The plank was introduced in 1994 to provide a minimum ride height for cars after the events of Imola that year. This was the end of the flat floor and the birth of the the complicated stepped floor.
18 years on does F1 still need this precaution?
Flat floors were less complex than the stepped floor, probably cheaper on the pocket and a fresh avenue of development for the engineers.
In the increasingly stagnant formula at the moment, shouldn't certain incentives be made to keep F1 fresh? I have not seen much on the 2014 regulations other than engine regulations but know that the proposed reintroduction of the ground effects have been spat put.
If you got rid of the stepped floor you'd have to find another way to control ride heights. Why? For the same reasons we have the plank to control ride heights now.
You could use FIA-logged ride height sensors in the underside of the car to do that but it's a more complicated system and therefore doesn't really bring anything useful to the sport. Active suspension was developed for the flat floor inorder to optimise ride height. But active is banned and unlikely to be allowed, not least, for cost reasons.
The teams have decided they don't want to go down the "floor+tunnels" route for a number of reasons - but most probably because of the huge cost involved in developing a whole new aero system.
The flat floor also suffers in wet conditions much more than the stepped floor because the whole floor can aquaplane - a real issue if you have rain midway through a race that starts dry. This is a real safety issue.
I'd love to see tunnels and active suspension back in the sport but it's just not going to happen because it will be hugely expensive to implement.
If you are more fortunate than others, build a larger table not a taller fence.
Is active suspension really so expensive to implement nowadays? I can't imagine that it would be really. All sorts of machines use it outside of F1, from gigantic transporter beds to saloon cars to trains.
I'll agree on the aero front, just can't see why the suspension would cost so much!
IMO its not costs which really stop the regulations changing, its the established order afraid of where they could end up afterwards.
look at 2009 both Mclaren and Ferrari were well off their 2008 pace, and a little team know has Red Bull has run away with 2 championships since.
"I continuously go further and further learning about my own limitations, my body limitations, psychological limitations. It's a way of life for me." - Ayrton Senna
Well, if you're starting from scratch, then yes, active suspension would be expensive. If it cost, say £5million to develop then the small teams are not going to be able to use it. Which means they'd end up way off the pace and we'd be back to the bad old days of the back of the field being in a different series in terms of performance.
The problem, as with all technology that F1 borrows from elsewhere, is that it has to be re-engineered to make it light, small and reliable in the face of some fairly harsh conditions. The heat and vibration that many of the components in F1 cars are subjected to is much greater than a road car would ever see. Lexus might be happy for a suspension component to weigh 10kg per corner because, in the context of a 1700kg car that's not too bad. In the context of a 640kg car it's a nightmare.
Making something a quarter of the weight, a quarter of the size, use much less energy and be liable in face of high frequency, high g with high temps thrown in is not trivial. To do so in a short time period adds to that difficulty and thus to the expense.
If you are more fortunate than others, build a larger table not a taller fence.
Its all down to cost as many have said above, as the floor would provide much more performance gain and give birth to a new arms race.
The plank is a relitivly cheap part of the car, it is arround €400 per car. The rest of the floor costs arround 100 times more, and is the most stable part of the rules, and is almost the only part of the rules that hasnt changed much in almost 2 decades now.
However, if i was a nasty person in the FIA, id give the plant rule a rr-visit just before the season starts, and make the allowable thickness after the race 50% less than what it currently is. It would mean downforce at the diffuser would be lost as the teams would run their cars a milimeter or two hihgher just in case. However one former F1 tech director said once that if the FIA were to be totally nasty, they should extend it on every car to 250mm behind the rear wheel centre line just to reduce the effect the diffusers have, and would also bring cars into more of a regulated wheelbase as well.
The plank is a great and good thing in F1, its cheap and very effective. Should the plank be reviewed, i belive so, as it would bring less downrorce to the cars, and with our regulators hat on, trying to reduce downforce. With our designers hat on, its a known roadblock, but a good road block as it keeps cost down to spend good money in other better areas.
As said above, i feel the time is right to give something back to the sport in the form of a standardised and SECU monotored Active Ride again. However only allow the drivers to change it 5 times each race, but id twin this with a review and updating of the plank rule, if it takes away downforce, and makes the cars difficult to drive all the better. The only way id allow Active Ride back again is if the teams aggreed to work with a smaller team and make it that at all cars must run it like DRS for all cars to be able to use it.
