henra wrote:
A diffuser that runs on the verge of stalling can be a very limiting factor for the setup options of the car. It can force you to limit the vertical movement range of the car. Thereby messing up mechanical efficiency/behaviour.
We have seen that happening before in F1. And the description of the problems of the MP4-28 lead me to believe the (main) issue is somewhere in that department.
True, but the diffuser cannot be tuned or setup. Therefore it's not a variable, your variable over a weekend is your suspension. And this what limits your aerodynamic performance.
One example is ride height dependence. Remeber when during winter testing they ran the car too low?
That's an example of mechanical limitation which expanded the aerodynamic envelop.
Yes ride quality is mechanical but it can be a consequence of trying to mitigate an aerodynamic ride height sensitivity problem which requires them to run a setup that is too stiff for good mechanical behaviour.
That's some circular logic there. You went from mechanical to aero to mechanical.
Put it this way, if your car has good aero, it will be consistently good. A team that has no money to do any updates will be able to setup the mechanical to get a good balance on any track. The aerodynamics will still give the same performance regardless of the track. What you find is the suspension setup that is changed more often than not.
And one setup doesn't work well on all tracks. But one aero package can work well on all tracks (with the exception of Monza and Monaco)
It can be (and probably more often than not is) a symptom and not the original cause. As someone already said, suspension is probably better understood and less prone to totally unexpected behaviour than aerodramatic issues.
Just look at how long it took RB last year to get their tunnel working properly. And Adrian Newey is far from being an amateur in that regard...
Suspension is not better understood. It is also more dificult to do repeated tests on it. Aero has more controls.
You do straight line tests and a few yaw tests, to evaluate most things. Suspension as mentioned before, worse when pirrelli tyres are thrown into the mix, different tracks, surfaces, fuel levels etc. cannot be easier to understand. It is more of a black art than Aero. in fact it probably cannot be mapped with all variables taken into account, hence why a team can have a predetermined Aero package that works on a track, but they cannot have a predetermined suspension setup that works throughout a weekend. Too many variables, and sometimes when you think you understand the mechanical side in practice 3, all of a sudden in Q1 the car is behaving completely differently. This indicates that it is less understood and less under controlled, and the engineers cannot be blamed for it anyway.
