sunsalem

Bu-bu-but Sergio thinks Ferrari already IS in the proper position.

I don't know what it will take to reduce turbulence coming off the cars...
I suspect it will ultimately take a lot of different approaches.
And you can bet each and every step will be fought tooth & nail by the Big 3.

The standardization of components is a tricky business.
At what point does F1 become a spec series?

Liberty has to decide whether F1 is going to be "for the fans" (meaning increased revenues) or whether it will be an engineering exercise for the teams (as it pretty much is now).
For F1 to continue to survive long-term, I have to think it must be the former.
Sure, some manufacturers may be lost along the way, but others surely would be attracted to come in once the engineering costs come down.

D K

Pirelli tires are essentially junk.
They don't grep very well and produce so much marbles that it dictates a single racing line.

Pirelli is very lucky that there is no competition from someone like Bstone or Michelin.

If they had to compete against one of those manufacturers, they would be screwed. they know that too. Thats why they get very nervous whenever there is talk about another tire manufacturer.

I think it would be nice to see a tire war



With respect to the earlier comment about fuel stops - yea, nobody wants to see someone get hurt. That is very clear.
In the many decades that refueling was allowed how many people actually died?

To reduce or eliminate danger, it's very easy - reduce the fuel pressure! F1 fueling rigs are (were) operating at a very high pressure. If you remove that, or cap the pressure somehwere sensible, then by default you make the stops longer, reduce danger yadi yadi yadi.

Point is it would be great to see these cars weighing a few hundred pounds less and then competing!

Corner speeds would go way up and the men would, indeed, be seperated from the boys...

D K

Its actually not the turbulence that's the problem...
More turbulence could even be better..

A semi truck produces a lot of turbulence. If an F1 car was following, it would get sucked up in it's wake.

The issue is the car following.

At the moment it's designed to be fast in clean air. Airfoils and components only work when there is a lot of air flowing over them.
When they get behind another car, they lose the clean flow and aero efficiency drops.

With ground effects it's different.
Car creates its own low pressure area by managing the air that goes underneath the car and is not so dependant on what is going on above the car.

Another step would be to lower the height of the front wing. It would be buch more efficient that way too.

Bring back the early 1990's front wings and noses.

Very much so.

That's why I'm thankful someone like Ross Brawn is in charge and not some overpaid yahoo beancounter.

To keep it from becoming 'spec' - I would only introduce a very small number of spec parts.

Parts that would be hard to 'police'
Parts that would cost a lot of money to R&D

Look how close the Lolas and Marches were in the CART days. They had many uniform parts and dimensions.

sunsalem

Thank you for the education regarding aero.
My knowledge is, admittedly, incomplete.

Agreed.
As far as technical knowledge goes and his reputation as someone easy to work with, I can't think of anyone better for the job.

Can you expand on these points?

mattastick

Pirelli build the tire that they're asked to build. I'm pretty confident that they (or BS or Michelin, or any of the competent race tire manufacturers) could make a tire with Ultra-soft levels of grip that would last the race distance. But that's not what they're contracted to do. Pirelli have been asked to make a tire that degrades significantly, as this produces "excitement" from new tires vs. old tires and their relative pace difference. It also produces the coasting that's happening now (well, the tires and the fuel limits). Blame the people sourcing the manufacturer, not the people building to a contract...

As for the aero, look at how close LMP1 cars can race, and they (were) running mid pack F1 times. Significantly more downforce generated from the bottom of the car, rather than the top, and they can race nose to tail and through traffic for hours on end. If you need any more proof, watch this highlight:
I watched that race live, and that level of racing went on the entire 6 hours, separated only by pit stops. It was amazing. But, there's BOP in WEC. Do we want F1 to be a BOP series?

sunsalem

Good points.
The WEC and IMSA series are very exciting to watch.
GTLM class wins are completely unpredictable.

BTW, the 24 Hours of Daytona is next weekend (go Corvette Racing!).
If that what it takes to bring more excitement to the sport, then yeah, bring it.

VetteDrmr

On the subject of aero dependencies:

Comparing Alonso's F1 and Indy car rides (obviously the Indy car setup is low downforce, but still a good comparo:


Discussing how F1 cars struggle aero-wise:


I still think dirty air is dirty air (just basic physics), but I don't know enough about extreme ground effect flows (like you get underneath either kind of car) to say one way or the other.

Have a good one,
Mike

mattastick

Dirty air isn't dirty air, when you're comparing air coming off of a ground effect device vs. air coming off of a wing. Applying pretty simple physics (I hope this is accurate, but it seems like it would be), force = pressure*area. So if we assume that the floor area is 10x the wing area (I don't know if this is accurate, but it seems close, and it makes math easier), and that creating delta p is a function of how far upward you have to turn the air, then it's pretty easy to see that if we're making the same amount of delta p, then the underbody aero is going to make 10x the downforce. This would then say that we can take less energy out of the air using ground effect aero, and thus is should have more energy for the car following. I'm pretty sure this is why WEC cars can race wheel to wheel for 24 hours and F1 cars can't follow for more than 2 corners.

VetteDrmr

I was with you right up to this point. Why does x amount of downforce generated underneath the car take less energy out of the air than the same x amount of downforce generated by a wing?

Great conversation, let's keep it going!

