Infiniti Red Bull Racing 2015

[SectorOne]

I'll go one better: it was wholly the truth. But, it's also completely irrelevant.

If tires are the same for everyone and you design a car that can't make best use of them, you have designed a flawed car. It's no different than what caused the discrepancy between Mercedes' PU and Renault's PU.

I have to disagree with this one to be honest.

To compare the new engines with the 2013 Pirelli´s would be like if any team hit 600 horsepower the engine would instantly blow up.

"you have designed a flawed engine for reaching 600hp"

Yea, can´t really be compared with tires engineered to handicap the fastest cars on the grid.
There´s no component on the new engines that are designed to handicap Red Bull or the fastest car in any shape or form.

"Adrian Newey has made the direct link between downforce and wear."

The 2013 tires were purely designed to handicap the fastest cars and bring them back in line with the inferior Lotus and Ferrari.

[bhall II]

(This probably works as a response to Phil's comments, too.)

To compare the new engines with the 2013 Pirelli´s would be like if any team hit 600 horsepower the engine would instantly blow up.

"you have designed a flawed engine for reaching 600hp"

If, in such a scenario, the rules demanded that no engine equal or exceed 600bhp, you're 100% correct.

In order to be competitive in any racing series, it is incumbent upon all teams involved to make best use of what's legal/available at the time, regardless of anything else. To do otherwise is, by definition, a mistake.

Try to understand that I'm not passing judgment on the sensibility of the rules in question. What anyone thinks of them is completely irrelevant as long as they're in force, because it does nothing to release competitors from the need to adhere to them.

So, if you're compelled to race with a specific kind of tire and you don't take the necessary steps to make that work in your favor, whatever it entails, then the outcome is your fault.

Yes, it's faaaaaaaaaaaaaar from ideal. But, it is what it is, and it applies to everyone.

Are you saying RB never used KERS during qually or races in 2011? Because that's just flat out incorrect, sorry.

If that's inaccurate, blame this guy...

After qualifying today it became apparent that Red Bull’s drivers did not use KERS during qualifying.

Asked why not, Mark Webber said that the team had internal reasons why not.

But tonight it has emerged that the team may have a lightweight KERS system, which is designed for use off the startline only. This is necessary because KERS confers about 7 metres advantage on a car using it over one that isn’t on the start straight.

(And I guess me, too, for putting even one ounce of faith in a Formula One "journalist.")

[Tommy Cookers]

the same James Allen who still tells us that F1 brakes at 6 g

[Juzh]

the same James Allen who still tells us that F1 brakes at 6 g

And corners at 5. Still.

This whole "start kers" thing was a fairy tale from the beginning.

[bhall II]

I was rather impressed by Red Bull's decision not to run KERS in 2009. The technology was so new, the rules so restricted, and the benefits so unclear, that not running the system was a bit like adding dead weight to everyone else's car.

In any case, my point was not to say that Red Bull did something wrong, only that the decision had consequences later, like this...

"The reality is that it is a system in its infancy," said Newey. "We are not a manufacturer team so we are having to develop KERS ourselves, which has not been our area of expertise in the past."

"We are also doing it on a limited resource, limited budget and with limited experience, so we are on a rapid learning curve. How long it takes us to get to the top of that learning curve remains to be seen."

[FoxHound]

Also, didn't Mercedes just turn down RedBull to supply it with engines? If their chassis is so good and ahead of the field, why not supply RedBull? I think I know the answer to that question..

Mercedes have said, if Renault withdraw they'll be open to supply.
This should answer many questions.

As for the link to AM&S / Horner thinking they are 3 tenths behind; It's hard to gauge in what context....].

Red Bull PR context. For a definition of it, look at any RB related story over the last 5 years. That they favour a rival in this context, should suffice any explanation.

Think about it. RedBull might have massive spending power, but the gains need to be there

I did think about it. So it needs to be advantageous before it can be deemed necessary?
How very Mateschitz!
Spare a thought for Mercedes, Ferrari and to a lesser extent Renault, who spend hundreds of millions just to have their names on the engine cover.

I'm not going to reply to the rest of your post, had a few beers after an exemplary track day in my beat up Ass2000, but let's keep the cordial line... and attempt some more brevity in posting.

