politburo wrote: ↑01 Jun 2021, 12:01
siskue2005 wrote: ↑01 Jun 2021, 11:14
PlatinumZealot wrote: ↑01 Jun 2021, 04:32
Nope.
The wing is legal as long as it passes the FIA tests. Flexing is inevitable so It's about limitng the flexing enough to pass the tests. Read the recent article by Ross Brawn on this. Very good insight.
They pass the test yes
But there is also a rule stating that there shouldn't be any flexing even when the car is moving and they should comply with that all the time. So it is indeed illegal to contravene a rule.
It's like fuel flow measurement, you cannot go above the allowed value when the sensor is not reading it.
It is physically impossible that a mounted component, such as the front or rear wing will not flex. The spirit of the rule is that the wing need not have excessive flexing not that it be completely rigid. Given the forces these F1 cars encounter, that'd be quite expensive to find a light enough material such that it not flex at all and not add unnecessary weight to the car.
Thus, the whole reason why they have tolerances with the test (even the new one) is that even the FIA knows the wing cannot be infinitely rigid so as to not vibrate or rotate backward on the straights due to the high-velocity airflow or be pushed downwards in corners by the car's downforce. It is literally physically impossible in our current universe for there to be no flex, if the airflow does any mechanical work on the wing it will deform. But the question is "by how much will it flex?" not "does it flex at all?."
The issue is that teams were obviously pushing the limit of the rule and the tolerances of the test and going over those restrictions by possibly (maybe) intentionally designing the wing to deform even more than allowed under certain loads. How they might have designed it in such a way I have no informed idea of.
Exactly, and whether or not the wings were actually illegal, completely hinges on the last aspect. Was there something in the design that deliberately led to more deformation than what could be naturally expected at loads exceeding the test conditions. IMO, that has not been shown conclusively. In addition, the rules do not stipulate what would be naturally expected; 'gut-feeling' may dictate 'at most a linear stress-strain relation', but engineers don't design on gut feeling. So regardless of whether 3.8 + 3.9 can be interpreted in such a way that conclusively declares the wings in question illegal (which I think is still contestable), the main issue is an omission in the rules: the rules do not state any unconditional limit for deformation (say, X mm deformation under
any load that is not fatal to the wing integrity), nor does it state any material requirements on basis of which the test conditions can be extrapolated to real-world performance (e.g. 'a deflection that does not exceed linearity under loads higher than imposed during tests'). The new technical directive does not fix that - it just introduces some rather arbitrary new test requirements, and with that, new design criteria, forcing engineers to meet criteria they were never told to design for in the first place.
