kilcoo316 wrote:
I wouldn't agree with that at all to be honest.
The cars are balanced for corners, who cares if it would "understeer" down a straight?
The moveable flaps are there purely to compensate for the turbulent air off a car ahead.
I agree 100% with the point that they should be automatic though. The driver cannot be expected to manually re-trim the car through a corner.
I think we didn't understand each other.
The yaw induced downforce hike is in the wake not in freestream.
It was obvious since the tests of the first iterations of the OWG configurations than the balance shift was pretty important and quite sensitive due to the front wing width and endplates design.
The on track result is pretty obvious both for melbourne and malaysia, typically in the wake of another car when this one was farther into the corner (thus with a yaw angle relative to the following car) they almost every time had to correct.
Timo Glock, who was the first to complain about overtaking possibilities (including the supposed late braking that would pose problems...resulting in more braking overtaking this year than in the last year's races) he said that he was too busy keeping the car in track to try out the front flap adjustement.
That's why i talked about drivers complains, the usually mix balance problems with downforce loss...and drag drop.
you have three phenomenons with modern F1 cars: There's a balance shift because the front wing and rear wing are not affected the same AND do not recover at the same rate; you have a downforce loss (up until 45% last year at 0,50m distance) and a more surprising thing is that drag can increase in some part due to heavy separation and induced drag thus resulting in less slipstream.
This latter point needs in addition to be added with the problem of wanting to reduce loss of pressure in the wake while providing a sufficient slipstream.
Drivers usually complain about the overall situation but if you think about it,the only mean in the theory of no balance shift and no drag rise to assess downforce loss would be to see the car slide which is already difficult to assess since you never have a neutral balance, Be it last year or this year the balance changes so you always have either understeer (much less this year) or overtseer.
So it is very difficult to say it. The only spontaneous measurement is the distance at which you can follow a car without being too much affected by the three phenomenons, and if balance shifts were not there and drag drop sufficient then we would already see much imporvement in overtaking because by definition a car wanting to overtake is faster thus either having more grip or needing less.
And precisely this year, cars seem to be able to follow each other into the 0,3sec and you can see in fast corners that in contrary to last year and previous years they don't get distanced.
The increase in braking overtakings is directly relevant to that fact, since they can follow each other closer they can slipstream better (and longer due to shorter braking distances).
Of course we need to wait, Of course there are still downforce loss (it was never intented to do otherwise) but as far as the two first races are concerned and, oh max mosley noticied that too, they really seem to be able to follow each other closer and there're far more overtakings.
BUT imho the balance shift would have to be cured; if you spend your time fighting the balance you can't overtake.
