motorloon1993 wrote:The cars of the pre-2009 era were designed with low noses and although I understand the wings and various other aero restrictions that effect the whole design of the car were completely different, I am curious as to why teams designed the noses as high as possible around the 2010-2013 era as apposed to the low noses of pre-2009?
If the teams had to design under the 2008 regulations now would the cars have high noses or low?
The biggest reason is a shift in peak aero balance.
Like Ciro so well-wordely told, "high" noses or rather the concept behind it has existed long before 2009. Raising the nose ultimately makes the diffuser work better, creating more rear downforce.
The main thing you need to understand is that your front and rear aero needs to be roughly in balance, else your car will excessively either oversteer or understeer. A high nose is good to gain rear downforce, but is useless when you can't get the front create equal levels of downforce.
Throughout the 90's and 2000's, regulation changed several times, shifting aero balance more to the back one time, an other time back more to the front, etc.
That's what we saw to develop after 2004; in 2005 several rule changes reduced diffuser volume, brought the rear wing forward and raised the front wing. While the former 2 changes do reduce rear downforce, the latter rule change dramatically reduced front downforce. So team were in shortage of front downforce. So they lowered the noses again (but not too low in order to have the middle section of the FW produce optimal downforce) to benefit of the lower CoG.
In 2009, diffuser again got reduced in size while the front wing got lowered to the ground while keeping around the same or even slightly more downforce producing surface. Aero balance shifted back to the front. Newey was the first to notice that the nose needed to be extremely high in order to get max air voiume underneath the nose. All others followed, and ultimately we got all teams pushing and flattening their noses up to the max height.
