I do recall (hazily) it was designed during a time of great upheaval and political infighting at Ferrari. The head aerodynamicist at the time, J-C Migeot, gained the political high ground for a time and he basically designed the car. It was a triumph of aero over mechanical engineering. The supposed head designer at the time (Steve Nichol) came to Ferrari from McLaren, went on to Jaguar, and I believe is now back at McLaren. He lost the political fight and was basically handed this design.
It had a fully separate "floor" or plate suspended from the chassis proper. Poor handling, down on power, underdeveloped design, demoralized drivers - all added up to minimal success.
Enzo Ferrari was a great man. But he was not a good man. -- Phil Hill
On the picture from ultimatecarpage - one in the middle it is visible that sidepods are elevated above the floor on the entire length (contrary to the drawing on the italian link I found), I think the idea was to let the airflow pass undisturbed to the diffusers making them more effective. From the computer translation it seems that problems were that in the real road conditions ride-hide variations and sidewinds disturbed the airflow.
The F92 was indeed a beautiful car, with aero designed by Jean Claude Migeot (also the Tyrrell 019 designer).
Known as the twin floor car, the aims was similar the theory that lead to the first high nosed Tyrrell. Migeot wanted to remove the influence of the sidepods on the cars aero. On the Tyrrell project, he started with a car without pods and worked on the best aero set up, effectively a round aircraft-like cross section. He progressed with the F92 to make the sidepods divorced from the floor over the top of the diffuser. Back then the diffuser was the full width between the rear wheels. Thus the flow passed from beneath the front wing over the top of the floor creating higher pressure above it and thus more downforce (for almost no drag). However Ferrari were in disarray by this stage their success of the early\mid eighties was long gone and the team suffered political infighting, while the British teams were far more organised and had chassis and aero working together. Albeit Ferrari had ex-McLaren man Steve Nicholls as technical director, but he wasn’t political eough to win over the team and get them pulling in the same direction.
The twin floor concept took up a lot of resources, it compromised the mechanical set up with a high CofG. The rear of the car was also too heavy. Ferrari were running thin wall cast iron blocks and a heavy gearbox (upon rejoining the team It took Barnard some time to restore the lightness back into the Ferrari). Meanwhile active suspension was being raced by other teams and Ferrari were lagging behind. I recall the car was revised towards the end of the year, IIRC without the extreme twin floor. The next car bore some similarities aside from more conservative sidepods. By this time Barnard was directing the technical side (albeit with Nicholls still there as TD) some common sense was prevailing.
I think in principal the concept was sound, the subsequent under sidepods Barnard tried and todays small and undercut sidepods bear this out. I think they just tried to go too extreme too quickly.
I would not be very surprised if that car shape is possibly a starting point for the 2009 car. The wings and clean body are very similar to the mock-ups that I have seen, and with the expectation of a return to the boxy sidepods, they may be similarly shaped to the F92.
Conceptual wrote:The wings and clean body are very similar to the mock-ups that I have seen, and with the expectation of a return to the boxy sidepods, they may be similarly shaped to the F92.
Chris
Can you tell more about mock-ups?
Also, why return to the old-styled sidepods? I thought only flipups and winglets are banned and no additional limits on the shape of sidepod.
