Formula 1: The secret aerodynamicist reveals design concepts

I almost feel stupid but I never realized they take the corners THAT fast. Holy shit. Respect. That's insane.

It is and it is not!

It is a formula. The 13 inch wheel size is an example of where being a formula gets in the way of innovation. Plus the non-movable aero rule.

The rules are there to make it a sport with the drivers safe, close racing and the smaller teams not out-spent by the manufacturer teams.

At the moment there is a lot going on for the 2021 season to fix the 'close racing' problem. The aero will be changed to throw the 'wake' up and over cars following the leader. At the moment any car wanting to overtake has to battle against a tide of messy air that has been disrupted by the car in front.

The list of banned things is a list of technology that was not applied. Ten years ago Brawn F1 won with a 'double diffuser', 'spinner' wheel covers and a very different aero package than allowed today. They were bought out to become the Mercedes team.

The Williams team brought along innovations that were tantamount to magic in the 1980's and 1990's. Active suspension appeared and was banned. On the same car there was traction control - now banned. We don't hear the term 'driver aids' any more but things taken for granted today such as a semi-automatic flappy paddle gearbox were not introduced easily to the sport.

The engine is built to spec in F1. It has to have a certain amount of cylinders, the fuel rate is restricted as is the total fuel load. You would not be able to put a car together that didn't bother with the engine bit and had batteries to get through 200 miles of racing.

The mystique surrounding F1 engineering is cool but sometimes it is best to not meet your heroes.

If you go to a car meet such as at Goodwood you can see some fairly recent F1 cars and what is under the hood. Some of the engineering is quite shockingly primitive. There are reasons for this, for instance, if only having to get through a race and taking the car apart every weekend then bearings can be more basic than what you might find on a family mass market car. It is all a lot more bicycle workshop than NASA when you see these cars close up. This is not to deride what goes on, but, if engineering is bespoke, doesn't have to have customers fix it and only needs to last two hours of race distance then it has different production values.

I think that Formula E on 'proper circuits' rather than city streets would be the apex of technology in sport. I am not alone in this, Formula E has more sponsors and the Formula 1 people that have jumped ship to it are not 'has beens'. F1 really is in danger of getting stuck in the slow lane with an elderly audience who can remember when F1 was shown 'free to air'.

I really miss the Stig segments in the (now) old top gear with clarkson, may and hammond. Really unfortunate what happened to that show - it kept me going through some ugly periods in life.

Wow, how can you enforce a limit on simulation time?

Can't they use a secret cloud somewhere?

Are they limited to specific software? I wonder if they could "cheat" using the new neural network NS solvers that came out recently.

So it turns out Mercedes were sand bagging in testing, as usual. Beat Ferrari by 7 tenths of a second! Anyways, that's the same gap as last year's race, interestingly it turned out Ferrari had a car cappable to win the championship.

https://www.formula1.com/en/results.html/2018/races/979/aust... - 2018 Aus GP Quali result

https://www.formula1.com/en/results.html/2019/races/1000/aus... - 2019 Aus GP Quali result

I’ve never driven a single-seater, but to some degree it’s intuition, and to another it’s just getting to know the limits through practice. I think Gasly spinning in FP2 while trying to find the limit is an example of that. You’ll be familiar with the twitching feeling when traction starts to give.

I don’t know if they have any on-board telemetry to measure this.

Yes it's a big advantage specially on fast corners (where you don't lift or hit the brakes to take it). You can maintain or increase your speed if you have more downforce than your competitor.

There's an old saying for drivers (and it's usually trotted out when your favorite driver has had an off) that goes "In order to know where the limit is, one must occasionally cross it."

Usually drivers are going to test that limit in an area with less risk, for example a corner with lots of paved runoff. But small factors such as the ambient wind changing direction, or the sun coming out or going behind a cloud, can affect grip enough that the limit changes enough to catch a driver out. In these cases there's usually warning, that the car very slightly stops responding as exactly to your inputs as it was the lap before.

However the most common scenario for a single car shunt is when the driver is testing the track limits; for example riding 3 inches of his tire over the kerb instead of 2, or using up the edge of the track to where the tire is now on a painted line rather than bare asphalt. In these cases there is often no warning, the car just steps out.

