Technical Regulations for 2009-2015

[WhiteBlue]

Downforce, as an absolute is not the problem. The cars have more downforce this year than they had in 2008 yet they can follow each other more closely. Bang goes your theory.

Lol, not so fast! We also have slick tyres which we did not have in 2008 and the jury is still out about the ability of the cars to follow each other. Wait for the next procession. It will not take so long.

We should not take these things so serious. We will not decide about F1 rules here. All we can do is have rational discussions and learn something from it, but the probability for that is pretty small.

[autogyro]

There exist no real loopholes that could not be closed.
F1 engineers work from many motivations and getting rid of wake turbulence was never one of the most important to them.
Lip service was all that was applied to the results from the aero working group, there was never any real chance of the needed changes. Far to many in F1 now rely on aero for their existance. Those who have the experience and knew the writing was on the wall were discredited and silenced. The real contamination still remains and continues to eat out the heart of this great sport.

[strad]

autogyro said

The real contamination still remains and continues to eat out the heart of this great sport.

And just pray tell is this contamination?

[Scotracer]

Downforce, as an absolute is not the problem. The cars have more downforce this year than they had in 2008 yet they can follow each other more closely. Bang goes your theory.

Lol, not so fast! We also have slick tyres which we did not have in 2008 and the jury is still out about the ability of the cars to follow each other. Wait for the next procession. It will not take so long.

We should not take these things so serious. We will not decide about F1 rules here. All we can do is have rational discussions and learn something from it, but the probability for that is pretty small.

So now you're complaining that we're not doing it truly like for like? Before you were talking about aircraft, for crying out loud!

I have no problem talking flippantly about this subject and just shooting the --- but when people come in saying they have definite answers and continuing to parade them around to try and gain authority by doing so, I get cheesed off.

There exist no real loopholes that could not be closed.
F1 engineers work from many motivations and getting rid of wake turbulence was never one of the most important to them.
Lip service was all that was applied to the results from the aero working group, there was never any real chance of the needed changes. Far to many in F1 now rely on aero for their existance. Those who have the experience and knew the writing was on the wall were discredited and silenced. The real contamination still remains and continues to eat out the heart of this great sport.

And you seriously think there is an alternative to aerodynamic downforce to achieve the same levels of grip?

[therealjackson]

instead of trying to control turbulant air rather by regulating what is and is not allowd on the car, the amount of turbulance itself should be measured and regulated. this would open the scope for aero development, leading to the kind of inovative designes we used to see in the seventies. because there would be limited turbulance allowed behind the car, they would be able to run close together and promote overtaking. obviousley there should be regulations controling the dimensions of wings etc. but overall the designers would be able to work unrestricted as long as their ideas dont effect aero wake beyond the regulations.

[WhiteBlue]

Downforce, as an absolute is not the problem. The cars have more downforce this year than they had in 2008 yet they can follow each other more closely. Bang goes your theory.

Lol, not so fast! We also have slick tyres which we did not have in 2008 and the jury is still out about the ability of the cars to follow each other. Wait for the next procession. It will not take so long.

We should not take these things so serious. We will not decide about F1 rules here. All we can do is have rational discussions and learn something from it, but the probability for that is pretty small.

So now you're complaining that we're not doing it truly like for like? Before you were talking about aircraft, for crying out loud!

I have no problem talking flippantly about this subject and just shooting the --- but when people come in saying they have definite answers and continuing to parade them around to try and gain authority by doing so, I get cheesed off.

F1 aerodynamics with all their science, computational tools and wind tunnels are all derived from aircraft technology. I don't see why we cannot learn from the failures of aircraft designers when it comes to avoiding wake turbulences. The universal experience in aircraft design is: "The bigger the take off weight the bigger the wake turbulence". Please show me a single example when this rule has been broken. It is no coincidence that air traffic controllers adjust the length of take off and landing slots to the take off weight. The bigger the lift the longer the spacing.

Downforce is nothing but inverted lift. Please tell me why a practical law in applied aerodynamics should change when you invert the wing to produce downforce rather than lift!

