First you need to understand the rules are very prescriptive and dictate A LOT of what the teams can and can’t do. This should help:
https://www.racecar-engineering.com/art ... gulations/
The current wings are as much as an aesthetic choice by the rules makers to make the cars look fast as anything else. This was admitted to even leading up to the current cars.
Even the Y250 was a result of the rules and the 250 comes from the location from centerline, again, which the rules allowed to happened.
As for outwash, it’s a pretty easy concept to grasp at a high level. Interesting enough, Frank Dernie mentioned in an old interview that they picked up on it first from Champcar teams in the 1990s.
The thing with the front wing people need to understand is it sets up the airflow for the entire car. Especially in the ground effects era, changing the front wing will change how the air flows over and under the car and change the entire performance. Front wings also work in ground effect also. It’s location again, is dicated by rules, but theoretically you’d want them to be as close to the surface as you can without stalling.
This is unvalidated CFD, but should help you understand the general concepts of airflow of the current rule set. Look at what the air does as it hits and then comes off the wing.
https://bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/you.stony ... 602aa3.pdf
Again, it’s unvalidated and on estimated geometry, so the absolute figures are useless, so you have to look at this from a very high, generalized point of view.
Here is a short paper on a generic late 1990s Champcar:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jo ... dGlvbiJ9fQ
If you look at the floor, you’ll see they look very similiar to current F1 floors. You can also see how the floor stalls as it gets too close to the ground. Same thing happens with front wings.
There are other papers out there on their designs as well from older F1 rule sets.
especially when you look at how much variation there is across teams. Do teams focus more on maximizing Y250 vortex strength or reducing wheel wake? Also curious how this evolves through the season given the budget cap constraints.