[bhall II]

Perhaps my thoughts are better organized today. Let's see...

(Holy ---, even by my standards this is long. No filler, though.)

... [Mercedes] have by far the most powerful PU so can run the car with more downforce which is key in getting the most from these tires.

There's the fundamental misconception, and it's based upon pre-Pirelli era logic. There was a time when having the most downforce was ideal, but that's not necessarily the case anymore.

Tires have always been the ultimate arbiter of performance, because they constitute the sole link between the car and the track. In the days of the tire war, it was the job of tire manufacturers to produce rubber that could withstand anything the cars dished-out for as long as they needed to dish it out. If a tire company did its job correctly, the tires would seem to be a non-factor, as their performance would be invisibly integrated into that of the total package.

Grossly simplified, picture a graph with axes that represent "grip" and longevity. The ideal tire will have performance characteristics that fall directly upon the diagonal line that evenly splits the two. Because the scale of each axis is wholly dependent upon both the car and the track, the tire war compelled manufacturers to bring different tires to each circuit in order to ensure their performance always fell upon the ideal line.

In the Bridgestone era, the tires became heavily biased toward longevity, which meant you could throw anything at them and they could withstand it. That gave rise to the two-compound rule, because it was the only way to challenge teams with control tires.

Ever since Pirelli arrived on the scene, tires have been ridiculously biased toward "grip," and that means they don't last very long. Longevity has improved over the years as a result of increased understanding and the slight shift toward harder compounds, but it's still nothing like it was throughout the tire war/Bridgestone era.

On the nature of hysteresis...

A characteristic of a deformable material such that the energy of deformation is greater than the energy of recovery. The rubber compound in a tire exhibits hysteresis. As the tire rotates under the weight of the vehicle, it experiences repeated cycles of deformation and recovery, and it dissipates the hysteresis energy loss as heat.

Though I'm leery of this being an (irresponsible) oversimplification, consider all tires to have a sort of "hysteresis budget," and that they're worthless after it's been depleted. Broadly speaking, this occurs along a spectrum of performance on a per-stint basis such that you can put energy into the tires at a high rate over a relatively short period of time or you can put energy into them at a lower rate over a longer period of time. The former is limited by the number of tires available to each driver throughout a race weekend, and the latter is limited by the need to run two compounds during a race. Anything that works the tires harder increases the rate of "hysteresis budget" depletion: rapid acceleration, deceleration, and cornering, i.e. "pushing"; adding downforce; increasing slip due to running in "dirty air," etc.

As counterintuitive as it may seem, Red Bull's mistake in 2013 was to design a car that placed an undue emphasis on peak downforce. It indicates they failed to fully appreciate the importance of tire use in the Pirelli era. (To be fair, though, I don't know that anyone truly understood them at this point.)

As if to underscore the oversight, Newey made the following comments...

“We had a big change over the winter, an unexpected change,” said Newey. “Pirelli introduced a new tyre which was much more sensitive, it was very easy to overload it and because our car, a lot of its lap time is under braking and in the high speed corners, where you’re putting a lot of load into the tyres, we couldn’t really exploit that without the tyres going off very quickly.”

“So that tyre change hurt us and helped some other people, such as Lotus, Ferrari perhaps. For me that was purely luck.

“I think Lotus and Ferrari are making making big noises about how clever they were over the winter to read that far. But to be perfectly honest they were just plain lucky, we were a little bit unlucky, and of course the the politics take over. So it’s been a challenging year but a very rewarding one.”

The change was not unexpected...

“We'll be bringing some of our 2013 prototype tyres to Brazil in order for the teams to get a taste of them during free practice,” Pirelli motorsport boss Paul Hembery said. ”With no testing until February otherwise, this will be an extremely valuable opportunity for them to see what our new tyres are like as they finalise their 2013 cars – so let's hope that it doesn't rain on Friday!

“Both the compounds and construction will be different, which means that the characteristics of the new tyres will be altered, with a wider working range and some compounds that are slightly more aggressive. We've yet to finalise where exactly all the compounds will sit in relation to each other, which is why we are calling the tyre to be used in Brazil a 'prototype' rather than giving it a specific nomination, but it will be very representative of our general design philosophy next year."