And if you still see no sense in this I will give you a very simple reason for limiting downforce. A following car cannot loose any downforce the leading car doesn't have in the first place. I have yet to see a sensible point why a competitive F1 car needs more than one ton of downforce if it is the same for all cars and if we increase the mechanical grip to get similar lap times. I really wonder how much downforce an MP4-2 had in the early eighties.

And you seriously think there is an alternative to aerodynamic downforce to achieve the same levels of grip?

No, I don't think so. Actually you don't need the same grip. A bit less grip in high speed corners and more grip in slower corners will do ok. We would even gain some more safety and probably better racing. Is it essential that we have lateral G-forces of five G? Three or four G would probably make no difference to the spectacle.

[Just_a_fan]

I have yet to see a sensible point why a competitive F1 car needs more than one ton of downforce if it is the same for all cars and if we increase the mechanical grip to get similar lap times.

Why 1 tonne? Why not 0.75 or 1.25 tonnes?

And if you lose any of your downforce applied grip then you will struggle in the following car. The problem is that the way that downforce is produced makes it certain that you will lose out in the following car. The front wing doesn't work so well so you understeer for a start. And because the front wing affects all of the aero performance of the bodywork behind it, as soon as it is in affected air it further affects the air and the whole car is less effective.

Generating downforce in a way that doesn't rely so heavily on highly optimised front wings might actually be a start rather than blindly demanding downforce limits.

If the teams came up with a design that generates 5 tonnes of downforce and allows the cars to run up each other exhaust pipes and thus overtake, would you be happy? Is it close running you want or downforce that you don't want?

[autogyro]

And you seriously think there is an alternative to aerodynamic downforce to achieve the same levels of grip?


Why is it important to maintain the current level of grip???????

[strad]

This is getting downright funny. Look..the first thing you must understand about the current set up is that the diffusers are designed not only to create an illegal ground effects downforce but that the designers work at creating the turbulence. The design the diffuser to not only provide downforce, but to create turbulence to screw with the following car. The airflow leaving the car could be a lot smoother but they don't want it to be.
The real cure for this is to ban diffusers

[Ogami musashi]

.....

The problem with your reasoning is that you negate the very concept of association...that is in maths..the multiplication.

Paddy lowe talks about a level and talks about a wake that has a quality.

How do you think you would translate it in maths?...

DF lost= DF*(Wake Intensity/Sensitivity)

If the above relation was not true, then the OWG wouldn't have done any design change...

FYI, BMW did a preliminary study for the OWG in 2007 with a more conventional layout with a downforce Cut (50% over the 2006 levels). After trying several layouts around the baseline, they just found out that...the loss of downforce was more or less the same than in 2006...

Thus, Your proposal would work only if you can have at max a constant (Wake intensity/Sensitivity) ratio as now.

The next thing is of course there's no way you can keep up the speed of todays car with 1 tons of downforce..you don't care? Your right..but 1 tons is not even the downforce produced by a GP2 car..


As for the wake problem, i'm sorry but you are totally wrong; Rather than dragging you into physics equations, i'll tell you something: The trailing vortices you talk about are energy transfers from the plane to the air; What does it mean to you, i don't know but what it means in real life is that if the plane transfers energy to the air that is the air loses this energy.
Lift is work done to keep the plane up in the air;
Thus trailing vortices are lift wastes; If wake was linear with lift that would mean the energy lost would be linear thus that would mean for one mass ALL planes would need the same thrust for the same condition...Of course that's completely impossible.

Why mass then? Simply because wake is an energy loss from the plane; but what energy??? The potential energy (m*g*height).

Of course the plane do not waste all the potential energy or else it would not fly at all..Thus there must be a parameter. Don't search i'll tell you, it is the rate of sink, in the form of velocity/finess, this latter ratio is the derived form of h (in the potential equation) for aerodynamic forces subject to bodies.

So the wake is defined by m.g.(v/f).

As you can see..there's nothing to see with level of lift. It is a question of mass and finess.

Now if you take that to a car then the m.g term will be nullified by the reaction force of the air...and the car does not sink..so only one parameter's left.. Finess.


And when you do the maths guess what you find for the wake intensity for a plane or a car? The STRICT power needed by the engine to overcome the drag.

