Fair points, one and all...!Monstrobolaxa wrote:You are also forgetting... .
I figure that the flow-field about an F1-car through its operating speed range is a complex mixture of laminar, transitional and turbulent boundary layers, each with specific pros and cons, dependent on the functional design and local pressure-field about each component... ! So purely laminar flow boundary-layers won't necessarily dominate all components, although I appreciate it may dominate up to the peak suction/roof-top/pressure recovery in terms of the aerofoil design for the wings.... 
I think the airflow direction issue you raise could sometimes be crucial - and sometime a red herring!- for eeking out the last few hundredths of performance from the aero package (although as always real-world track and race conditions are the ultimate arbiter)... choosing the 'most appropriate' onset assumption could subtly influence and even bias design decisions and technology development paths in the wind-tunnel and CFD design environment.
When I think of the mixed, compressible flows, with unsteady flows and wakes and deformed tire 'jets' from the steered wheels interacting with the quasi-'steady' flowfields of the bodywork, votical flows & vortex bursting and strongly-coupled wakes of the multielement wings, together with the circulation dumping and generation that go hand-in-hand with a heavily braking and accelerating racing car and then add the angular velocities under-cornering + changes in ride-height due to an undulating track and pitch (roll, yawing) chassis + the random effects of windshear, + heat transfer and variable density in the rad duct and exhaust flows it's impressive that F1 designers keep the problem tractable and steer a practical path, distilling sensible on-design points, then identifying key flow structures and interactions and tweeking and honing these, whilst also keeping the whole vehicle optimisable in such short shrift whilst subject to the constraints of systems integration and regulations! - its no wonder the racecars aerodynamics are sensitive to blatting through the total pressure loss mess of other cars "slipstreams" !!!
- the aforementioned being just my own off-the-top-of-my-head brain-dump of the biggies... though no doubt others in the know could add more... masochists might even add transition mechanisms including bypass & receptivity! At least there's no shock waves to worry about yet - engine & exhaust system excluded !On the other hand w.r.t. question of the necessity for the prescence of natural turbulent b.l.s to benefit from surface drag reduction technologies, fish are relatively low-Re devices (say 20-30cm one anyway!) - not sure if the scales do the trick or it's just surface 'smoothness', but I'd agree that sharks (and their skins) do seem to favourable interact with the energy cascade in turbulent flow energy spectra... what is nature up to, I ask?
Maybe, as Lewis Richardson paraphrased:
"Big whirls have little whirls, that feed off their velocity, and little
whirls have lesser whirls, and so on to viscosity".
with the usually appologies to Lewis Caroll !!
My limited hard-earned design experience in life so far has slowly taught me to recognise, that one rarely needs to fully understand how something works, in order to take advantage of its beneficial effect in design... :
Indeed, if at first you don't succeed, try, try again... though some understanding helps of course, when choosing the right parameter to vary and gain even more performance ! But with complex problems, after resorting to much head-scratching, "suck it and see" seems a perfectly valid approach!Even so, I'd say we all should keep working to improve our knowledge and stay open to new ideas, concepts and ways of thinking - after all it can be a fun (but sad and twisted) way to pass some time ! - 'get a life!', as they say
But coming back to Tim's "What if?" question ....given the large wetted area of the non-downforce surfaces cf. the downforce surfaces on an F-1 car, perhaps a theoretical - albeit small - drag reduction is there to be had, if desired, laminar flow regions and cross-flow induced separation notwithstanding.... commercially available 3M-style apliques may yet find an application somewhere.... then, again
To buy shares or not to buy shares, THAT is the question....
with my appologies to Shakespeare !!!
P.S.: Now that's what I call a big post - and mispost below, bloomin' logins - moderator please delete my guest post below!!!
Sorry, y'all ! 