Please don't take this to mean that I think briefly testing two prototype compounds results in an ability to know precisely how everything is going to turn out months later. That's not at all what I'm saying. But, I do believe you can somewhat narrow down the possibilities, or establish a broad trend, by comparing prototype data to that which was collected throughout the season, and Red Bull should have designed the 2013 car around the resultant estimations. It's not an uncommon practice...

"When we work with a customer chassis manufacturer like Lola or Courage, they don't ask us to make a special tire for their cars," explains Michelin's competition manager for four-wheel activities, Matthieu Bonnardel, "instead they try to design the car to suit the tires. So they look at what tire sizes we have and get some physical data, then they get data from us on the characteristics of our tires, which will help them optimize the aerodynamic design and the suspension. Then when the car is complete they can bring it to our test track in France where we can gain real understanding of the car's behavior - the downforce for example. We have a few devices that allow us to take a closer look at what happens on the car, as well as on the tires, and the teams like that."

(This is why Mercedes readily volunteered for that "secret" tire test after the 2013 Spanish GP.)

So, whatever caused this...

"If we use our full potential, we cannot even last a full lap of qualifying. To tell your drivers that they are not allowed to drive some corners properly is not easy," claimed Marko.

...was a mistake, and there was no guarantee it could have been fixed with "routine" in-season development, because certain chassis characteristics are locked-in.

“We’ve improved things throughout the whole year,” Allison, Ferrari’s Chassis Technical Director, said. “The car is much more to his liking now than it was then, but there are certain fundamental characteristics that are sort of ‘baked in’ to a car when you lay down its architecture."

“That architecture is not really modifiable in a given year. You can make it better, and we have made it better, and we continue to make it better. But there are limitations.”

Hence, Horner/Marko Bitchfest '13. Without a move to more robust tires, Red Bull could not develop the car according to plan, because downforce squares with speed, which means adding downforce exponentially increases wear/degradation.



I won't even pretend to understand the details beyond that, because such knowledge is waaaaaaaaaaaay above my pay grade. But, I do know that an increase of just 5-10kph through a corner can have exaggerated consequences in terms of tire wear/degradation, because...

One thing that is sometimes overlooked by chassis designers is that the tires are a critical part of the machine, not just something to bolt on and go racing with. Some acknowledge that the sidewall of a tire has an effect on that corner's spring rate and damping, but Bonnardel reveals that the situation is far more complicated than that.

"There are a lot of complex things going on in a tire when it's running on a track. For example, the tire spring rate does not just depend on the sidewall - that would be too easy - the sidewall construction is a factor, but so are many other things. It can vary with tire type, size, temperature, load and pressure. It will even change depending on how much camber a car is running. The more you run, the more it leans on the shoulder and that puts more load into the sidewall. A tire that is overloaded has less spring rate than a tire that is not loaded, for example. And finally, spring rate changes with speed, so one tire does not have one spring rate, it has billions of spring rates in the same tire. We know a basic rate and communicate that to our partners, of course, but we also have to communicate the range of different rates and how it changes through the various usage of the tire."

The tire failures at the British GP, in which the practice of running the tires backwards reached its inevitable conclusion, enabled RB9's late-season dominance.

I think the secret to Mercedes' chassis success is that, after years of struggling with tire use, they figured out that the Pirellis effectively put a cap on useful downforce. So, rather than develop toward increasing downforce, as has been standard practice since wings were introduced in the '60s, the ideal strategy now is to find the downforce limit and then develop toward maintaining it as consistently as possible.

What gave it away to me is when they deliberately sacrificed downforce with this development...



The wider end plate reduces wingspan, i.e. reduces peak downforce, but it helps the wing maintain efficiency over a wider range of conditions. It seems Red Bull figured it out, too...



There's no telling how long it will take them to catch up aerodynamically, and that's why it's not a given that a better PU would immediately vault them to the front of the field.

For reasons I mentioned in a previous post, they have to transition from an aerodynamic philosophy analogous to this...



...to one that more closely resembles this...



