2017-2020 Aerodynamic Regulations Thread

[Just_a_fan]

Why not simply reduce the span of the front wing to the inner side of front wheel (like 80s and 90s cars) and limit the number of foil to 2 (it has been made for the rear wing so it should be possible to use the same wording for the front wing too).
Front downforce will be reduced and so automatically the loss of downforce when following a car.

This is not necessarily true - fewer elements doesn't mean less downforce. Narrower span may reduce downforce, but teams don't max the front wing now anyway - because they can't necessarily balance it at the rear.

Indeed. Generally, more elements means less total downforce but what downforce that is generated is more consistent as it is less prone to stalling from varying ride heights.

[Just_a_fan]

The endplate, as it were, is mandated as a minimum projected area (looking at the side of the car) between 2 lines a certain distance from the centreline. So if they squeeze those lines together the teams can no longer camber the endplate.

I assume they can still achieve outwash by shaping the inside of the endplate.

On the other hand, it would make the bargeboards much more important in pushing tire wake away. Essentially meaning they're just pushing the outwash further back on the car.

The issue is that the front wing sets up flow structures that are used by the rest of the car. These flow structures are ruined/reduced by running in "dirty" air. By making the front wing a purely downforce device - no clever vortices feeding other pars of the car, the driver is better able to deal with following closely. Sure, the car might lose downforce but it will do it across the whole car not just at the front or rear. A balanced car is driveable, an unbalanced car is not.

The barge baords will still do their thing but they are less affected by running behind a car anyway - they work with less than optimal airflow in the first place.

[godlameroso]

I'm not so sure you're correct here, the plan is to make both wings wider, part of the reason we need such outwash designs is because the wing is smaller than the full width of the car. By making the wing wider you can still get the air where you need it without extreme outwash designs.

[PhillipM]

Yep, you'd go back to upwash designs to loft air over the tyre instead of around it

[djos]

I'd forgotten how good those cars looked! add the current wide car & wheels and Phwoar!

Not a render but the wide front and rear will look something like this... only with the halo... and the OTT bargeboards and sidepod vanes... and a thumb nose... and a wheelbase like a stretch limo...

[OO7]

Those front wing extensions were a really efficient way of channelling the front wing tip and lower tyre vortex system outboard of the car. If I were in charge they would be on the cars again. That said the key rule which made them viable was that the front wing endplates were only 25mm above the reference plane (the bottom of the car as defined by the rules). Mid 1994 that was increase to 50mm - currently it's 75mm.

I agree jjn9128.

I think Ferrari were the first to exploit the end-plate extensions in 1990 with their F641/2. In 1990 the front wing and thus end-plate extensions could be placed on the reference plane (0mm). As you say the following year the minimum height of the front wing ahead of the front wheel centreline was increased to 25mm, but between the front wheel centreline and the rear edge of the front wheel, the FW end-plates could be positioned as low as the reference plane (0mm). In 1993 the minimum height of the front wing (including parts between the front wheel centreline and the rear edge of the front wheel), was increased to 40mm.

[jjn9128]

I think Ferrari were the first to exploit the end-plate extensions in 1990 with their F641/2. In 1990 the front wing and thus end-plate extensions could be placed on the reference plane (0mm). As you say the following year the minimum height of the front wing ahead of the front wheel centreline was increased to 25mm, but between the front wheel centreline and the rear edge of the front wheel, the FW end-plates could be positioned as low as the reference plane (0mm). In 1993 the minimum height of the front wing (including parts between the front wheel centreline and the rear edge of the front wheel), was increased to 40mm.

Aaah yes. It's hard enough staying on top of the detail of the current rule book sometimes, let alone remembering back 25-30 odd years There's the bit in Newey's book where he talks about that vane he exploited from the bottom og the vortex tunnel down to the reference plane - aft of the front axle line - in 1993. The 50mm height must have been from 1995 when the step plane was introduced!?

