McLaren MP4-26 Mercedes

[megz]

What if the sidepods are just here to mess with the other teams heads and have them run around in the wrong direction and divert resources from where they should be. Kind of like the F-Duct... only that kind of worked.

[astracrazy]

i had a thought earlier. If this works, could we see this as the future?

Not just performance but also safety, because surely the view from the mirrors would be much better

[timbo]

i had a thought earlier. If this works, could we see this as the future?

If this proves successful, we would definitely see other teams adopting this or their take on this.
Funny that I draw cars like that about 10-15 years ago=)

What is certain is that designers took much more attention to the sidepods and packaging. Which is natural – for a few years, everyone seemed to converge on a common layout and now it's time for a change.

[godlameroso]

Easiest way for Mclaren, or any other team to get good sand bag data is to fill er up, guaranteed to put you 4 seconds off the pace, at least. Not to mention you can run at the limit so you can see the difference in your actions. Just fill the car up and keep doing runs till you get to a quarter tank. I think if they ran on fumes they could have easily broken into the 1:11's

[segedunum]

I don't think it is particularly low drag. They have the raised parts of the sidepod almost in line with the rear tyres and the shallow part of the sidepod should give some fairly unrestricted airflow, but whenever you create leading edges and shape changes on your car you're always going to get some drag and conflicting airflow. I just don't think you can pretend that your sidepods are lower by chopping part of them out. It's the easy way out. They're are also longer then the 25 last year, which is a bit of a shock.

[Predator]

This is a low drag solution; ugly as it is. Talking about ugly, this thing is uglier than predator, it has the side jaws and everything. I think i will call it that from now on.
Sorry about that,the post just feels incomplete without acknowledging the looks.

I resent that!

The side-pods are definitely a compromise, but isn't everything in F1? I can't wait to find out what else they have on the car, no doubt it will evolve by the time we get to Bahrain. My thinking re: the exhaust, they will go similar to RB and not Renault. Renault's solution isn't proven yet, so why would they go that route? We shall see...

[ringo]

oh, appologies.



What i noticed with the car is that the beam wing is fused to the crash structure.
Most teams now have them separate, to increase the effective span of the beam wing.

Instead of using a banana crash structure, Mclaren went for the straight version which has a lot of space underneath.

That free space under the structure seems like it will be occupied by something.

[dbwmhn]

[Tim.Wright]

I believe there was a change to the rules regarding the rear crash structure. Might want to check what the other teams are doing but I believe the FIA are trying to reduce the amount of "scultping" of the rear crash structure

Tim

[Tim.Wright]

[img]http://img145.imageshack.us/img145/5662 ... ow.jpg[img]

If only CFD was that simple.

Where did that picture come from?

Tim

[timbo]

That free space under the structure seems like it will be occupied by something.

Something like exhausts?

[dbwmhn]

sport1.de - german page.

[NoDivergence]

Also wondering if the snowplough is kept in order to redirect flow over the sidepods. It might be hard for other teams to copy if the nose/suspension setup is critical for the idea to work. All I can hope now is that the car is somewhat on the pace but is very easy on the tires. Honestly, that's what I think they should be concentrating on. The tires are the limiting factor of performance this year. We might see some DNF's this year solely due to tire disintegration or wear

[Afterburner]

I just hope some of this extreme solutions don't put them off due to reliability reasons. Cooling related, they sould test this solutions to the maximum to get a clue when they arrive to some hot tracks.

[Richard]

All the talk of moving weight out and up is wrong. They have simply taken a bite out of the tradiditional side pod arrangment. The shape of the inlet exaggerates the shape.

The top of the sidepod looks to be a similar height, and the width is the same. Most teams go to the max allowed for sidepod height and width, so they have the same outer dimension as McL. The difference is that McL have gouged out some space beside the survival cell.

Put it another way. If the teams all have similar sized raditors in those pods, surely the tems with extravagent undercut sidepods have a problem because they must have moved the radiator mass up to create the undercut?