fluid simulations built into them, and if memory serves don't count against CFD time.

[Sevach]

[Jambier]

Please Ferrari save the season and end this endless Mercedes domination

I am also really not impressed by Alpine… 3 years with the same car to finally deliver what look like a midfield car

Let’s wait for the first race though

[Ryar]

The idea thats you can look at any car and tell how many iterations the design team has gone through is ludicrous. All the cars are designed by teams of people with various backgrounds, design philosophies, and constraints.

One can say, budget constraints and limit on CFD/Wind tunnel usage have hit some teams harder than others from making their usual development progress?

Of course, but that still gives no indication of iterations, because cad, and pencil and paper is still unlimited. If you have good empirical reference data, a lot can be accomplished in a desktop cad application, before you send it off to the server farm or wind tunnel! A lot of cad suites have low level fluid simulations built into them, and if memory serves don't count against CFD time.

You can make a thousand iterations of same design by slowly optimizing it and catching up with law of diminishing returns Or you can start going in various different design directions in search of bigger gains and open broader avenues of future gains in those thousand iterations. There is potentially more effort involved in moving through different design direction than trying to perfect the trusted and proven design. Taking risk of working with newer design approaches can be lottery and if that works, they can make a big jump or land up in mess. But the fact is, it does require more effort. The vanilla Mercedes design looks tidy and "effortless", but doesn't seem anything innovative, "until now".

[dans79]

One can say, budget constraints and limit on CFD/Wind tunnel usage have hit some teams harder than others from making their usual development progress?

Of course, but that still gives no indication of iterations, because cad, and pencil and paper is still unlimited. If you have good empirical reference data, a lot can be accomplished in a desktop cad application, before you send it off to the server farm or wind tunnel! A lot of cad suites have low level fluid simulations built into them, and if memory serves don't count against CFD time.

You can make a thousand iterations of same design by slowly optimizing it and catching up with law of diminishing returns Or you can start going in various different design directions in search of bigger gains and open broader avenues of future gains in those thousand iterations. There is potentially more effort involved in moving through different design direction than trying to perfect the trusted and proven design. Taking risk of working with newer design approaches can be lottery and if that works, they can make a big jump or land up in mess. But the fact is, it does require more effort. The vanilla Mercedes design looks tidy and "effortless", but doesn't seem anything innovative, "until now".

Define innovative.

It seems like you are associating looking different as innovative, and in the the world of complex dynamic systems looking different doesn't mean anything significant!

[Ryar]

Of course, but that still gives no indication of iterations, because cad, and pencil and paper is still unlimited. If you have good empirical reference data, a lot can be accomplished in a desktop cad application, before you send it off to the server farm or wind tunnel! A lot of cad suites have low level fluid simulations built into them, and if memory serves don't count against CFD time.

You can make a thousand iterations of same design by slowly optimizing it and catching up with law of diminishing returns Or you can start going in various different design directions in search of bigger gains and open broader avenues of future gains in those thousand iterations. There is potentially more effort involved in moving through different design direction than trying to perfect the trusted and proven design. Taking risk of working with newer design approaches can be lottery and if that works, they can make a big jump or land up in mess. But the fact is, it does require more effort. The vanilla Mercedes design looks tidy and "effortless", but doesn't seem anything innovative, "until now".

Define innovative.

It seems like you are associating looking different as innovative, and in the the world of complex dynamic systems looking different doesn't mean anything significant!

You read what I didn't say. Lack of innovation in case of Mercedes, is not having anything that visibly provides a feel of a new, unseen, potentially advantageous feature. Only time will if their approach is better. But for an armchair expert, having spent years watching F1 cars, experience says new and different is the first step towards innovation, if the results prove it. It then continues to train an arm chair expert's ML model. Until then, it's personal opinion, right or wrong.