[ESPImperium]

I'd forgotten how good those cars looked! add the current wide car & wheels and Phwoar! [-o<

Not a render but the wide front and rear will look something like this... only with the halo... and the OTT bargeboards and sidepod vanes... and a thumb nose... and a wheelbase like a stretch limo...
https://cdn-0.motorsport.com/static/img ... m-2009.jpg

This is what ive ben saying for a year or so that a F1 car should look. Id like front wings and noses to look like this, however id unban the Double Diffuser or the beam wing give the teams something back at the rear. However, id also bring back standardised Active Suspension for the front to give the front end of the cars more mechanical grip with the rear being more aero grip.

I think we are very close to the cars being ideal for me. All thats needed in the longe term is to get a replacement for the Halo.

[FrukostScones]

FW discussions of the past:
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=10845&start=60

[OO7]

Aaah yes. It's hard enough staying on top of the detail of the current rule book sometimes, let alone remembering back 25-30 odd years There's the bit in Newey's book where he talks about that vane he exploited from the bottom og the vortex tunnel down to the reference plane - aft of the front axle line - in 1993. The 50mm height must have been from 1995 when the step plane was introduced!?

Yes, that sounds about right. In 1995 the front wing was still at 40mm above the ref plane but the 50mm stepped bottom was introduced.

You said earlier:

The problem is you can't force teams to unlearn what they've learned. In the late 90's CFD was still in relative infancy, so the majority of aerodynamic testing was performed in wind tunnels or on track (testing was unlimited back then). The advantage of CFD is being able to visualize the flow field around the car - which is where teams started playing with vortices to influence the rest of the car. Having that extra detail is when the car's started to sprout the extra aerodynamic features - as the teams really started manipulating and controlling the air around the car for net gains. The regulations between 2016 and 2017 weren't all that different really, conceptually, basically the car's were stretched to make them wider - the longer diffuser and wider rear wing were the main differences (for the design concept).

This for me is one of the problems when it comes to following another car - the flow field is so finely tuned that any disturbance will negatively impact performance. On top of the base effect of the wake - which is a dynamic pressure effect. Cleaner cars are generally easier to follow as spec series show - F2, Indycar, Superformula, Formula E... etc all have lower downforce than F1, but also cleaner aerodynamic surfaces.

That's an interesting point that a few others have mentioned and I may be wrong in my thinking but I do wonder............:
1) In the late 80's and early 90's, CFD and aero development was nowhere near the sophistication that we see today, so the cars back then by comparison weren't particularly optimised. Today's cars due to highly complex air flow management systems, enable downforce producing bodywork to receive very clean, highly energised flow, so in clean air a huge proportion of bodywork actually receives clean air.

With earlier designs (late 80's to early 90's for example), airflow management was far more rudimentary, meaning those individual cars would essentially run in their own dirty wake, even when in so called clean air (no other car ahead for some distance), at least more so than today. Because of this, aerodynamicists of that era would be forced to deal with less than ideal airflow characteristics from the inception of a design, so while being in the slipstream of another car would still hurt aero, the fact that the design is not so critical on receiving clean air, could translate to better relative performance in dirty air.

Perhaps limiting wake management systems would be the best method of forcing teams to adopt designs more suited to working in less than ideal flow conditions?

2) There is also a move to ban front (not sure about rear) brake duct fins for 2019. Do these fins manage the top half of tyre wake in conjunction with the fins and bargeboards higher up on the side-pods, in a move to prevent interaction with the rear wing?

[djos]

Champ cars had pretty sophisticated underbody tunnels iirc. As a result the wings were merely supplementary and the racing was usually excellent.

[designf1]

[media]https://twitter.com/ImanHansra/status/9 ... 4405718016[/media]

[jjn9128]

That's an interesting point that a few others have mentioned and I may be wrong in my thinking but I do wonder............:
1) In the late 80's and early 90's, CFD and aero development was nowhere near the sophistication that we see today, so the cars back then by comparison weren't particularly optimised. Today's cars due to highly complex air flow management systems, enable downforce producing bodywork to receive very clean, highly energised flow, so in clean air a huge proportion of bodywork actually receives clean air.

