Both Andrea Stella and Pierre Wache (RB and Mclaren technical directors) more or less referred to the sidepods as part of a "sideskirt" system.zibby43 wrote: ↑11 Aug 2023, 23:43I stated multiple times, earlier in the season, before the incredible surge of teams upgrading their side pods, that they were a critical area of the car.
The crux of my argument was, it’s not the bodywork shape in and of itself that is key, but rather, how critical that bodywork is in this regulation set in tying together the most important performance-generating bits of the car.
I felt the RB concept and the progress made by McLaren and AM after copying key features, validated that theory.
And then Dan Fallows hammered that home with this:
“There's no doubt that the sidepods are essentially flow-tuning features. They are things that condition the flow to the rear of the car, but it also helps the floor to work as well.
Although in itself maybe the actual performance improvements of the bodywork is not so big on its own, it helps everything else to work. So it's quite a big feature of the car.”
Sideskirts on their own don't do **** of course...you need a floor for sideskirts to matter, but then once you have a floor, if some teams have "sideskirts" and you don't...then it's a big part of the problem...there's no semantics about it. I agree and this is more or less what you have said above.
