Friday, May 3, 2024

Formula 1: The secret aerodynamicist reveals design concepts BBC Sport

f1 car design

The airbox absorbs this turbulent air, preventing it from disturbing the laminar airflow along with other parts.The second advantage of the air box is its large size, which provides a large space for advertising, in turn, providing opportunities for additional ad revenue. The only team to take this option was the Toro Rosso team, which was reformed and regrouped Minardi. Turbulent air flowing under the floor can also damage the performance, creating pockets of higher pressure which can upset the stability of the car's underbody. In past seasons, speeding cars pushed air to the side, slowing the cars that followed.

Is Haas destined for a miserable 2024 F1 season? Our verdict

Tyres are a comparative bargain at about £1,500 per set – although when you consider a team has 20 sets at every Grand Prix (13 drys, 4 intermediates and 3 full wets) that’s suddenly £30,000 per car each race weekend. Spending is capped at $140 million (£106m) per season in 2022, reducing to $135m (£102m) from 2023. This covers all car performance costs and excludes marketing and salaries of drivers and the three most expensive team members. The carbon fibre matting is precision cut into specific shapes – defined by the composite design department – and these are laid up in a very precise way, as different strand directions deliver different strength properties and directions.

Technical challenges in F1 car design

Whilst we haven’t had a race since then, the team at Brackley have been pushing flat out. The fruits of that will see us continue to bring new parts to the track at the coming races, as we have at each Grand Prix so far. Understanding how cars generate performance and the factors involved in making that happen. We call this style 'out-washing' - ie, it sends air outwards, away from the car, in an attempt to control the tyre wake. This is because, to keep performance under control, the regulations are very prescriptive and there are only certain areas in which designers can innovate. The manipulation of air around a car is the single biggest performance differentiator in F1 - and collectively the teams employ hundreds of people and spend many millions of pounds on refining it to find that crucial extra bit of speed.

Red Bull’s biggest 2023 F1 car design change explained

Different compounds have different properties, and it is not unusual to see a car's suspension responding better to certain compounds than others. The suspension is the link between a car and its wheels, dictating how it reacts to the road and to the driver's inputs. By 2018 most teams were following the trend of separating the deformable structure from the length of the sidepod, with the sidepod around 15cm shorter than the crash structure. The main radiator inlets are positioned on either side of the car and must accept enough air to provide sufficient cooling to the power unit. Ferrari and Mercedes have moved the steering rod aligning it with the lower wishbone, to have a better cleanliness of the flows in the highest part of the suspension, where the air raised by the flaps of the front wing passes.

If the incident occurred in the middle of the race rather than the final lap, a red flag likely would’ve been used because the car would’ve needed to be recovered. Given it was the final lap, it was safer for the drivers to pass at a slower speed before returning to the pits. Newey is one of the most revered and successful figures in Formula 1's history and had previously designed multiple title-winning cars for McLaren and Williams before being convinced by Horner to join a then-fledgling Red Bull team in 2006.

Such was the speed within the FW18 under the control of Hill and Jacques Villeneuve, Williams won the Constructors’ Championship with four races to spare. With four Drivers’ and Constructors’ Championships in a row, that’s not a bad way to finish that set of regulations. The ‘Multi 21′ drama in Malaysia where Vettel passed Webber when instructed not to under team orders was a race win but also something of a lowlight for driver and team, but what came after the summer break was nothing short of incredible. While Red Bull were in a titanic battle for supremacy throughout 2010, the following season proved to be an altogether more dominant affair – for Vettel especially. Without the reigning World Champion on the grid, this left Prost running the number ‘2’ on his car and Hill the number ‘0’, but the FW15C was still very much the number one force in Formula 1 to continue the success of its predecessor. To date, after McLaren’s disqualification from the 2007 Constructors’ standings, the MP4/13 is also the team’s last Constructors’-winning car.

f1 car design

As the name suggests, the change of wheel height pushes the suspension rocker to actuate it. Whether cars have pushrod or pullrod suspension configurations is one of the most obvious design decisions to spot when you first see a new F1 car. You can see this in the change of the front of the chassis shape from one that was already somewhat rounded in 2022 to even more V-shaped in 2023. Given we’ll have to wait for a serendipitous car recovery to get a clear look at the floors, the sidepods are the next best thing in terms of something to spot as soon as 2024 cars are revealed. This means carbon fibres strengthening a matrix of carbon, which is added to the fibres by way of matrix deposition (CVI or CVD) or by pyrolysis of a resin binder. The 2009 season saw the re-introduction of slick tyres replacing the grooved tyres used from 1998 to 2008.

