Remember during pre-season when the big topic was improving overtaking?
Indycar racing in the US has had a similar problem for several years. At the most recent race they tried to improve overtaking by making some simple modifications to the existing cars. It worked well.
There is no clear technical description of the change, but from reading between the lines it appears they used large wicker bills on the wings to do a couple of things-
1. Reduces wing sensitivity to turbulence. The wing with the big wicker bill makes more consistent downforce behind other cars.
2. The big wicker bill makes the wing less efficient in terms of downforce relative to drag. Previously teams were using extrememly efficient wings that gave downforce at a low cost (in terms of drag). Therefore there was no incentive to do anything other than nail the car to the track with lots of downforce. Now with the inefficient wing, downforce comes at a large cost in drag. The teams have an incentive to use less downforce in order to keep drag under control. The result is cars that are not nailed to the track. It's possible to go around the oval corners on the outside and still be quick instead of only using the inside line because it's the shortest distance (if you have all the downforce in the world you only care about the shortest distance around an oval).
The interesting thing is that this solution would have been possible years ago and it was conceived by a couple of team engineers on an informal basis. Not a committee. Not a high tech solution. Just ask the rank and file engineers what to do and they can probably tell you.
Here is the limited info I saw--
http://auto-racing.speedtv.com/article/ ... on-target/