Have a good one,
Mike

sunsalem

I seem to remember something about the air underneath a car is accelerated vs. the air above....


I need to email Adrien Newey....

VetteDrmr

This is for a traditional wing, but you essentially turn it upside down for either the undertray or the front/rear wings:




Have a good one,
Mike

D K

Well, I wouldnt expect FIA(sco) to come upwith an engne lets say.
Or the monocoque of a car.
I think its important to let teams experiment and come up with their own solutions.
But, if there were some key compnents that the car was built around, then everyone could be happy?

Lets say: FIA opens up a tender to Ferrari, McLaren, Mercedes and Red Bull. Design us an underbody in these dimensions and the best one gets selected. Each team is askd to make 3. The dimensions are set. The mounting points are set.
Now we go to winter testing and each team gets handed 3 ground effect tunnels from each team and they go testing.
All data is retrieved by FIA and gets shared among the teams.
Everybody agrees that Adrian builds the best underbody so thats what they go with.

It could work.?...??

D K

Downforce is expressed in psi..
As in PER square inch... so a wing that is 3 sq/ft would have to make 10x more downfoce that an entire car body thats the size of 30sq/ft to be equal.
So if you can seal off the bottom of the car and create a small pressure differential, then the entire surface of the car will push down on the tires.

If the underbody is sealed, it doesnt matter if there is air going over the wing to make downforce.

Thats why “ground effect” cars can follow each other closer.

FIA knew that teams were experimenting with grond effects, active suspension, and automatic gearboxes and they got freaked out because it was going to be too expencive to police it all.
So they started chopping all the technology in 92/93 and of course what followed in 94 - everything got axed, wood planks got introduced and tracks got chicanes everywhere.

FIA was very much aganst going with ground effects, so they opted for a flat floor instead. However, the flat floor brought its own set of problems: it was super pitch sensitive.
So, to get around that, they had to raise the floor up off the ground and they introduced the wood plank.

It might have ben a good solutin at the time, but we are way past that now.

D

mattastick

The amount of energy removed from the air is directly proportional to how hard you're working the air. As mentioned, downforce is a function of pressure and area of the surface with the lower pressure. Working the air creates the lower pressure, so let's look at an example using nice round numbers.

As mentioned previously, floor area = 10x wing area.

So let's say our target is 100 force units of downforce.

For the wing, with an area of 10 square units (I don't know if this is accurate, but let's just go with it), we need to generate 10 units of pressure delta.

For the underbody, we now only need to generate 1 unit of pressure delta (area = 10x that of wing area, so 10 square units (wing area) x 10 (size difference) = 100 square units*force, and our goal is 100 force units. So our pressure needed is only 1 unit. Because of this, we don't have to work the air as hard (don't have to turn it upwards as much) to generate the same amount of downforce.



Downforce is a unit of force (pounds, newtons, something like that), not pressure (PSI). Force = Pressure * area. So you're on the right track, but not there with your units.

VetteDrmr

But, the downforce of the total car is measured in pounds, not psi. Work is work: if you use two wings to generate 2000 lbs of downforce, and the floor generates 3000 lbs, the air is "worked" to generate 5000 lbs. Mix and match those however you want, but the total downforce works the air the same as long as the downforce number stays the same.

Ah, now I understand. You're proposing going back to the sealed chassis like F1 had in the past. I don't see them going back there at all, if for no other reason than the cars lose virtually all of their downforce with pretty small yaw (or sideslip) angles. I *can* see how a car with a sealed undertray would be less susceptible to dirty air. I think it would still be impacted, but probably not as much.

Agreed. However, I expect that a complex aero floor would be just as sensitive to AoA changes.

Well, the legality plank was put in place because teams were finding ways around the minimum ride height requirements.

Now that I understand you were referring to the true ground effect cars of the past, and I was thinking of current cars with just different configurations of floor tunnels, I see where my confusion lay.

Have a good one,
Mike

D K

I was using the examle of a sealed floor because it is easier to understand.
A non sealed car with tunnels works similarly by accelerating the air under the car which creates a low pressure area.

All good. Great discussion.

One of these days we’ll start a topic on blown diffusers

sunsalem

You 2 guys are knowledgable far beyond me...thank you for taking the time to explain it.

Here are some videos that also help for those of us who benefit from visual aids:

sunsalem

I keep waiting for a blown diffuser on a street car (C8 anyone?).
I've yet to hear a manufacturer bragging about one yet.
Is it even feasible?

VetteDrmr

I wouldn't think so, if only because blown diffusers require the exhaust to be basically at full "power" to be effective, and that's not the way a street car is used.

Maybe a hybrid while it's charging its battery system, but even then it's limited in duration.

Have a good one,
Mike

Nowanker

Wow. Missed a couple of days here and missed a whole bunch of awesome discussion!
I'd like to see refueling return:
Limit the size of the fuel tank to assure at least one stop will be required, and limit the refueling flow to something rational. Allow the teams to decide how far to turn up their horsepower, with that bringing the additional strategy of speed vs. number of stops.
SOMETHING needs to be done about the aero on the cars. No one wants to keep watching boring F1 parades, regardless of how f*ckin' awesome the machinery is.
And since we're running spec tires anyway, surely they can make one that doesn't cover the track with ***** of rubber. See 'boring F1 parade', above...