Those updates will be on and off the wind tunnel model several times before going onto the car as part of a bigger update.” The areas of the car to which Egginton referred were, not coincidentally, those most affected by the 2019 regulation changes. And while upgrades are, to a certain extent, a response to what a team sees on track, and what they see rivals doing, they would have also formulated a plan to best deploy their resources in-season long before a wheel has turned in anger. The Spanish Grand Prix in early May has traditionally been the time to see the first big upgrades of the season. The modern reality is that, while the big upgrades still happen, updates arrive race by race. The regulations for the 2014 season limit the maximum fuel mass flow to the engine to 100 kg/h, which reduced the maximum power output from 550 kW to about 450 kW.

BEYOND THE GRID PODCAST: Red Bull's legendary designer Adrian Newey on the secrets behind his immense ... - Formula 1

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Newey's current role at Red Bull had been expanded in recent years to include projects with the Milton Keynes outfit outside of F1, including the creation of their first hypercar, the RB17. Recent reports also suggested that highly-ambitious Aston Martin were making a play for the Englishman's services in their own quest to get to the front of the grid over future seasons. "I think perhaps [this Newey news] is more to do with the power struggle that has been the background to the Horner situation," added Slater.

I am a senior aerodynamicist for an F1 team and I hope to try to explain to you some of the secrets behind F1 cars. Whilst the Haas and FOM renders or their show cars haven't shown it, DRS is still being employed too, with the moveable flap section unable to take up the full span of the wing owing to how the outer portion of the flaps merge with the endplate. This is an unsurprising decision, as the goal of both regulation changes was to improve the racing.

These tools all have different purposes, vary in how they impact a driver’s race, and play a role in teams’ strategy plans. The standards are constantly evaluated by the sport’s governing body, but debates and suggestions for improvement do arise from the drivers, teams and the FIA. A predominantly mid-blue body with sky blue and red accents creates a classic but contemporary look to the 2022 car, while the simple Williams Racing logo on the rear wing is a real standout feature. With Newey’s university thesis having been written on ground effect aerodynamics, it could be said he has quite literally written the book on how to design one of Formula 1’s current cars properly – and with the RB18, the brief was well and truly nailed. Vettel’s control of the RB9 was sublime and he combined with the car to take a whopping nine race victories in a row to close out the season, winning his fourth World title and bringing down the curtain on the naturally aspirated V8 era in style.

"Shortly after the season starts, you start to kick off the initial discussions," he said. "By the time we get to the shutdown in August time, the new car is being designed in earnest. Alpine is the team that has changed the most in terms of mechanical design with its new pushrod rear suspension layout.

The barge boards are the curved pieces that jut out from the main body of the car, and which direct the airflow in ways the designers want it to go. To solve this problem, last year we would use the airflow off the front wing to kick the tyre wake as far out and away from the car as possible. Now, because of the restrictions on devices to control the airflow that we can put on the front wing, all that's changed and, frankly, we're not yet sure what is the best thing to do. The changes mean teams have lost a lot of our ability to control one of the biggest problems for an F1 designer - the air coming off the front tyres. The way they have done this is to reduce the freedom to design parts that manipulate the airflow.

The new design keeps the airflow closer to the sides of the car, creating a smaller wake. Full ground effect cars were subsequently outlawed at the end of 1982 – and the 2022 car is certainly not a return to that era (there are no side skirts for a start!). There are a few reasons why the race wasn’t red flagged, including that there weren’t any cars immediately following Russell.

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From optimizing fuel efficiency to harnessing the power of hybrid engines, F1 car design requires a delicate balance of engineering expertise and cutting-edge technology. The pursuit of speed requires constant innovation in areas such as suspension systems, aerodynamics, and tire design. These technical challenges are what make Formula 1 so thrilling and captivating for both fans and tech enthusiasts.

The technical challenges behind F1 car design are immense, but so too are the rewards. Each year, teams push the boundaries of what’s possible in automotive engineering, creating machines that are faster, more efficient, and safer than ever before. The pursuit of innovation in F1 car design not only drives advancements in the sport but also inspires technological progress in the wider world of automobiles. As we look to the future, it’s clear that the technical challenges and innovation in F1 car design will continue to captivate and thrill both fans and tech enthusiasts alike. Air from the bargeboard area flows under the floor beneath the driver before feeding straight into the diffuser.

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