scuderiafan wrote:
What's the point of having the pillar connect to the wing that way? If they wanted to have the wing that far up, why not make the pillars extend forward or something?
Maybe they are experimenting with a pivot point, but they could be trying to reduce interference drag at the front wing stay intersections.
When you have two surfaces intersecting, especially at perpendicular or acute angles (as in the wing stay) the boundary layers flowing over each surface will interfere with each other and introducing vortexing that induces early separation of flow on both surfaces.
If there is a large fillet between the surfaces, this effect can be reduced. The boundary layers are then never forced to interact with each other at a single discrete intersection, but can act more like one continuous layer (remaining tangent to itself through the fillet radius).
Problem is, the FIA regs restrict the intersection fillet to 10mm in that area. Perhaps that's not gentle enough of a transition for any worthwhile gains, and require something more like this:
So if they move the stays and wing away from each other, they can at least reduce the length of the intersecting surfaces. They're not even bothering with fillets in this case:
Looking at this year's crop, it seems like everyone's abandoned fillets and either shortened the stay's chord, or eliminated full intersections between the stay & wing by moving them way back like Lotus, FI and Ferrari. Some '09 cars for reference:
