Is the Aerodynamic dependence in Formula One too high?

[WhiteBlue]

The Overtaking Working Group wasn't specifically tasked with reducing downforce; they were tasked with with making overtaking easier.

Your view is not complete. There was the cornering speed problem which had a safety aspect and the overtaking problem which was hurting the popularity. The safety task was a big cut in downforce specifically a cut to about 50%. This was promised in return for abolishing grooved tyres which turned out the wrong way to decrease cornering speeds. The grooves had been introduced ten years before and had also made the cars much more unstable. The FiA had stipulated that a downforce limit of 1.25 metric tons would be appropriate and the technical working group had agreed to shoot for that target. In the end they missed the boat by a huge margin and this was one reason why the trust in the teams to solve the problems in F1 was very low during the 2009 financial crisis.

The FiA had proposed the CDW rear wing to cure the overtaking problem and that was rejected by the teams. You are right that the group also proposed to cure the overtaking problem by introducing a standardized front wing mid section, wide front wings, narrow rear wings and several other items. As it turned out that problem wasn't resolved either. They failed on both counts which was a big disappointment to me at the time. I lost my trust in team experts to deliver a geometric restriction for downforce. There are too many vested interest by those who think that expensive aero research will give them a competitive advantage.

[PlatinumZealot]

@ Reca. What I mean when I say DF is easy is that is always easier to bolt more wing on the car or more AoA. The problem is doing that without the added drag. Think running the Monaco wings at every track.

This is so very true. Alas, this basic and fundamental reality seems to evade many!

I disagree. Current regulation make it very difficult to get more downforce from wings: this was pointed out by a mclaren engineer sying that Canada is not a low downforce track anymore (even in 2010).

@frog and smikle: Reca's point is more subtle: he is not overlooking "basic reality". Maybe you have misinterpreted his post

The monaco rear wings make the most downforce.. but they are not used throughout the season because of the drag penalty associated with them. If your CAR is aerdynamically efficient you can get away with higher DF wings at the more balanced tracks..

The mclaren mp4-26 has been noted to carry steep wings even on low drag tracks.

[bhall]

Well, at this point I fear my views on the subject would stray too far off topic.

I do, however, agree with you that the effects of the recent major rule changes, save for the new tires, have badly missed their intended marks. Of course, I also think the overtaking "problem" was only a perceived one, not a genuine one. And as the Pirelli tires have shown us, it was a reduction in mechanical grip, not aerodynamic, that has served as the best catalyst for more overtaking. (I don't know why that hasn't always been apparent when wet races are consistently the more popular ones every season.)

[Just_a_fan]

WB, it's not because you think it's the way to go that it is "intelligent rule making". Intelligent rule making to me is conducted by the overtaking working group, by experts in the field based on real windtunnel and track tests. I find it quite disturbing that you think your idea is only good approach.

The overtaking working group got it seriously wrong the last time they had a go at the problem. They created the double diffusor loop hole and the aim of reducing DF was totally missed.

Wrong. That loophole was in the regs long before the OWG got to work. It's just that no one, up to that point, had used it in that way. But then that's what the engineers are paid to do - develop the maximum performance within the letter of the rules. Any rule you can formulate will see the engineers coming up with clever loop holes and work arounds. It's the nature of the beast - it's competition. It's the whole bloody point!

[Just_a_fan]

And as the Pirelli tires have shown us, it was a reduction in mechanical grip, not aerodynamic, that has served as the best catalyst for more overtaking. (I don't know why that hasn't always been apparent when wet races are consistently the more popular ones every season.)

Because banging the "aero is bad" drum is so very popular these days...

[WhiteBlue]

Wrong. That loophole was in the regs long before the OWG got to work. It's just that no one, up to that point, had used it in that way.

Sorry to disagree. The responsibility was on the group to reach the target. They missed it. They were particularly told by Brawn to fix the DD problem but disregarded it. The diffusor rule of that year was clearly the responsibility of the OWG. The FiA would have fixed the downforce at 1.25 tons and the issue would have been solved. A clear cut case.

[Reca]

Regarding Reca's concerns that downforce would be selected arbitrarily there is a simple solution. You just pick the peak downforce of the best car on every circuit immediately before you change the rule. I assume that there would be an index track like Barcelona where everybody tests. The other tracks would derive their DF levels by a factor which would be determined before the rule is introduced.

Previously, and later mentioning the OWG or 1.25 tons limit (that i believe was nothing but Mosley's usual tactic of putting on table a bunch of random absurd proposals solely to create panic in teams and then exploit the confusion to get quietly approved the few things he really wanted), it seemed to me your aim was a drastic reduction of downforce to lot less than now, so that's what I looked at when you mentioned the limitation.
If I assumed wrong and instead you are fine with current level as long as they don't go over it, that doesn’t change my opinion, I still think that setting a fixed amount and trying to policing it is not practical and would just open a can of worms.

His other concern is the measuring of the actual peak downforce on the tracks in real time. This is an almost trivial problem for the massive computing power of an F1 car. The vertical forces balance of a car is composed from aerodynamic, inertial and weight components. The balance can be measured at all four wheels. The weight can be integrated by tracking the fuel consumption via the controlled fuel injection. The inertial forces can be tracked by systems that have been used in commercial and military aviation for ages. So the real time DF is always available to computation. Teams will have practise sessions to dial in the right level of DF for qualifying and the race. If there are over runs there can be pre determined penalties for the size of the violation. F1 has attempted much more complex things than that in the past. Teams have to manage their car weight, petrol consumption, petrol temperature, fuel composition, tyres, pit stop impact on track position and many more items. Getting DF right for the race would be no big deal compared to the other jobs. They actually do a DF optimization now for every track, but obviously with different goals.

You make it all sound very easy and straightforward but I'm afraid it's not.

For a start, when you say peak downforce, what does that mean, at which speed, in which conditions (ride height? Rake? Yaw?) or even just in which weather conditions (influence of weather on aero of different cars is not the same, varying weather Saturday vs Sunday would mean that different cars react differently) ?

Just as example, let's assume that you told teams "you can't have more than 12500N at peak speed", first thing they would do, if more downforce than that would be beneficial for laptime, would be find any way, legal or "creative", to get as high as possible at lower speed, and then somehow manage having a drop of downforce to the limit before getting to the speed it's checked (with controlled deformation of the elements that aren't checked or beating tests for those that are... playing with how the various vortices interact with each other in different speed range, with opportune suspensions movement to change body's position or anything else that would give even the slight chance of working in that sense).
Something like that in reality already happens, for a variety of reasons, it would be "simply" a matter of trying to control it more accurately and plenty of time/money would go on that work as, if they managed to do it, performance gain would be immediate, so ultimately you would favor even more those with resources (money facilities etc) to spend on aero, which it seems to me it's what you want to avoid.

Thing is, as nice as it is the simple law 0.5 rho v^2 SCz, reality is not that simple, with SCz as a single well defined constant, especially it's not for a vehicle with a complex geometry and running so close to ground under a constantly varying range of conditions; so it's not like you can set a value for a speed and have it fixed, job done, clear cut as you make it look like.
It's a complex multidimensional map we are talking about, to even just think about putting some limits on it you have to introduce various control parameters, not just a single random number, and set them in a way that is coherent.
Way more easily said than done.

Also, when I say that it can't be measured with accuracy, I don't specifically mean by teams, but mainly by FIA, which is a totally different matter.
I've no doubt, for example, that RB has fairly good idea of how much their front wing bends. FIA on the other hand...

Demanding FIA to, every race, check the compliance of every car to a set downforce limit requires FIA to know each car almost as well as teams do, following them thru every single setup modification in practice session and development, analyzing it all before giving the green light for racing. All the stuff that teams normally employ several people to do.

And on top of it, all that has to be done to extreme accuracy, potentially even higher than teams' themselves need for their setup, because any small uncertainty would open a can of worms as it would be the equivalent of allowing a team to use more downforce than others are allowed to use.

FIA people have already plenty of troubles with controlling things way easier than that.

The FiA had proposed the CDW rear wing to cure the overtaking problem and that was rejected by the teams. You are right that the group also proposed to cure the overtaking problem by introducing a standardized front wing mid section, wide front wings, narrow rear wings and several other items. As it turned out that problem wasn't resolved either. They failed on both counts which was a big disappointment to me at the time. I lost my trust in team experts to deliver a geometric restriction for downforce. There are too many vested interest by those who think that expensive aero research will give them a competitive advantage.

Have you considered the possibility that, if the change of bodywork rules for 2009 (or plenty of other before that) failed to make overtaking as easy as people expected, maybe it's not because their work achieved nothing but because the thing they were limited to work on wasn't the (main) cause of the problem(or people expectations were too high)?

[Reca]

The monaco rear wings make the most downforce.. but they are not used throughout the season because of the drag penalty associated with them. If your CAR is aerdynamically efficient you can get away with higher DF wings at the more balanced tracks.

It's obvious that increasing efficiency is desirable if you can, but the point I'm making is that in most of current tracks the advantage from adding downforce, even at cost of losing bit of efficiency (thus proportionally increasing drag by higher % than what you gain in downforce), is still worth taking, because drag penalty is very small.
Even if certainly teams' long term target is trying to increase efficiency, that's a secondary aim over the short term priority of getting more downforce. (and that is particularly true in the first year after a big change of rules that limited the geometry and the established ways to produce downforce)

A drop of even various km/h of peak speed for the few seconds spent in that upper range in most of tracks, albeit very noticeable on velocity plot (or speed trap) in reality costs no more than couple of tenths, easily recoverable with minimal speed increment for the rest of lap, available with just bit more downforce, if you can get it.

And the need to keep speed high for fear of being passed in straights is minimal as, once all teams do the math and realize how scarcely important drag reduction is, they will all work in same direction and ultimately will end up more or less in the same ballpark, with gaps not big enough to really influence straight line performance.

If you look at the wings of most of tracks you'll see that they all use basically all the box available from rules to put wing elements, if there are differences (minimal) between Monaco wings and these used in vast majority of other tracks they are probably more aimed at adopting airfoils that work reasonably well also at the very low speed (thus low Re) unseen in other tracks than about the max Cl target per se.

And as the Pirelli tires have shown us, it was a reduction in mechanical grip, not aerodynamic, that has served as the best catalyst for more overtaking. (I don't know why that hasn't always been apparent when wet races are consistently the more popular ones every season.)

Because banging the "aero is bad" drum is so very popular these days...

Agree.

[WhiteBlue]

You make it all sound very easy and straightforward but I'm afraid it's not.

For a start, when you say peak downforce, what does that mean, at which speed, in which conditions (ride height? Rake? Yaw?) or even just in which weather conditions (influence of weather on aero of different cars is not the same, varying weather Saturday vs Sunday would mean that different cars react differently) ?

Just as example, let's assume that you told teams "you can't have more than 12500N at peak speed", first thing they would do, if more downforce than that would be beneficial for laptime, would be find any way, legal or "creative", to get as high as possible at lower speed, and then somehow manage having a drop of downforce to the limit before getting to the speed it's checked (with controlled deformation of the elements that aren't checked or beating tests for those that are... playing with how the various vortices interact with each other in different speed range, with opportune suspensions movement to change body's position or anything else that would give even the slight chance of working in that sense).
Something like that in reality already happens, for a variety of reasons, it would be "simply" a matter of trying to control it more accurately and plenty of time/money would go on that work as, if they managed to do it, performance gain would be immediate, so ultimately you would favor even more those with resources (money facilities etc) to spend on aero, which it seems to me it's what you want to avoid.

Thing is, as nice as it is the simple law 0.5 rho v^2 SCz, reality is not that simple, with SCz as a single well defined constant, especially it's not for a vehicle with a complex geometry and running so close to ground under a constantly varying range of conditions; so it's not like you can set a value for a speed and have it fixed, job done, clear cut as you make it look like.
It's a complex multidimensional map we are talking about, to even just think about putting some limits on it you have to introduce various control parameters, not just a single random number, and set them in a way that is coherent.
Way more easily said than done.

Also, when I say that it can't be measured with accuracy, I don't specifically mean by teams, but mainly by FIA, which is a totally different matter.

You are making it much more complicated than it really is. My proposal is a real time indication of the actual DF by the SECU in an automatic way by telemetry. There is technically nothing challenging to do this. The FiA, race control, the teams and even the spectators would be able to watch the peak DF of every car on every lap and compare it to a target value that is applicable for that race. In order to be safe against things like wind gusts you may have a tolerance where the lights get only yellow, but if you over run that tolerance you would get a red violation light and the competitor would automatically get flagged up at the stewards office.

You think that weather could be a problem. Well, I don't think it would. If the weather changes from dry to wet - which is the standard weather change problem - people just want to run more downforce. That would not be a problem. They simply have to live with less downforce than they optimally would want, just like it is now. If it is constantly wet before a race and teams get no opportunity to practise fora dry race they would have to rely on experience and CFD to set their DF level to the low level that would be anticipated. In such cases the tolerance can be a bit increased to make it easier.

You also argue that teams would develop solutions that allow a higher average DF level than before. I'm not at all concerned by that. The main point is that we would not have changing aerodynamic rules which constantly create different optimal solutions to the set of restrictions. The restrictions remain the same and so we would necessarily see an effect of diminishing returns on aero research. And that is exactly what I want to achieve.

[Just_a_fan]

The restrictions remain the same and so we would necessarily see an effect of diminishing returns on aero research. And that is exactly what I want to achieve.

And the teams with most resource will still be able to maximise the aero potential because they can afford to go further along the curve. The only way to prevent aero development is to have a spec series.

[bhall]

I still don't see a logical basis for such a rule. I think it's because one doesn't exist.

This is just about tailoring F1 to suit one person's megalomaniacal desires.

[WhiteBlue]

The restrictions remain the same and so we would necessarily see an effect of diminishing returns on aero research. And that is exactly what I want to achieve.

And the teams with most resource will still be able to maximise the aero potential because they can afford to go further along the curve. The only way to prevent aero development is to have a spec series.

I do not want to stop aero research, I just want to shift more resources to other areas.

[flynfrog]

just for sake of actually talking about something technical. Where do you plan to put the DF sensor?

[MIKEY_!]

Somewhere on the suspension would be my bet.

[WhiteBlue]

just for sake of actually talking about something technical. Where do you plan to put the DF sensor?

You actually cannot measure downforce alone. You need to measure the balance of all three forces as they occur on the wheels. Hubs or wheel bearings could be a good spot. And then the SECU needs to compute the weight/mass of the car and the inertial forces in order to subtract them from the balance. But as previously shown it would not be a big deal.