2022 Aerodynamic Regulations Thread

[Sevach]

I'm surprised there isn't some form of rear wheel cover/cleaner in this design.

[djos]

I actually love how crazy the F1 cars can get, it’s part of their so called DNA and what separates them from all other series in my opinion... Let them go crazy... At the end, this is supposed to be the pinnacle of Motorsport


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It's actually only fairly recently (last 15 years) that Aero development has gone mental in F1 - prior to that wings were quite simple and even underbody aero was not as crazy as it is now!

[FrukostScones]

I actually love how crazy the F1 cars can get, it’s part of their so called DNA and what separates them from all other series in my opinion... Let them go crazy... At the end, this is supposed to be the pinnacle of Motorsport


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It's actually only fairly recently (last 15 years) that Aero development has gone mental in F1 - prior to that wings were quite simple and even underbody aero was not as crazy as it is now!

I think in the 70s F1 cars looked very crazy.
It always depends on the freedoms in the regs.
And Brawn and his team want to press F1 regs into a very tight corsett.
Which could lead to all cars looking more or less the same, but it could lead to great racing.
And that is what people apparently want.
Maybe it will hurt the Brand, the DNA, but maybe it will reshape the perception of F1 to the global audience.

[jjn9128]

I think in the 70s F1 cars looked very crazy.
It always depends on the freedoms in the regs.
And Brawn and his team want to press F1 regs into a very tight corsett.
Which could lead to all cars looking more or less the same, but it could lead to great racing.
And that is what people apparently want.
Maybe it will hurt the Brand, the DNA, but maybe it will reshape the perception of F1 to the global audience.

The cars looked crazy in the 70's because designers were working from basic principals of aerodynamics - e.g. the massive airboxes were because they were starting to learn about the benefits of ram pressure. The beyond the grid podcast episode with Gordon Murray is interesting, because while he is an engineer he has an art background, so he was also trying to make solutions which were aesthetically pleasing. Similarly I was at a talk by Willem Toet where he was talking about the Empire Wraith hillclimb car - after he'd designed it he handed it off to a 'designer' to make it more aesthetic which smoothed the surfaces, making the car a little worse on downforce, but much better on drag, increased L/D by 1!

I'm not sure what my point was... this became a bit of a ramble...

[wesley123]

I'd argue that nothing is a ground effect car unless it has a fully sealed floor like the old lotus.

Until then they are similar utilizing some ground effect.

Then your definition of ground effect is wrong. To an aerodynamicist the "ground effect" is simply the increase in normal force (lift/downforce) from proximity to the ground. Current F1 cars are very much in ground effect!

No my definition of ground effect is perfectly fine. It's the definition of a ground effect car.

Modern F1 cars use ground effect but they aren't a ground effect car. I bet the Astra in my drive way produces some minor ground effect, it doesn't make it a ground effect car.

Ground effect isn't some diffuser shape, it is physics.

Ground effect cars are called ground effect cars because they were cars designed around the recently discovered ground effect. They aren't called ground effect cars because of the tunnel shape.

Ground effect is now a well understood phenomenon, thus there is no point in naming 'ground effect', even though cars have been utilizing ground effect ever since the first ground effect cars of the late 70s-early 80s. Sure, 'ground effect car' is a term frequently used to define the cars of that era, however is now frequently -really, really badly- misused to refer to a certain tunnel shape. Current cars are just as much of a ground effect car as they are in the late 70s-early 80s.
It's like how road cars really liked to name how many valves it had at some point in the past, which they don't do so anymore. Does that mean they don't run valves anymore? of course not.

[roon]

jjn, wesley: he's saying the full three-letter-term ground-effect-car for years refered to a car with venturi tunnels and side skirts, in an F1 context. It's not a commentary upon the underlying physics, it's use of a layman's term that references a familiar object.

[mzso]

I actually love how crazy the F1 cars can get, it’s part of their so called DNA and what separates them from all other series in my opinion... Let them go crazy... At the end, this is supposed to be the pinnacle of Motorsport


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It's actually only fairly recently (last 15 years) that Aero development has gone mental in F1 - prior to that wings were quite simple and even underbody aero was not as crazy as it is now!

I'd rather prefer they make effort on optimizing pretty much anything else, rather than convoluted aero that only ruins racing, but is morbidly costly, and is ultimately useless in the real world.

I actually love how crazy the F1 cars can get, it’s part of their so called DNA and what separates them from all other series in my opinion... Let them go crazy... At the end, this is supposed to be the pinnacle of Motorsport

Wasting 100s of millions a year for aero toys is the pinnacle of stupidity and waste, but nothing else.

[SmallSoldier]

I actually love how crazy the F1 cars can get, it’s part of their so called DNA and what separates them from all other series in my opinion... Let them go crazy... At the end, this is supposed to be the pinnacle of Motorsport


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

It's actually only fairly recently (last 15 years) that Aero development has gone mental in F1 - prior to that wings were quite simple and even underbody aero was not as crazy as it is now!

