Formula 1 2020: The secret aerodynamicist – are capes the key?
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- Accessible aerodynamics (it's on the road in front of you, not up in the air)
- Technological developments (e.g. this year, one of the teams has a steering wheel they pull toward/push away themselves to change the geometry of the front wheels)
- Watching high-performing athletes demonstrating the ability to operate a machine at speeds over 200mph and still having the capacity to understand the strategic situations unfolding around them, even gathering information from the crowd in the grandstands, or the tv screens that flash past them as they navigate the track
- Seeing an inter-disciplinary team design and operate a machine that fuses aerodynamics, mechanics and hybrid propulsion systems, driven by a human operator, monitored in realtime by a team of engineers distributed around the world
- On-the-fly risk/reward decision making in race strategy from observing current data whilst incorporating gut feeling based on past experience to great effect
The Mercedes dual axis steering:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mX0Laaj9_RA
Allowed this year, but already banned from next year.
Plus everyone involved is such a drama merchant (or crook!) that the season often plays out like a soap opera.
There are much more fun motorsports to watch, but rarely do they come so packaged with intriguing technical drama.
I wasn't cheeky enough to mention the two DNF's (ran out of fuel) they had had the previous season, and how as a former Research Assistant / Experimental officer at a world leading hydro dynamics RnD org - I would have at least made sure the second one did not happen
I worked on Campus at Cranfield Uni (close to RB and Maclarren) At a tier 1 research organisation in hydrodynamics, there was one US lab that was working at our level.
I worked on research projects and managing out risk like this is a big aspect of the work. If the materials for a single run of an experiment cost as much as for a small flat you take great care not to fuckup or at least not to make the same mistake twice
I also did a niche specialised Vocational Course in thermofields basically to support military /aerospace.
He commented that some of the runs cost 20k (about 10x my salary at the time) in chemicals to fill the tank (this was a full size 1:1 experiment) so using a brand new set every time made sense - and also the environmental cost of disposing of the several tons of chemicals was not trivial either.
If the double-headers do well this year, I can see that being how they manage that many next year.
The 10% of what the driver adds to the mix is what makes Hamilton champion instead of Bottas.
That's not always the case. Eddie Irvine spent 4 years as n.2 to Schumacher pretty happily, only changing teams because Jordan offered more money. He was pretty spectacular on good days but nowhere as good as The Michael.
I think you mean Jaguar. He moved from Jordan to Ferrari.
You can put whatever driver you name in a Mercedes from 2014 until today, and he will end at least in second place in the championship. I cannot imagine a single driver, not even Maldonado, that would end worst than 2nd except due to incredible bad luck with the car reliability.
Verstappen is an incredible good driver that probably deserves to win multi-championships. But as it is now, Bottas is closer to that achievement than him.
"Kimi!!! How did you feel the car was today?!"
"Car was good." walks off
> Baseball is ninety percent mental and the other half is physical.
Last year there was a hobbyist race on my local track and the person who won it was a guy who mainly practices at home on his computer. I imagine a gokart simulation is close enough to the real deal that training on it actually can help a lot. You can get much more fine-grained feedback on how well you're taking certain corners etc. One thing that trips me up is understanding the kart - my local ones have somewhat poor acceleration, so it seems it's not actually best to take the corners as sharp as possible and try to accelerate out of the corner, but instead try to maintain as much speed as possible going into the corner, even if you end up on a bad line. This would be easy to test in a simulation, but I just have to go by gut feeling.
The 2nd rule we've learned is : no skidding, never. That's really hard to do. But look at top pilots, they don't skid.
The 3d rule is : you do your best time on every single lap (super good pilots do almost the same time on most of their laps, within 0.3 sec range; it's hard to believe they do it, but they do !).
4th rule : figure out the best trajectory. According to my kid's teacher it's a question of 10 centimeters here or there (good luck figuring that out !).
Strangely, passing a car is the last thing you learn. But in retrospect,it's normal : most of the time you run after the one in front of you. The opportunities to pass another pilot are rare (most of the time you're much faster so the blue flags forces them to let you pass).
As a dad, I'd say : find a good teacher, it makes a big difference.
Because that's F1. There's not a balance driver/car. There are good cars, average cars and poor cars, almost all of them driven by good drivers. In karting (and many formula cathegories) the reverse scenario is true: there are good drivers, average drivers and bad drivers, all driving similar karts.
* Hamilton/Verstappen in a Williams?
* Antonio Giovinazzi in a Mercedes?
