Odd question about floor aero.

[Zynerji]

If you were to suspend a solid floor from the wheel uprights in each corner, what would the effect be?

I imagine that large suspension movements would cause huge issues, but since most movement is within the tyre sidewall, that would be almost irrelevant. I imagine that the handling of the car would be different as you would be effectively applying downforce directly to the tyre contact patch instead of a compliant suspension.

I'm in NO WAY SUGGESTING THAT F1 DO THIS!

I'm just interested in hearing what the experts in race car dynamics have to say, and if the initial drawbacks can be overcome enough to make it something worth checking out.

Thanks!

[humble sabot]

This is essentially what Lotus were trying to do with the twin chassis car, the 88, albeit with the sideskirts rather than the whole floor. The execution had its own difficulties, but I think the main problem you'd encounter is an order of magnitude change in unsprung mass. Meaning that any suspension of the chassis would be nearly negated, since the combination of the floor's mass, and the downforce acting on it would make the ratio of sprung to unsprung probably feel more like the Williams https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LFmWd2JkC8

In principle, it might work a bit better right now in F1 with relatively overweight chassis, and a significant, but not majority component of the downforce from the floor. The ratios might be closer to doable than most of the time.

plus sides: less pitch sensitivity since the floor would maintain its attitude at all times, possibility to run softer springs, suggesting to me there might be a possible grip improvement.
downsides: tyre development would be extra difficult, suspension tuning would have an extra dimension of difficulty as the transition of the coupling between the tyre's behaviour and that of the rest of the suspension would change depending on speed, particularly as underbody airflow is quite different to wings in a free stream.

[Zynerji]

Thank you, sir. That was a fantastic answer.

I agree with those points, and I also think certain things would overcome some issues.

I think active suspension would be able to compensate for the sprung/unsprung weight change, but realistically, the floor, if fully suspended from the bottom of the uprights, and not the chassis, would not be overly heavy. a single person carries them now without much trouble. I'm not saying that the weight would be insignificant, but i think it would be able to be overcome.

[zac510]

The floor is the bottom of the monocoque (to define it in simplistic terms). In my opinion it has to be affixed to the monocoque to be a floor. If you mount a panel to the suspension mounts and it's not attached the the monocoque then it's not a floor, it's just a big body panel that's under the monocoque.

That said, it's a curious idea! Might be even more fun to have this panel bend when the car pitches - perhaps you could increase the diffuser area under braking.

[Jolle]

Indeed lotus did this with the 88, but they didn’t fixated the aero chassis directly to the wheel uprights, they sprung them as well. So you can have the aero mass with heavy springs and the actual mass of the car very soft for excellent grip and still maintain maximum stable downforce.

[Zynerji]

Very interesting. I expected a hundred posts as to why this was stupid.

Also, it came from the initial thought of Track Limits.

If these types of floors (or belly pans) were on the cars, harsh curbing would be avoided by the drivers due to easily breaking the extended front floor area if they hit something.

Want to cut too sharp? You are going to lose 25% of your downforce when you break the pan near your front wheel...

[netoperek]

Paired with at least simple semi-active suspension (magnetorheological for example) would make room for a whole new team of analysts and double the CFD loads to optimize the effect. Cars would be once again rendered possibly to fast for human beings and FIA would either ban the solution or cut engine to 1.0 ecoboost due to safety concerns