I think in the 70s F1 cars looked very crazy.
It always depends on the freedoms in the regs.
And Brawn and his team want to press F1 regs into a very tight corsett.
Which could lead to all cars looking more or less the same, but it could lead to great racing.
And that is what people apparently want.
Maybe it will hurt the Brand, the DNA, but maybe it will reshape the perception of F1 to the global audience.

The big issue would be if FOM is making decisions based on what the “fans” want... When most probable than not, the fans don’t have a clue of what they really want... If it’s close racing, Indycar would have more viewers than F1 and that’s not the case.

F1 has something definitely special about it that keeps the fans around it, even when the racing may not have been exciting in the last decade... That something special is the so called DNA of the sport, the engineering the design, the different approaches to a similar goal.

Do I want closer racing? Absolutely... Do I want closer racing at the expense of turning into an spec series? Not really.

I guess that at the end, most fans will continue watching regardless, a similar situation happened with the introduction of the Halo and a lot of fans said they weren’t going to watch if introduced... A couple of years later, they are all still around and watching and the Halo isn’t a discussion point anymore.


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[Tommy Cookers]

Ground effect cars are called ground effect cars because they were cars designed around the recently discovered ground effect. They aren't called ground effect cars because of the tunnel shape.

both those sentences are wrong

the term GE was only used with the introduction of skirts to complete a tunnel
to distinguish them from earlier cars (though those we now see had some weak GE)

[SmallSoldier]

I actually love how crazy the F1 cars can get, it’s part of their so called DNA and what separates them from all other series in my opinion... Let them go crazy... At the end, this is supposed to be the pinnacle of Motorsport


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

It's actually only fairly recently (last 15 years) that Aero development has gone mental in F1 - prior to that wings were quite simple and even underbody aero was not as crazy as it is now!

I'd rather prefer they make effort on optimizing pretty much anything else, rather than convoluted aero that only ruins racing, but is morbidly costly, and is ultimately useless in the real world.

I actually love how crazy the F1 cars can get, it’s part of their so called DNA and what separates them from all other series in my opinion... Let them go crazy... At the end, this is supposed to be the pinnacle of Motorsport

Wasting 100s of millions a year for aero toys is the pinnacle of stupidity and waste, but nothing else.

That’s your opinion and I respect it... I guess that we can argue than a soccer team spending tenths of hundreds of millions paying salaries of guys that kick a ball for 90 minutes is a little bit more stupid.

I disagree with your comment, the reason why those 100s of millions of year in aero are spent has made this cars faster than anyone thought they could be... That’s the interesting part... I also find absurd the comments in regards to the road relevance of Motorsport to the “Real World” since nothing coming out of Indycar is having an effect in the “Real World”, nor what comes out of DTM, BTCC, WEC, WRC, Dakar, F2, Formula Ford, Formula Renault, etc, etc, etc... The reality is that Motorsports aren’t there to be test beds of parts to be used in the “Real World”, they are Marketing Exercises for manufacturers to showcase their brands and when possible their engineering and technical capacity.


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[Maplesoup]

Perhaps they should just go down the route of the new hyper car wec rules and specify limits on the amount of downforce and drag. Or maybe say 80% of downforce must come from floor so if they generate more on the floor they can increase the amount over body as well.

Then after the summer break and post season they can increase the limits. This puts a soft limit in how much aero work the teams can do each season I guess.

[Blackout]

The more I look to these tunnels, the more I find them complex and very different from the wing cars and the champ and Indy car tunnels.
Which means this drawing is far from true. https://cdn-1.motorsport.com/images/amp ... ar-sid.jpg
The first part of the tunnel where the pressure is low, looks like a diffuser... the rest looks more like a classic aerofoil/reversed wing...

So near the plank, the top of the tunnel kinda look like this... but near the outer edges of the floor, the curves should look less pronounced...


And they seem to have a concave shape (viewed from the front) If you cut the tunnels/sidepods longitudinally at different positions, you'll obtain different sections...



The violet deflectors (skirts?) are interesting because they're attched to the wheels, not the suspended part of the car...

[jjn9128]

The more I look to these tunnels, the more I find them complex and very different from the wing cars and the champ and Indy car tunnels.

The tunnels are similar to one of the Champ car underbodies which gets posted a lot. The car in all the images released so far is the "India" concept though. Talk is they're up to "Kilo plus" (the 11th iteration ) now - but no images from that so far - which could well be closer to the motorsport picture.

[NL_Fer]

I hope we don’t to much races ruined by a broken floor, after running wide over some curbs into the asphalted runoff area.

[djos]

I hope we don’t to much races ruined by a broken floor, after running wide over some curbs into the asphalted runoff area.

Imo these floor designs will be much stronger than the current ones which are incredibly intricate and easily damaged.