Intriguing...Lewis_Hamilton wrote: ↑13 Oct 2022, 03:05“Getting to the desired aero shapes has meant a complete internal repackaging, right down to the electrical layout and where we fit things like the ECU. The suspension has been redesigned to account for the loss of hydraulics and remote springs, now banned in the new regulations. Hopefully, you will also see that we have taken another step with how tightly packaged the sidepods and engine cover are. To get to this is not just a shrink-wrapping exercise but requires a huge amount of redesign and simulation to make it work,” continued Mike Elliott.
Mike let on at the beginning that the sidepod layout was not the fundamental aero shape we baked into the car with our packaging decisions.I think some bright minds will be able to guess where we went wrong when they finally get to see the changes that are coming for next year.
If you piece together evidence and comments throughout the year, I can't help but feel that the answers can almost be found in Mike Elliott's interview on Beyond The Grid podcast.
At around 03:05 he talks about an almost singular decision made during the car development process where the team may have made a mistake. He talks about the performance swings of the car and also implies that during the team's transition to the new car they carried over learnings and methodologies from 2021 that weren't quite applicable to 2022. He also talks about how they have managed to fix things a bit, but the issue won't be fully resolved till next year.
Singular decisions in engineering typically involve defining a specific parameter of the design that builds in a desirable characteristic. I have no first hand experience of the racing car design process, but given the available evidence I wonder whether he is referring to defining the car's nominal ride height window.
Once the porpoising was resolved with the Barcelona update, bumpy circuits remained a huge challenge for the car and maybe it was discovered that the nominal window was set too low... GE cars being extremely ride height sensitive, in order to sacrifice as little performance as possible they opted to tackle the problem primarily by increasing spring rates, and then raise the ride height as a last resort to satisfy ride quality, driver comfort, and, later on, the bouncing metric. Maybe the performance swings can be attributed to how far the ride height strayed away from the nominal for a given circuit. (Mercedes' typically high wing angle settings are possibly an indicator of having to sacrifice floor performance.)
Perhaps they envisaged this window as a place that would bear more and more fruit; a sustainable development path. But having discovered the problem, and with the mechanical architecture locked in, it left only a certain amount of scope in aerodynamic developments to widen - or move - the window. I think the direction they took with the floor edge geometry is indicative of this. (NB: The car was 'missing' floor edge detail at the start of the season.) Recently the car seems to be behaving more desirably.
Where my theory falls flat is how they did not anticipate the chosen ride height window being an issue on bumpy circuits, given the sophisticated suspension modelling and testing tools at their disposal to check wheel displacement under loads.
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