Meanwhile at Rich Energy https://www.gpblog.com/en/amp/60353/rich-energy-kicking-williams-when-they-re-down.html
Kinda "Rich" coming from a company that didnt pay, couldn't pay and has had less product on shelves than a bog roll isle during a crona virus pandemic
5th July people https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/formula1/52883244 8 race European stint confirmed to start with. 2 weekends in Austria, then Hungary, weekend off, then sliverstone for 2 weeks, Spain, break, Belgium and italy
So glad Spa made the cut great circuit Also, reverse grids could be good, shake things up, amusingly merc and Redbull don't want it. Ferrari agreed it. Not sure whats more shocking there
Could be said that some drivers exhibit behaviour that could be deemed as a willingness to share a car...
Seen this little reg change they snuck in? looks quite small, but it could be quite dramatic, Tapered floor, no more tyre squirts, no more longitudinal slots along the floor either. Floors have to be a single solid piece of material. Looking about a half second per lap https://www.autosport.com/f1/news/149659/fia-adds-floor-aero-changes-to-2021-f1-regulations Team wise its going to hit the ones with high rake so Redbull for example. I doubt any of the teams will bin off the whole aero concept as its not going to be worth it with the now postponed reg change still coming. Probably changes to the barge boards should help. The flatter longer wheel base cars so Merc and Tracing point, they will likely have less of an impact as they basically have more surface area to play with so the change will affect the car less. Chances are if there is any notable impact it will be quickly overcome as teams scramble to make up the loss of downforce/stability.
I believe it was brought in so that Perelli dont have to design new tyres for 2021 due to any development done over essentially 2 seasons. Seems unfortunate but the majority of teams run high rake. Merc and now Racing Point are likely to be the least impacted with Red Bull being the biggest impact.
I still find it bizarre that every team except Mercedes persisted with high rake designs from 2014 to now even as the low rake Mercedes blasted them into the weeds. Are they all playing some kind of elaborate prank? One or two seasons fine, but more than half a decade of one philosophy being obviously and fundamentally better than the other you would think even Mr Newey would have admitted defeat eventually.
The high rake concept does so much though, it drops the nose of the car improving the ground effect, back end it allows the diffuser to work more efficiently the only real negative is the car is not as aerodynamically stable so you tend to get quite a pointy car as the aero load shifts as the car corners. The long and low approach basically smooths out this as the aero loads move around under the car when cornering still but the area they load into is larger so if generally does not unsettle the car so much resulting in a smoother feel for the driver. An yes Javaman is right this is a Pirelli push, from their point of view I can see why. The 18's have been pushed back as it is so they don't really want to be trying to develop new versions of the existing 15's which will get binned off shortly anyway. 18's still coming in for 2022 with the new cars? I can't recall but would make sense. Just going to throw this in as an edit, Seen a rumour we could see Hockenheim, Imola and of all places, Mugello host a race this season, logistically they all make great sense. I would love to see what they make of Imola only a couple of drivers will have raced there. Sochi has also been mentioned but meh.
From what i understand about it, it was a mixture of design research and trade offs. For example a high rake pushes the nose closer to the ground increasing front wing performance, however it lead to unpredictable aero on bumpy circuits. Other elements like engine packaging or area of floor to work with, tire aero meant it was probably impossible to predict which concept would win out Overall. From the number of teams that went high rake, Merc probably got a better balance and extracted more that though possible from the long wheelbase car. I Remember near the start of the turbo era that Merc had a large engine advantage that carried them despite them struggling with a "diva" of a car that was difficult to get the tires in the window. Yes, larger tires where delayed until 2022
But it doesn't result in the fastest car, at most of the tracks F1 races there are 1 or 2 corners below 80mph on the whole track and 90% plus will be spent over 100mph. So for a few tenths gained in low speed corners everybody but Merc is giving up stability in the mid-high speed corners and drag on the straights. From 2014-16 Merc's amazing engine sort of masked how good the rest of the car was, but from 17 onwards it's not just the engine, even The Diva won 12 races once they'd figured out how to make her dance. Merc struggle at Austria, Mexico and Monaco, two tracks that are very high and one that's very slow. They dominate everywhere else unless circumstances get ahead of them. I really don't get how all these teams of supposed geniuses can turn up every weekend, watch Merc beat them and declare 'our approach is clearly the superior one, Mercedes obviously have it all wrong' year in year out. It's bizarre. The small teams can plead budget, but RB and Ferrari have no excuse, if the Racing Point is suddenly near the front I predict the death of high rake designs with the 2022 rules. Those things will have ground effect anyway.
