A place to discuss the characteristics of the cars in Formula One, both current as well as historical. Laptimes, driver worshipping and team chatter do not belong here.
Something new in terms of bodywork composition, look at the junctions between chassis, vanity panel, nose cone, upper suspension front arm and push-rod area...
Something new in terms of bodywork composition, look at the junctions between chassis, vanity panel, nose cone, upper suspension front arm and push-rod area... https://postimages.org/
I think that enables them to move the upper arms further back, f.e. Circuit specific, or if they want to keep development options open. Big changes this year.
Those are not vortices. I see everyone saying that, but they are not. At least I have never seen any qualified person say that before.
That's just the water kick-up from the contract patch among a chaos of things happening. It is affected by a mish-mash of the vortices and outwash and the tyre wake itself, but the vorticity is not strong enough to imprint itself cleanly on those heavy water droplets from the tyre. So yes, the vortex is inside there somewhere, but that spray is not cleanly representing the vortex there.
You will see those waves of water spray on pretty much any car. In F1 yeah there is some vortex interaction involved int he spray, but liquid water is very heavy! Trust me when you see the vortices in the videos you will know.. You won't see it in heavy water droplets coming from the tyre though. You will see the vortices easier with smoke or water vapour.
Rear wing vortex pair in wake highlighted by blown Ferrari engine in Felipe Nasr’s Sauber C35, source: https://media.giphy.com/media/3o6EhRHS3 ... /giphy.gif
There is a open 'tunnel' on the far outside edge of the floor entrance behind the outer most blade that leads down to the waves on the outer edge of the floor
Last edited by shady on 18 Feb 2022, 20:02, edited 1 time in total.
The new cars look a lot better than expected, especially compared to the pos showcar which was displayed by FOM last year. The W13 is no exception.
With that said, my only gripe is they look more like indycars now rather than F1 cars, especially at the front.
The only thing I don't like about the new cars is when stuff is made purely for looks, like the Chevron front wings. Other than that I'm positively surprised with the looks of the new cars. No stepped noses like 2012 or penis noses like 2014 or stuff like that.
So many comments on here & social media about which teams car concept is good, how the Merc is too long for ground effect to work, is that wing/sidepod/hole/floor legal.
It's utter madness to me, unless you have 3D aerodynamic vison and can literally see the airflow it's tosh! The same as "that looks like it won't work to me", how do you know, have you CFD modelled it!
Do people also think the teams haven't poured over the rules looking for loopholes and the testing the results? The basic rules are widely available online with a quick Google, if you want to know about min/max wheelbase, or how the bounding boxes make up much of the bodywork rules this year it's easy to find out.
Whether something unusual is in the rules, that will be up to the FIA and stewards to decide come Bahrain...
As to vortexes, again unless you can CFD model the Merc, or get the car in the wind tunnel who knows. This is a venturi/ground effect formula now, if you can seal the edge of the floor with a vortex then you'll have less pressure differential/leakage in that area and more low drag downforce than your competitors.
What we can see is that the latest Merc looks to have a level of detail in the sidepods, floor and several other aerodynamic surfaces that is missing from all other cars.
This is a little surprising, as wind tunnel/CFD time and budget last year was fixed (assuming Merc hadn't started 2 or 3 years back, like they did for the 2014 rules change). However, the Williams looks pretty detailed too, but we've not seen it close up, McLaren haven't shown a real car, Red Bull are hiding their car from the press... roll on testing and Bahrain I say...
This is a little surprising, as wind tunnel/CFD time and budget last year was fixed (assuming Merc hadn't started 2 or 3 years back, like they did for the 2014 rules change). However, the Williams looks pretty detailed too, but we've not seen it close up, McLaren haven't shown a real car, Red Bull are hiding their car from the press... roll on testing and Bahrain I say...
I don’t think it’s surprising, as you can’t unlearn what you know.
The rules reward efficiency, so if Merc (and RBR) have spent the last decade refining their CFD and wind tunnel correlations to the real world, they can get closer with less effort. NASCAR is essentially a spec series at this point and certain teams / drivers still dominate.
But I agree with everything else. No one really knows and we won’t know what is good or not, and will still struggle to understand as to why, when the race season starts.
The part about PU positioning (Merc vs Ferrari) is very interesting. Merc has pushed PU as backward as possible, while Ferrari has pushed PU as forward as possible. There were rumors that with the understeer-y nature of new cars, RedBull was trying to put PU forward and immediately behind the cockpit. We haven't seen RedBull yet, but Ferrari clearly has done this.
It seems that in terms of weight distribution and Center of Gravity, this PU placement has helped Ferrari, but Merc on the other hand has much slimmer sidepods thanks to pushing PU backward and using more centerline cooling.
I wonder which solution will be more effective with the new cars?!!
Last edited by timoth on 18 Feb 2022, 20:09, edited 4 times in total.