Personally the plank works, and it works well. It needs a freshen up, just to help reduce downforce and also make the cars looser at the rear.
ESPImperium wrote:It needs a freshen up, just to help reduce downforce and also make the cars looser at the rear.
The teams would design the cars not to be loose at the back end where possible. Drifting looks great for the fans (well, some of them, anyway) but it's slow and it kills tyres. The result would just be worse lap times and cars that might be no faster than GP2 cars around a given track.
If you are more fortunate than others, build a larger table not a taller fence.
Just_a_fan wrote:If you got rid of the stepped floor you'd have to find another way to control ride heights. Why? For the same reasons we have the plank to control ride heights now.
hardingfv32 wrote:Reduces the car's performance. The track spectator safety cannot handle higher performance.
Brian
Tracks are already safe
Contention for removing the plank is to simplify the design of the car floor.
If reduction of the downforce / performance of the car is the criteria then it should not be at cost. This is the way that the FIA have chosen by putting restrictions on the design process which leads to a very narrow formula with only way of gaining performance is a sigle avenue.
The other way of capping performance is to add sfeguards as per requirements such as the restrictor plates in NASCAR and hanford wing in CART. FIA can limit performance of the cars by simply specifying the maximum angle of attack for the rear wing, rather than going for complex definations for the floor.
Flat floors are a better perfomance equator, less complex than a stepped floor, Ground effect cars are even better.
Just_a_fan wrote:If you got rid of the stepped floor you'd have to find another way to control ride heights. Why? For the same reasons we have the plank to control ride heights now.
What is the point of having ride height control?
There are two reasons:
1. Ride height control is needed to maximise the performance of the underfloor aero. It's ride height control that the teams want/need in order to maximise performance
2. Ride height control is used by the FIA to limit the performance of the underfloor aero. It's a passive safety feature, in effect. One of the problems with the old flat bottom cars was that they would go from making huge downforce to bugger all very quickly in certain conditions and if the speeds were high at that point they became missiles and headed straight for the scene of the accident. And the accidents would then be huge.
If you are more fortunate than others, build a larger table not a taller fence.
Just_a_fan wrote:If you got rid of the stepped floor you'd have to find another way to control ride heights. Why? For the same reasons we have the plank to control ride heights now.
What is the point of having ride height control?
There are two reasons:
1. Ride height control is needed to maximise the performance of the underfloor aero. It's ride height control that the teams want/need in order to maximise performance
2. Ride height control is used by the FIA to limit the performance of the underfloor aero. It's a passive safety feature, in effect. One of the problems with the old flat bottom cars was that they would go from making huge downforce to bugger all very quickly in certain conditions and if the speeds were high at that point they became missiles and headed straight for the scene of the accident. And the accidents would then be huge.
Running into the ground is going to be bad for the driver and team. Have been watching races from the flat floor days, never seen a driver going out of a race because of bottoming out.
With a flat floor the airflow under the car will be blocked if the car bottoms out, and with that the car will temporarily lose downforce. With the stepped floor, some airflow will be allowed under the car even when the plank hits the track, which it can't do too often or it will wear out.
I don't think an active or reactive suspension system would be impossible due to cost. In the past these have used regular MOOG valves for control which probably cost a few thousand euro per corner which isn't that much by F1 standards. They would also need a hydraulic pump that is a bit larger than what they use today, but in principle it should be possible to use the current hydraulic system as the powersource. Then actuators for each wheel need to be made, and a control system. The latter could perhaps be a standard unit like the SECU. It would probably cost a bit to introduce like all regulation changes, but given that most of the adjustment at the track probably could be carried out by software tweaking alone, and that F1 cars are already equipped with hydraulic systems it would probabably quite cheap to operate in the long run.
WilliamsF1 wrote:Running into the ground is going to be bad for the driver and team. Have been watching races from the flat floor days, never seen a driver going out of a race because of bottoming out.
Ayrton Senna? That's the whole point of the regulation, isn't it?
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I think simply the boost in speed an active suspension system could provide would scare the regulators. There is also the "not really the driver driving" argument, similar to the one that saw traction control removed.
"Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words." - Chuang Tzu
horse wrote:
I think simply the boost in speed an active suspension system could provide would scare the regulators. There is also the "not really the driver driving" argument, similar to the one that saw traction control removed.
That is like saying calculators should be banned in examination halls.