Try pressing your hand against a flat surface and then slowly applying enough force in the way parallel to the wall so the hand starts to slide. After some practice you will feel the point of losing traction. The concept is the same with tyres. F1 as of 2018 actually doesn't allow drivers to push 100% all the time, otherwise the tyres will overheat and the strategy is screwed.

Plus, 4 tyres may have different traction depending on car balance (braking, accelerating or cornering), downforce (nearly zero at 50km/h but at 300km/h F1 car is on rails, and different for the front and the rear), track specifics (for example, most clock-wise tracks put a lot of pressure on the front left tyre) and many little other things. It's really complicated.

> Is there some sort of feedback when you're really close?

If you watch the practice for the race coming up shortly in Australia, you'll see one corner in particular where pretty much everyone including the fastest guys slid off the track. So a lot of it's a feel thing, but you've also got engineering data telling you all the measurable stuff about how the car is performing, which you can then feed into a computer simulator which knows the exact (one hopes) layout of the race track.

One of the younger guys who qualified surprisingly well supposedly spent hundreds of hours on a PC simulator before this latest race.

> is this true about the increasing downforce and if so, why is that so?

The regulations have changed this year so the teams can't use the same aerodynamic designs they had last year. The idea of the new aero regulations is that they will promote overtaking, but it also means the cars will lose downforce:

https://www.formula1.com/en/latest/article.aero-changes-to-p...

https://www.motorsportweek.com/news/id/20555

They'll regain some (and maybe even all) of the lost downforce through new aero approaches that are allowed under the new regulations. The designs will be developed and refined as the season progresses.

I’m by no means an expert—or even an expert amateur—but I’ll try until someone with more knowledge comes in!

All of the technical regulations are set in advance of the season (this year’s is https://www.fia.com/file/78015/download/26184). The teams are only allowed to test their cars during a fixed number of “test days”, so they do a _ton_ of simulation pretty much all the time (https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/04/formula-1-technology/).

The chassis (the tub that the driver & engine sit in) doesn’t change much over a season, so the time will be occupied by the team finding ways to move and re-shape things like front and rear wings, so as to increase downforce.

Downforce is king because it allows you to make sharper turns at higher speed without understeeting (where the front refuses to turn) or oversteering (where the back refuses to stop turning). And the technical regulations are really finicky about many areas of the car. And in many ways, the three “free practice” sessions before qualifying are as much about in-season development as they are about getting used to the track.

Yes, as drivers get time in the real car, they begin to understand where they can push. But also the engineers are seeing how the car is responding during real-world conditions, to feed that into the simulation.

My understanding is that the wash from old designs would reduce downforce for cars that follow, which in turn would slow them down and make it harder to overtake. This made for less interesting racing.

The new regulations are intended to promote overtaking. Teams of course are trying to maximize downforce within the new regulations.

There isn't that much teams can do on the underside of the car. A lot of effort goes into preventing air from "leaking" under the car in the first place.

While you don't see the underside of the car much (for obvious reasons), the occasional roll-over crash (or crane lift after a 'regular' crash) gives us a glimpse from time to time. Check out Nico Hulkenberg's crash at Abu Dhabi pay year for a good example.

>What about the underside of the vehicle?

A very astute question. Yes, as much effort goes into the design of the underside as does the shiny side.

The most recent article I found via a quick G search is from 2013. For sure the rules have changed since then, but it's still a fair benchmark to illustrate the complexity of overall design with regards to the aero.

"https://www.roadandtrack.com/motorsports/news/a18417/the-sec...

Chain Bear F1 on YouTube has great video from an incident last season which helps explain the floor setup.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUC2gDPiHEc

Floors in F1 have been flat for a while with the exception of the FIA mandated plank down the middle.

The rear diffuser is sometimes blocked from cameras when the car is parked. For example 2009 with the double diffuser.

It used to generate a big fraction of the downforce, so much that drivers pressed the accelerator when going into corners.

http://formula1-dictionary.net/ground_effect.html

Right now this ground effect has been banned and it is mostly flat, except for some things in the tail.