So for once: the wake is NOT related to the level of lift or downforce. It is linked to drag;

[WhiteBlue]

I have yet to see a sensible point why a competitive F1 car needs more than one ton of downforce if it is the same for all cars and if we increase the mechanical grip to get similar lap times.

Why 1 tonne? Why not 0.75 or 1.25 tonnes?

And if you lose any of your downforce applied grip then you will struggle in the following car. The problem is that the way that downforce is produced makes it certain that you will lose out in the following car. The front wing doesn't work so well so you understeer for a start. And because the front wing affects all of the aero performance of the bodywork behind it, as soon as it is in affected air it further affects the air and the whole car is less effective.

Generating downforce in a way that doesn't rely so heavily on highly optimised front wings might actually be a start rather than blindly demanding downforce limits.

If the teams came up with a design that generates 5 tonnes of downforce and allows the cars to run up each other exhaust pipes and thus overtake, would you be happy? Is it close running you want or downforce that you don't want?

It doesn't matter much which of the figures you take but I bet around a ton was giving good values in the times before aero was optimized in the nineties.

I say that the miracle of downforce without wake turbulence is just that, a fairy tale. Five tons downforce is completely out of question because the human body would not stand the G-forces (7-8 G). Sure, I would be happy with 2.5-3 tons of downforce and cars being able to run close. I just don't believe it possible like I don't believe in the easter bunny, Santa Claus and the tooth fairy.

[xpensive]

As I've said before, I'm with WB all the way on this one, believe it or not. Regulating downforce to a generous level such as 15 kN would be just as natural as liniting the width of the tyres. Simple, green and very cost effective.

[WhiteBlue]

So for once: the wake is NOT related to the level of lift or downforce. It is linked to drag;

Ok, let us take your word that wake turbulence is proportional to drag.

Let us also neglect the temperature increase of the air by dissipation.

Let us further assume that F1 aerodynamic efficiencies by different designers within the 2010 aero rules have a variance of +/- 10%. In the greater scheme of things we are going to neglect this as well and say that the efficiency of all cars is the same.

Next we see in this simplified energy balance model that all engine power that is absorbed by aerodynamic forces goes into downforce and drag. What follows is that wake is still proportional to downforce. If you increase downforce you always increase drag and wake turbulence. QED

This simplified model shows that designers would have to achieve massive aerodynamic efficiencies to avoid increasing wake turbulence when they double the downforce. Everybody agrees that we have twice the downforce the OWG was tasked to produce. Do you honestly assert that designers can double or triple the aerodynamic efficiency in order to tweak the downforce in favor of the drag? I don't believe this.

[autogyro]

Formula One has always been about improveing efficiency, not going faster or increasing DF. If it was, the cars would be going at more than 500mph and generating many tons of DF.
It also does not matter how the power and speed compares to other formula. Many formula over the years have produced more power and higher speed.
Formula One has always existed to shown off the peak of human egineering excelence as applied to ground vehicles. (not aeroplanes)
The FIA has got to draft new regulations that make sense of this and do away with regulations that are there simply to satisfy the current monopoly held by aero and the dictates of the oil and big car manufacturing industries. If these negative forces are not dealt with F1 will have no way to justify its existance in future world economics. Things are changing fast in the real world.
The old boys networks in motor sport have got to wake up and catch up.
There is no other choice.

[jon-mullen]

Formula One has always been about improveing efficiency, not going faster or increasing DF. If it was, the cars would be going at more than 500mph and generating many tons of DF.
....
The old boys networks in motor sport have got to wake up and catch up.
There is no other choice.

Yes, they're so silly with the way they're always trying to...go faster? What are you even banging on about? If anyone had a car that went 500mph, generated tons of downforce, fit the regs, and didn't spend all its time in the gravel or the pits, they'd be a damn fool not to enter it. It's getting old how you assume you've out-thought every engineer on every team, every road car manufacturer, and everyone on this forum while hiding behind a screen name.

I can think of one or two things off the top of my head that improved efficiency, and about a hundred counterexamples where it's been shown that since its inception, teams will do just about anything to go faster or get more downforce (since they started relying on df, anyway).