Lateral forces through aero

[hollus]

I was having this crazy thought:

In some tracks most of the time is to be won (or lost) in a bunch of corners, which sometimes are all or most to the same side (Barcelona's right handers spring to mind).

In that case, if some lateral force was effected on the car through aero, say, with asymmetrical wings of even an asymmetrical body, the car would rotate (a bit) without transmitting any force to the tyres.

An obvious side effect would be that the car would tend to rotate in the straights, and corners to the opposite side would require extra forces through the tyres, but maybe having some extra 30Km/h through turn 8 in Turkey would make it worth it? Cars for oval races are biased that way, but I believe that is purely mechanical, not based on aero.

I am thinking of turning vanes, like the ones currently in the front wing, but instead of both pointing to outside the car, having both direct the air to the right, or both to the left. Something like that could be even more effective in the rear wing (no downstream side effects) or in winglets in the limited bodywork where that is allowed.

I think that this pushing air to the sides would mean sacrificing a lot of downforce, probably with terrible overall negative effect, but I wanted to pick the minds of the forumers on the issue.

Just as a reference point, the currently produced downforce amounts to 3G at times.

Any ideas? Is it possible? Is it legal? Has it been tried? Is it used in ovals?

[WhiteBlue]

The only way I see it possible to create asymmetric aero effects is by creating structures that are flexible under lateral acceleration. For example the front wing is suspended on two vertical pillars. If the pillars are very flexible at the connecting points to the wing and to the nose box the whole wing can be moved to the outside under lateral acceleration. This would obviously be helped by having additional mass of the camera housings fixed to the wing as we have seen at Red Bull. So in that case the leverage of the outside wing half would become greater, the end plates would come closer to the ground and more downforce would be added to the outside wheel.

[PITsteeler07]

Actually, the teams that raced in NASCAR use to do this to gain downforce back when the rules were less regulated. Because they only turn left on a majority of the tracks they go to, they would "flare out" the right end of the car to gain some additional downforce/sideforce for the corners. Now the rules don't allow for that sort of thing. I agree with White as the only way it could possibly be done is if the wing were to flex.

[Jersey Tom]

Well additionally, if the car has a large side profile, when the car reaches some yaw angle it will generate lateral force from aero. This is certainly true in stock car racing.

The 'shark fin' designs in F1 undoubtedly produce some aero lateral force with yaw, without much straight-line drag penalty.

[sknguy]

From previous year's races there had been some tweaking of the aero. But I'm thinking of the hot air venting being more prominent on the ride side of the cars for Barcelona races specifically.

There are likely some tweaks done to optimize airflow over the diffuser. The knuckles in the bodywork above the front suspension joints are suppose to effect high speed turning. One has to keep in mind that changes to the front aero has a bit of a chain reaction effect on everything behind. Specially the diffuser's work.