With earlier designs (late 80's to early 90's for example), airflow management was far more rudimentary, meaning those individual cars would essentially run in their own dirty wake, even when in so called clean air (no other car ahead for some distance), at least more so than today. Because of this, aerodynamicists of that era would be forced to deal with less than ideal airflow characteristics from the inception of a design, so while being in the slipstream of another car would still hurt aero, the fact that the design is not so critical on receiving clean air, could translate to better relative performance in dirty air.

Perhaps limiting wake management systems would be the best method of forcing teams to adopt designs more suited to working in less than ideal flow conditions?

I think that's correct to some extent. They knew that wakes interacted and would try to act accordingly, but actually being able to see the flow means you have so much more control. I'm not sure how you could stop this - other than ban wings anywhere but the front and rear wing boxes, and ban bargeboards or mandate a minimum bodywork thickness rule around the car. Wind tunnel PIV and CFD means it's ingrained in the development process to look at these flows and manipulate them.

As the last indycar race was wet you could see that the front wheel wake directly collides with the front edge of the floor - there's no management. It's possible that's a deliberate move to do as you suggest, to make the car less susceptible to dirty air as it's already in dirty air.

Way back when I joined F1T I showed a concept for how I thought future F1 cars should look. That car was so under developed that when DynamicFlow looked at a drafting study it actually gained underbody downforce when following; because the tyre wakes were going under the floor when in the wake they reduced in size which benefited the underbody (in my defence it was never meant to be anything other than a quick CAD representation of the concept).

[OO7]

Way back when I joined F1T I showed a concept for how I thought future F1 cars should look. That car was so under developed that when DynamicFlow looked at a drafting study it actually gained underbody downforce when following; because the tyre wakes were going under the floor when in the wake they reduced in size which benefited the underbody (in my defence it was never meant to be anything other than a quick CAD representation of the concept).

jj, I have actually been working on my own ideas of how I think a Formula One car should be like. Outwardly it appears simplified, restricting aerodynamic elements (wings and fins) to the front wing, brake ducts, underbody and rear wing. The only other exception are the mirror stalks and pitot structure. The purpose of the design was to promote closer racing, but the more I thought about it, the more I realised that it could also significantly reduce the cost to become competitive. I've been procrastinating with finishing the idea because I wanted to approach the definition of bodywork regulations (only the relevant bits) in a similar fashion to the F1 tech regs. I'm not an engineer so this is a pretty laborious and incredibly boring process. Hopefully I'll put it up before 2021

BTW, do you have a link to your early concept?

[jjn9128]

jj, I have actually been working on my own ideas of how I think a Formula One car should be like. Outwardly it appears simplified, restricting aerodynamic elements (wings and fins) to the front wing, brake ducts, underbody and rear wing. The only other exception are the mirror stalks and pitot structure. The purpose of the design was to promote closer racing, but the more I thought about it, the more I realised that it could also significantly reduce the cost to become competitive. I've been procrastinating with finishing the idea because I wanted to approach the definition of bodywork regulations (only the relevant bits) in a similar fashion to the F1 tech regs. I'm not an engineer so this is a pretty laborious and incredibly boring process. Hopefully I'll put it up before 2021

BTW, do you have a link to your early concept?

It's hard to design an F1 car especially if you want to make something representative. I'm fiddling with something based around a hybrid of the aeroscreen, halo and Indycar screen, with some of the LMP1 rules I like thrown in too. It's made the chassis super wide at the cockpit so I'm toying with the idea of 4WD with the ERS-K moved to the front axle.

The thread is here - just noticed some people complained about all the images going missing I'll try to rectify that... no idea what happened.
viewtopic.php?t=26379