I totally agree, the low speed bleed off of aero in high rake cars is quite marked, but they are basically trading some low/mid speed aero downforce for more high speed downforce while hoping the mechanical grip will help them. Usually with high rake cars you can get away with it as they are shorter wheelbase anyway and you will have more ballast to play with as the car being smaller is going to be lighter, so you can chuck weight in areas to help balance etc. I agree the merc way seems to work better RBR were guilty of tailoring a car to its preferred driver as he likes a solid back end, again the same has become true of Ferrari they have slowly shortened their wheel base and raised the rear up over the seasons, again appears to be on the main drivers "request". I'm going to go with stubborn designers and cost being the factors on not wanting to flip and change aero concept. Merc had a conservative long wheelbase chassis with poor aero to start with as said they made up the difference with a massively powerful engine. I think that can be seen with how good the RBR was in aero terms as with a weaker engine they could still trim off downforce to be somewhere near competitive. Something I'll look into is the drivers natural driving styles, and the amount of rake the cars run. I have a feeling the super smooth drivers would favour a lower rake setup as its more stable and predictable, where a higher rake at low speed can be far more choppy as it unloads or effectively switches off it your going to slow. Could be wrong but it could be interesting. Thinking about it, a great case in point is Williams, the car a few years back was blindingly fast in a straight line pinging top of the speed trap tables most tracks, but places like Monaco its floundered. They tried to address this but kept the core principle resulting in a car that was still based around the "lets make a missile" concept but they had compromised it slapping on more and more parts to counter more and more problems, as a result it became slow, inefficient and hard to drive. Now if someone had just clean sheet redesigned the car ignoring all the previous work they would likely have ended up with a mid rake car kind of like last years Ferrari. While not perfect it would have been a clean break from the rinse repeat trying to fix a broken concept and would have likely not being pinned firming a few seconds off the back of the rest of the pack. My point being, designers will stick to what they know will work, only fly in that ointment is Racing point who instead seem to have hired a photo copier, much on the, can't beat them join them approach. An yes I think 2022 were going going to see very little rake on cars as they will want to maximise the ground effect, but even then a bit of rake will help, I remember reading something about Norbert singer when he designed the Porsche 962, when they were playing with ground effect, they put this little gurney flap on the rear during a practise session, literally a long strip of aluminium just drilled into the rear of the car, but what it did was slightly affect the rake of the car at speed lifting the back slightly but it was enough to give the driver the front end grip to stop it understeering as it nudged the nose down slightly providing greater front end ground effect. Now I doubt this would work really in F1 as even next season they will have more aero surface to play with that the 962 (talking wings diffusers etc) but you kind of get my meaning I hope.
Tracing point has always copied other designs, previously it was Red Bull. They seem to hit their limit on what they can extract from the high rake concept from sinply copying. Williams and before that McLaren had a rather extreme aero philosophy that was flawed. Both at some point have chased maximum total downforce looking at the absolute amount of downforce a part can bring. The trade off was drag. Downforce would be dialed back to provide the best balance. The alternative philosophy to this was pursuit of total usable downforce that while you could generate insane levels of downforce, not all downfroce created was actually usable. This is commonly known as aero efficiency trying to find the balance between aero and drag taking the trade offs rather than maximising aero. Yes you wont take corners as fast or be the fastest in a straight line but you would be near top in both as the wings produce high downforce for little drag. Again there where trade offs with tyre management, car setup windows and aero consistancy but Red Bull ahowed it worked. Top it off, After loosing Newy, Williams aero department has never performed well. They have tended to make slippery cars and when they needed downforce chase that total maximum figure rather than aero efficiency. Donno how well i explained all that but hopefully you get the idea