...and they have to do it with arguably the most finicky tires ever produced, all while successfully integrating ERS concepts for which they're the least-experienced team.

I can see why Newey would rather work on boats and supercars.

[Phil]

So, you are effectively saying that simply running higher downforce is not preferable, because there is a limit (the limit where the tires are in their ideal 'range' for longevity vs. grip) and that Mercedes biggest gain is that they have learned this and designed their car to stay as close as this ideal downforce range as long as possible.

Fair enough. There's not much to disagree with there and I don't think it nullifies the arguments I've put forward. The key isn't to have the best car on the grid in regards to tire management; it is to have the best performance over the duration of a GP. From start to finish, over the duration of roughly 300km. Essentially, getting there the quickest. I.e. the Ferrari that is perhaps the only car better on the grid in regards to tire management and wear, isn't the ideal candidate because its car perhaps is too much on the longevity side of the axis. Mercedes is that much closer to the 'ideal compromise'.

Yet the question why they are that much closer to the ideal trade-off, is the point I'm most interested in. Is it simply because they've built their car perfectly - meaning the chassis and the aero philosophy? Maybe. Or is it perhaps because they also have the most efficient/powerful PU that allows them to trade-off performance here and there to get that much closer to the ideal tire working range? I think that PU has every bit to do with getting there, and it's an advantage that seems to be overlooked time and time again.

The tire might be the crucial part that connects the power to the surface, but the overal performance is every bit as important. A track isn't just a maze with corners, there are straights too - and because of them, acceleration and higher top-speed are just as important as cornering speed. Where that ideal spot is between VMAX/acceleration and cornering speed, depends on the car and the track in question. A car with a serious lack of performance, will be compromising more, because they are further away from the ideal and because being vulnerable on the straights is not something you'd want in a race. It's a bit of an apples / oranges comparison really. It's easy to point to the tires and call it the underlying bottleneck. Or the engine. You will never be able to gauge the underlying tire performance strength of a vehicle, if the vehicles in question have differing performance. Because in this case, one team is already compromising one aspect for another (and it may be influencing their performance on that tire too).


As for RedBull being behind where KERS development is concerned; True. I've never disputed that, which is why I've always been refering to the 'PU' - the Power Unit in its entirety and not the ICE part. As a 'PU' it is severely underperforming and it may well be due to the ERS component. Fact is, they are lacking power and my best guess is is that it's influencing everything; From the compromises the team needs to embrace to not be eaten on the straights, to losing downforce perhaps in the corners, even their tire wear is influenced one way or the other.

[bhall II]

The key isn't to have the best car on the grid in regards to tire management; it is to have the best performance over the duration of a GP.

Try to divorce yourself from the idea that these things are distinct, because they're not. Tire management is integral to performance.

If you can't get enough heat into them, something is wrong. If you constantly overload them, something is wrong. That's what I meant when I said tires are the ultimate arbiter of performance. They dictate the pace.

Mercedes suspects that its tyre dramas are not being caused by an inherent problem with its car.

The team suffered a deeply frustrating Spanish Grand Prix, where both Nico Rosberg and Lewis Hamilton's form slumped after locking out the front row, and it does not yet have an answer as to why its W04 is so strong in qualifying and so poor in the races.

When asked by AUTOSPORT if Mercedes believed the matter was related to the procedure of looking after the tyres, its motorsport boss Toto Wolff said: "I don't think it is an inherent car problem because if you have an inherent car problem you cannot do three pole positions. Or be good on one stint, bad the other one."

[...]

"It requires out-of-the-box thinking. This is a pattern we have seen in the past, that the car that is doing good on the track at the beginning of the season is generally a quick car.

"We had three pole positions, so that is a quick car, but then the performance seems to deteriorate.

"Now it is about everybody in the team sticking their heads together and saying let's analyse what we do from a Saturday to Sunday. Is there anything that we need to be looking at which we didn't look at right now?"

That was a problem with the car, and they developed toward consistency in order to fix it. It was a deliberate decision to chase the ideal.

[Phil]

The key isn't to have the best car on the grid in regards to tire management; it is to have the best performance over the duration of a GP.

Try to divorce yourself from the idea that these things are distinct, because they're not. Tire management is integral to performance.

