DaveW wrote:WhiteBlue wrote: F1 should allow movable / elastic wings with sufficient safety against failure and do away with most aero rules by defining a minimum ride height and maximum downforce. 1,25 metric ton was proposed in the past and it should be a good figure. Nobody has ever opposed that.
Using aeroelastic deformation to modify aero loads is clever, efficient & dangerous. I believe that the last is the reason it has been discouraged.
A minimum static ride rule is not the most brilliant concept, IMHO. It is used in a number of race series, is demonstrably ineffective, but making it so compromises suspension set-up. Arguably, therefore, the principal effect of a minimum static ride height rule is to make race vehicles less safe than they might have been.
Downforce is difficult to monitor by measurement, I think. If the requirement is to limit cornering speeds, then D/F coefficent through corners is, perhaps, more relevant than maximum downforce. I can't help thinking that any rule that relied on measurements controlled by a race team would be of doubtful effectiveness.
Apologies...
Static or dynamic load testing can easily take care of structural integrity concerns of elastic rear wings. A main reason for not going that route was the continous concern of curbing excess performance under the concord rules. They could never agree to anything and often performance curbing had to be brought in on safety grounds. So the FiA wisely always kept a safety concern open althoug everybody who has been in an aircraft during major turbulences knows that elastic design can be very safe. In a 747 you can watch the wing tips make vertical movement of 10-20 m. Or watch the drooping wings of a B52. They had to fit ancillary wheels to keep the engines from hitting the runway so elastic was the design. I never heared of a wing coming off such a bomber under regular flight conditions.
Actually I was thinking about monitoring downforce by measuring ride height as one of the alternatives to eventually control downforce. With spring rates known a point can be made that ride height is functionally linked with downforce although this is obviously a different function on each car.
A more interesting alternative is measuring vertical force at every corner of the car and correcting inertial forces by accellerometers. The SECU should be capable of doing this. We have diskussed this in a previous thread sometimes and nobody came up with obstacles that couldn't be resolved.
I think that the teams simply prefer to exploit the chaos of ever changing "boxes" of aero restrictions. It is so nice to blame the FiA for all problems that arise from this crude method and by juggling the boxes around you can eternally create new configurations on which to waste more billions for meaningless aero research. If the teams were working against a fixed maximum downforce they would at least contribute to fuel efficiency by every bit of improvement they find. With fixed downforce the only way to get more performance by aero is to reduce drag which then reduces fuel consumption and improves overtaking.
Originally the 2009 rules were supposed to be introduced in 2008 with the expiry of the old Concord Agreement. The draft 2008 rules had a mandatory downforce limit of 1.25 metric tons. The teams opposed this rule and set up the OWG to show they could do much better. It initially cost a lot of time because they had to do some practical reasearch to prove a concept. They did that and it was clear that they would interprete the 1.25 ton very liberally and the rule would be pushed back one year to 2009.
They defined the concept of the new front wing, the new rear wing and the diffuser where rear wing and diffuser would be decoupled. Then instead of keeping the downforce rule they went ahead with another foolish "box rule" which they promptly got wrong. The DDD loophole was created and words of warning by Ross Brawn were disregarded.
The next step in this perverted development was the annoucement by Red Bull that they managed to join the diffuser and the rear wing wash once again by the latest Newey design. We have gone full circle and nothing of the original brief of reducing downforce and turbulence remains. Red Bull pays Newey 9 mil $ salary to play the foolish box game. I wish the teams would at least acknoledge that they simply got it wrong with the OWG process. If you measure downforce now in max configuration I bet we are back to 85 or 90% of 2006, which is way off target.