Don't forget the classic "to finish first, you first have to finish"...a drivers skill is not just better reaction time or better peripheral vision, it's also mental calm, not making stupid mistakes on lap 69 of 70, situational awareness etc.
Indoor kart racing is, in my country, affordable to, say 50% of population (you may have to make some choices though). Count +/-120€ per month (2 training session + 1 race). Swimming lessons are 30€ per month I'd say.
Outdoor karting is really expensive and is for the 1% (which I'm not part of :-)). Count 1000€ per race, gasp !
F1 is well, for ultra rich :-) Plan robbing 1 bank, or 10 (binary joke intended).
But according to many, indoor karts makes you a great pilot because the machine doesn't compensate for your failures.
So I think that 10% is a lot of skill and dedication, but also a sort of numbing to that fear.
I've occasionally gone into a corner way faster than I should with my abilities, frightened myself, but the car has stuck to the track. It made the corner. I couldn't do this intentionally, even knowing that I can throw it into the corner x mph faster than I'm comfortable with and I will come out the other end pointing in the right direction, I still can't do it.
Then you realise that if I gave my car to a racing driver, he would drive it like that in every corner of every lap. Because he has to, because if he doesn't he's giving away time.
It blows my mind.
My limit for how fast I can drive a car is so much lower than even an average road cars physical limits.
A lot of the issues with F1 stem from the fact that it’s actually two seperate competitions. If you let constructors build the fastest car that they safely can, then two bad things happen. Firstly, the fastest car will win. Secondly, the teams with less money can’t compete. The F1 brand is about having the most technologically advanced cars, but really it has to constantly hold the best teams back in order to keep things competitive. That’s why the regulations are so hopelessly complex (this years new regulations have to cover up the holes in last years poor regulating...), and it’s why anything that is truly innovative is nearly always instantly banned.
F1 is constantly swinging between a state of dominant constructors (Mercedes the past 6 years), and being more like a spec series (the new 2021 regs). If F1 wanted to actually live up to its brand, it would let the constructors build mostly whatever they wanted to. But if it did that, it would also have to divvy up the prize money more fairly to keep the lesser teams from going under, which it’s never going to do because of how political it all is.
Somebody will optimize for the engine, somebody for the aerodynamics, somebody for the suspensions, somebody for the tires (buy them from whoever they want) etc. I guess very few will spend much on the driver.
At the beginning they'll be slower than the current cars (which are only marginally faster than the v10s of 2004) but year after year they'll improve new areas of the design and get fast again. I expect a lot of technical drama and very different solutions. It's going to be back to the 70x and 80s with today's technology and processes.
Budget caps seems like a cop-out though, as eventually the budgetary rules inherit all the complexity in the current technical rules.
I think some kind of FRAND forced tech licensing / transfer + shared manufacturing would be an interesting solution. Whereby a hyper-optimized solution by a leading team can be licenses (or is outright open sourced) for the next season. And similarly, where all builders have access to a neutral manufacturing facility (a la TSMC).
And people who like to think about possible unfairness could argue that manufacturers build about 100 engines per season, test them, then pick the ones to keep, the ones to give to customers and the ones that turned out not to be good enough for racing. It's hard to get the very best engine if you are only a customer and you're really competing against the manufacturer and not only an appearance.
The budget cap is just a little over the current Haas budget. Personally I don’t find the prospect of watching a race with 10 Haas level teams in it to be a particularly compelling idea. I’m also not that excited about the idea of constructor innovation being limited to what you can achieve with a Haas budget.
The budget cap is probably the bluntest tool available for addressing constructor performance balancing. For example, the current chassis rules make aero incredibly complex to design (which is expensive), and makes close racing impossible (because of all the dirty air). They would have been better off simplifying those rules (and maybe bringing back ground effect). Look at how well Racing Point performed last weekend, they nearly got a podium. The only significant change they made was copying the Mercedes 2019 aero kit.
Sealed ground effect will probably not return to F1, not for performance reasons but safety. Introducing the seal greatly increases downforce but once it is broken, the dropoff is incredible. Maintaining that would be nearly impossible with surface imperfections and debris on the track.
Regarding ground effect, the new 2021 regs have already brought it back. They’ve simplified the wing designs, and moved a lot of the downforce to ground effect. It’s not the same level of ground effect that F1 had in the 70s/80s, it’s more like the current IndyCar ground effect design. But the result from a following car perspective is the same. Moving the downforce from wake generating bodywork to under the chassis. However the overall effect is less downforce and therefore slower cars on circuit.
My mistake when you mentioned ground effect, I thought you meant sealed (skirts and fans). The ground effect you mean is already a thing in present F1 thanks to diffusers. The new rules have just made the diffuser bigger and simplified the front and rear wings.
[1] https://www.racefans.net/2019/10/07/todt-admits-2021-budget-...
[2] https://www.racefans.net/2019/12/27/the-cost-of-f1-2019-team...
[3] https://www.racefans.net/2020/01/02/the-cost-of-f1-2019-part...
You can’t figure out exactly what teams that’s going to hit, because publicly available finances don’t have enough detail. But it’s either going to bring spending more or less in line with Haas or Racing Point, who are both pretty close in terms of spending anyway. The reason McLaren (a relatively big spending team) are so publicly in favour of it is that they’ve had some pretty serious financial trouble going on recently.
[0]: https://www.formula1.com/en/latest/article.breaking-news-f1-...
It’s also getting tighter at the front. Knock Mercedes down a peg or two and 2021 could be a 4-way fight, with Maclaren joining Ferrari and Red Bull to challenge the Mercs.
But I did mention Hakkinen-Schumacher for a reason - though they were direct competitors and had very different driving manners, you could see how they had immense respect for each other and acted like true sportsmen off the track. Whereas now you have a ton of spoiled brats (some multiple world champions at that) who cry like babies every time the wind isn't blowing their way, others who have seats only because they have rich daddies, while people like Hulkenberg are sitting in front of the TV at home... I mean look at teams alone - there are only two teams with solid relationships between drivers inside of them - Norris-Sainz and Raikkonen-Giovinazzi(I suspect because Raikkonen simply does not care and is only there because he enjoys driving).
And I don't see how this will improve in the future. What I'm trying to say is that I'd much rather watch a real race as opposed to a soap opera, which is what today's F1 resembles more. Not just from drivers' prospective but from teams themselves.
[0] https://www.motorsportmagazine.com/archive/article/december-...
With the ubiquity of drones nowadays there would seem to be a lot of options for more exciting viewing.
Although the speeds those cars move at isn't possible to convey on camera- what looks like 60mph is usually a three-digit speed. Drones wouldn't be able to keep pace, which is why they're used as static cameras rather than chase cameras.
It's perhaps not the best metric, but the number of overtakes over the year may remind you that before 2007, most GPs did look like Monaco. https://old.reddit.com/r/formula1/comments/2charb/the_number...
Here's a current strategist's thoughts on it: https://www.reddit.com/r/formula1/comments/go6c9m/im_an_f1_e... (TL;DR fuel restricted racing is more deterministic)
I personally didn't like fuel changes, probably because I started watching F1 before they were introduced and it made me mad that a less efficient, less-reliable engine could now win over more solid ones. They are also spectacularly dangerous for drivers and crew - as Jos Verstappen can attest.
Pre-2000, reliability was more on par to what we saw this weekend (45% of cars not finishing), which made it much more exciting on average.
EDIT: for reference https://youtu.be/XHSeGou-pCI
The race engineer has X10 data, X10 mental bandwidth, and X10 domain practice (that's his day job!)
There all these radio moments (Hamilton "how r we behind them?" after spinning out in Germany etc) .. which really makes it clear that the driver focus is very local (both spatially and temporally), as it should be!
Maybe they need to improve the way it is filmed and presented?
If you sometimes see spectators phone recordings of F1, where they try to pan their phones with the cars, you can clearly see the insane speed.
Example of F1 broadcasting angle that makes the sport a lot more exciting:
I’ve fallen out of love with F1 over recent years. Could you kindly expand on this tech? Does the push/pull change the toe or camber of front wheels, or something else?
There are rules limiting what can control the steering / suspension components of a car, and that's one of the reasons why this is controlled by pushing/pulling on the steering wheel rather than something else.
This is a nice video explaining all this: https://youtu.be/TxKhi6Qsrog?t=67
https://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/10-craziest-technologies-...
Hopefully a bit clearer here:
* Mercedes W11 cape: https://i.imgur.com/LoDuge8.jpg
* Red Bull RB16: https://i.imgur.com/lJ4SrYv.jpg
* Renault RS20: https://i.imgur.com/XJVeFwN.png
https://i.redd.it/4awyalvl1al41.jpg
https://i.redd.it/xrhjfzmj0ql41.jpg
It'll be interesting to see if they change cape/J-vane philosophy with their much vaunted aero upgrade for Hungary in a couple of weeks. There certainly seem to be some pretty fundamental issues with their 2020 car at the moment. I'm sure their newly legal engine isn't helping them but watching some of Vettel's onboards from yesterday[0] there's clearly something aerodynamically wrong too, the car just isn't planted in any phase of cornering.
[0] - https://twitter.com/deadlinex/status/1279825624719392768
I remember (pre-family when I could easily give-up a large chunk of my weekend) tuning in to the beginning of TV coverage on Saturdays (qualifying) and Sundays (race day) primarily to watch all the build-up about the developments since the previous race, particularly all the new technical changes; the relentless engineering efforts are immense and we only get a tiny glimpse of it.
These cars could in theory be even faster. They stopped in season testing years ago; there are limits to the amount of high performance computing they can do; many parts are standardised. There's a tension in the way the sport is regulated to constrain the vast budgets of the larger teams so that smaller teams can try and compete, and ideally new teams enter the sport too. In addition, the aerodymics evolved to such a degree that the wake each car leaves behind makes it almost impossible for cars to follow closely and overtake, leading to uninspiring processions on race days. So regulations are constantly being added to try and ensure a spectacle (DRS, degrading tyres, forcing sub-optimal front and rear wings). But they continue to innovate at a staggering pace.
When DRS (Drag Reduction System -- used in set portions of the straights, a car that's within 1 sec of a car can deploy DRS, that causes the rear wing to have less drag and can potentially allow an overtake). But absolutely amazing lateral thinking from the teams saw innovations like the "F-duct" that was eventually banned and then the so-called "Double DRS". They are channeling relatively small amounts of air-flow through little vents and holes to create small but improvements to their aero performance.
And when in-season testing was removed, all teams rolled out state-of-the-art digital car simulators that have become incredible sophisticated; they design new aerodynamic parts, such as a tiny adjustments to their front-wing, then they test the part on the simulator before actually building and taking to the next race.
Perhaps it's time I get a proper subscription for the TV coverage and watch it like you say over the weekend.
Try watch a few more races and even check out the F1 subreddit /r/formula1 - its a good community that share plenty of news, clips from new and old races etc - and if you have any questions, they're all very helpful
I typically just watch qualifying and the race. But it's a time thing. Qualifying if I fast forward through things still takes about 40 minutes. The race is typically a solid 2 hours or so. That's nearly 3 hours each weekend it's on and we haven't even dove into the pre-race and post-race bits or the practice sessions.
Things get interesting, like in yesterday's race, when penalties start playing into things (which resulted in different podium finishes yesterday) and some of the technical issues that happen (of which there were several during the Austrian GP, as only 11 finished the race).
I'd say yesterday's race had a fair bit happening in it, but not super duper exciting stuff.
The big part of the problem is, at least so far this year, Ferrari is once again behind the eight ball, Mercedes is (once again) running the pack, and Red Bull are sort of somewhere in the mix there.
The more exciting parts of the race are the team placing 4th, 5th and 6th. Those are typically much more exciting, but they rarely air much of those parts of the race.
r/formula1 is a good place to keep up to speed as well.
A few years back, the free-to-air channel, Channel 4, lost the exclusive rights to broadcast the live events. Sky bought them up. Nowadays the Channel 4 offering has become a highlights package, and frankly that's been a pretty good outcome for me. Actually, I don't mind the reduced coverage of the actual car-on-track phase, but it's also not as in-depth on the pre-/post-race analysis, which was where a large chunk of the interest, intrigue and drama occurs.
Also, being able to record using a DVR means I can just tune in whenever it suits me, even if I'm dipping in for 15-30mins over a number of days. At least there's often two weeks between races.
Also, I've found a few podcasts that I listen to during the week that help me stay up to date with the storylines of the season. In particular, Missed Apex[1] and Shift+F1[2] are my go-tos. The former is a little bit snarkier and opinion-based, the latter is more straightforward and factual - both are good. Check out their race previews/reviews, it will give you some things to pay attention to when watching a current race.
[1]: https://missedapexpodcast.com/
[2]: https://www.f1.cool/
The constraint is not the budget or testing though. You could make much faster cars with even less money if you removed some of the constraints (particularly in minimal car weight, engine size, aerodynamic effects, fuel, etc.). You don't want them to be much faster for safety reasons - if they go much faster then there would be too many situations where the human reaction time is not sufficient to avoid an accident. The Group B (Rallying) competition suffered from too many accidents and was disbanded.
Find out more here: https://jobs.redbull.com/at-de/bicester-scuderia-alphatauri-...
What sort of projects have you been able to work on? What's the work culture like? Do you find the actual technical problems you work on exciting, or is it more the domain that excites you (i.e. building and operating a racecar)?
