Testing - What's the point?

“The team has been testing for the past three days and we have made significant progress” is a quote you will see over and over again this winter, partly because it’s true and partly because press officers are lazy and write the same thing over and over again – but not ours of course!

But what purpose does testing really serve and how can it improve the car? Contrary to popular belief, the car does not get better simply by going round and round the track. There are certain elements that form the basis of most test sessions: setting up the car to suit the driver, ditto for the specific circuit, tyre testing, engine running and most importantly, when a car is brand new, validating the efficiency of the overall aerodynamic package.

Still not got a clue? Well, we took a specific example of a new front wing and asked Red Bull Racing’s Aero Guru, Ben Agathangelou to explain. “There are different schools of thought in F1 and some teams don’t really bother with part of this work,” he claims. “In testing they take it for granted that they have good correlation from their wind-tunnel data. It gives them enough confidence to take a wing straight to a race and run with it in practice. Here at Red Bull Racing, we tend to apply scientific practice. With a new wing, you start with data from the wind tunnel and from Computational Fluid Dynamics (a clever computer trick that does some of the work you can do in a wind tunnel.)

“We will take this part to a test and put mileage on it and assess all its characteristics (at this point Ben begins rambling on about things like “slap angles” and other arcane phrases from the Wizard’s handbook so we will move on.) “A lot of the data that emerges from the test is processed live at the day of testing. We are initially looking for data that confirms the information we had got from the wind tunnel in the case of an aerodynamic component. By having that comparison we can get the level of confidence that the part is doing what we expected it to do.”

Even with this all high-tech stuff, the driver’s comments are often as valuable as the computer data. “He can describe behavioural changes that tie together some of the more abstract methods of development that we have, because while some elements are measurable, others are more subjective,” continues Ben. “It means decisions are partly based on previous experience of what has been beneficial or hasn’t and what the driver feels.

“This data analysis validates the work done at the design stage. Then after discussion with the technical director and others, an informed decision is made as to whether or not you go into full scale production of the front wing, having made a one-off for the test. The aero department will then issue a “good to go” and so the factory kicks in to make enough parts to actually go racing. If things are going well, you will get a sign-off on the first day of testing, from the data analysis you have seen in situ at the track.”

Inevitably, sometimes a component does not live up to expectations when it’s been tested, but in this case the team can react very quickly. Again we take an aero component as an example – a front wing end plate. “If the modification was relatively simple with just a small amount of re-tooling to produce the new part, then, one day after the end of the track test, you would have come up with a revised geometry,” says Ben. “Then a full scale design would see the new part go into production. The analysis – design – release cycle is probably no more than three or four days.

“But the more usual cycle is that if you have tested three front wings with different characteristics, you end up favouring a particular direction. Then you will take the analytical difference between those three wings and set a new mandate for the development process that would generate the next wing and that can run to five or six weeks as it involves going right back to the drawing board, as opposed to modifying something that already exists. But occasionally you do see a result that you can respond to immediately and in that situation it can all be very quick.” And what Mr. Agathangelou has not told you is that the final piece of the jigsaw involves some poor team member having a major row at an Airport check-in, as he explains that the huge piece of bubble-wrapped carbon fibre really must travel as hand luggage!