If you can't get enough heat into them, something is wrong. If you constantly overload them, something is wrong. That's what I meant when I said tires are the ultimate arbiter of performance. They dictate the pace.

Again, I don't disagree. I'm just pointing out that it's inherently difficult to know how much is and can be attributed to the tires when there is a rather big discrepancy between power unit performance. If we had identical engines with give or take similar performance, like we did before 2014, then yes, it's easier to pin-point the cause.

You used the word pace - which IMO is rather fitting to describe the performance of a vehicle over a longer period, like over the duration of an entire GP. That RedBull and most Renault cars aren't only slow 'pace wise' - their apparent lack of power is also visible in qualifying and in the speed traps. That isn't due to them not being in the right temperature range. And that is before you factor in that they are already running a compromised set-up (compared to those teams that do have more power) to find the best trade-of given their 'package'.

Just as a minor point; RedBull was never entirely bad pace wise in all the years of Pirelli tires tailored to the extreme. They might not have been the best car tire degradation wise (in 2012-2013, that must have been clearly Lotus, though they tailored their car perhaps too much for longevity), but they clearly weren't the worst. In fact, even up until 'exploding tires in Silverstone', they not only were nearly tied with most pole positions (3 Redbull vs 4 Mercedes), but they had most wins (3 wins for Vettel vs 2 Alonso etc). So with or without exploding tires and the change of tire constructions for the Hungarian GP, we probably still would have seen Redbull take both championships. How is it, that suddenly, a mere year later - they have supposedly become so bad at tire management?

[FoxHound]

You say that, Phil, but what of Red Bull's pace in 2014 with Renault power? 2nd best team on the grid as I recall. The stats also back this up.

So, can we deduce that in this frozen formula, Ferrari and Mercedes did a better job of "development" for 2015... or did Renault, as I suspect, been pressurised into adding too much, too soon?

We cannot have it both ways to say that the engine Regs are too restrictive, but that the gap to Mercedes is now twice what it was in the first year of V6 turbo's.

[Phil]

I already covered this in another thread - namely the one where I gathered all the data of all the teams since 2010 and analyzed who made progress going from 2013 to 2014 and who didn't. Williams should have been 2nd, but again, they made stupid strategic errors and RedBull was able to benefit from 3 Mercedes technical issues (DNF, safety car chaos and collision in Spa): http://www.f1technical.net/forum/viewto ... 15#p570015

[FoxHound]

I already covered this in another thread - namely the one where I gathered all the data of all the teams since 2010 and analyzed who made progress going from 2013 to 2014 and who didn't. Williams should have been 2nd, but again, they made stupid strategic errors and RedBull was able to benefit from 3 Mercedes technical issues (DNF, safety car chaos and collision in Spa): http://www.f1technical.net/forum/viewto ... 15#p570015

That Red Bull benefited from those events suggests to me they were the second best team in 2014. If your analysis doesn't show this, could I suggest it as flawed?

[Cold Fussion]

You say that, Phil, but what of Red Bull's pace in 2014 with Renault power? 2nd best team on the grid as I recall. The stats also back this up.

Surely more of an indictment of the performance of the other teams. While I'm positive they over inflate the performance deficit of the Renault PU to the media, they will know internally to good level of accuracy the power of all the other teams so you have to accept it when they say they are behind.

One has to remember that none of their wins last year were on merit (unless you count Canada). I think it shows that as a team that even if there is a slim chance of a victory they are playing to win and are aggressive about it (unlike say Williams).

[FoxHound]

You say that, Phil, but what of Red Bull's pace in 2014 with Renault power? 2nd best team on the grid as I recall. The stats also back this up.

Surely more of an indictment of the performance of the other teams. While I'm positive they over inflate the performance deficit of the Renault PU to the media, they will know internally to good level of accuracy the power of all the other teams so you have to accept it when they say they are behind.

One has to remember that none of their wins last year were on merit (unless you count Canada). I think it shows that as a team that even if there is a slim chance of a victory they are playing to win and are aggressive about it (unlike say Williams).

Renault are behind, I accept that.
But this alone does not explain the massive discrepancy in performance between 2014 to 15.