For your last question, it is a bit of both. I went to university with the goal of working in F1 and the competitive aspect is definitely there but as I was not a comp sci student the technical problems are still interesting. Developing aero is very visual heavy as ideas are implemented as 3D CAD designs and often reviewed as such. So it's not just a more complicated stock ticker that needs to be shown.
[1]: https://static.carthrottle.com/workspace/uploads/posts/2016/...
[2]: https://images.cdn.circlesix.co/image/2/1000/425/5/uploads/p...
- limit on testing means that whoever makes the best car after regulations change will win until next regulations change (2010..2013 Red Bull, 2014.. today Mercedes), others have very limited means to catch up
- scoring system introduced in late 00s rewards reliability over racing, and gives miniscule reward for 1st place: now you get 25 for P1, 18 for P2, and in 80s it was 9 or 10 for P1, 6 for P2, and in 1980s only 11 of 17 results counted towards championship, so drivers would often take more risks to get for results. Now they just drive home safely.
25 vs 18 = 1.39x
9 vs 6 = 1.50x
10 vs 6 = 1.67x
18 vs 15 = 1.20x
6 vs 4 = 1.5x
Some of the on-track incidents yesterday (July 5th) suggest that this is not the whole story, and may not be accurate.
It's much more interesting to do the simulations virtually. Some even do the windtunnel testing now virtually. But only the richest.
Previously, dominance was never that total, not even during Schumacher/Ferrari era (and Schumacher was way better driver than Hamilton). But since 2010, no competing team is able to catch up.
But the stats disguise the fight; the fact that Mercedes have won didn't mean their position wasn't earned, frankly they've had a fair slice of luck in several races. For the last two or three years one could easily argue that Ferrari had the means to take them on and beat them, but their campaigns have unravelled for various reasons. Many races they've had to earn that win and many seasons where there was a fight throughout.
The fact that Maclaren has vanished into obscurity despite originally having a Merc engine, and RedBull and Ferrari getting in others faces so often has actually allowed Mercedes to keep their head down and get on with bringing home their maximum potential points haul per race.
There is a ton of cool engineering in F1. If you are bored poke around https://www.f1technical.net/
The cars got wider and more sensitive to the car in front, that overtakes became rare, even with DRS (*Drag Reduction System - that allows the back wing of the car in the back to fold to reduce drag at certain points in the track, if the car is close enough to the car in front).
Also, Mercedes started dominating it, to a point that the only battle in the race was in the mid-field. The winners were almost always, already decided at qualifying (unless some reliability issues happened during the race).
>The winners were almost always, already decided at qualifying (unless some reliability issues happened during the race).
I don't think that's fair. FWIW, in the 2019 F1 season only 8/21 races were won by the driver in pole position.
What makes the sport more interesting to the fans is not necessarily what motivates teams to participate. One could argue that there are many other formula and racing formats that get that balance between the car and driver, but it's not necessarily something that gets people tuning in. People watch F1 because it's supposed to be pinnacle of automotive engineering and racing. So if I'm a team boss of one of the top 3 teams, I'm not going to be interested in artificially handicapping the sport so that the smaller teams can get in the mix.
However, they've seen repeatedly that fans get bored when it's the same couple of teams who are wrangling for the podium and there's not much excitement per race. So teams at the top will begrudgingly let the regulations be altered to try and spice things up, but nothing too significant. Unfortunately it'll take a downturn in F1 rights income & viewership to make the teams think twice about how to fight this tension between the competitiveness vs status quo. But then the big teams will think, why am I investing hundreds of millions in F1 when I'm not winning when I can spend a fraction in DTM or Le Mans and start building up prestige from other events.
Take the Monaco race, the quintessential F1 race. Watch the pole position lap from the driver's viewpoint and it's the up there with the most amazing 70secs you've seen in sport. However, watch the full race and it's typically a dull procession. As a fan I'd be glad to see the back of it, but sport itself love it.
The biggest interest to most people are the drivers and they strongly dislike driver aids. I'd prefer every driver aid under the sun and have a real engineering battle. I'm obviously in the minority here.
Formula E is under very tight budget constraints in order to lower the barrier to entry. I look forward to the day when the series is established and they can start to compete on things like motor construction and battery tech to drive the field forwards.
The racers like whatever makes them go faster. When ABS and traction control was allowed everyone was using it. It just made you faster. But the current rules ban them with the goal of trying to make the driver matter more.
One of the sports all time great (Micheal Schumacher) won all of his championships with traction control most likely. The teams used their own computers in the cars then so it was basically impossible to police and thus the ban was lifted in 2002. The ban was put back in place when the onboard computer in the cars was homologated (everyone uses the same computer by McLaren)