Interesting F1 ideas...........poss' new regs?

[Reca]

Dave :
first of all thank you for your kind words, I’m glad my post are useful sometimes About the different kind of racing I think I already expressed my point of view, there are different disciplines and each one has his own particularity. IMO Formula 1 particularities are technology and ability of the driver to exploit it in the best way (being it by using in the race or helping with the feedback the engineers to develop it in testing); close racing even in the past 50 years hardly has been the strong point of F1 while compared with for example bike racing or oval racing. And IMO it’s a huge mistake to constantly make comparisons looking for a way, for example, to make F1 racing more similar to bike racing, they are different and will never be similar. Furthermore what would be the point, they don’t exclude each other, one can love and watch both, or simply watch what he likes the most. And the same can be said for endurance, rally, IRL, Nascar etc etc

As for manufacturers needing a reason to be there, that’s indeed a crucial point. And unfortunately also one of the reasons of the very strict regulations. Each manufacturer want to show his technological level but no manufacturer is willing to risk too much, being possibly beaten by someone else arriving with a new design making all the other designs obsolete. Just look at the imposition of the V10. Everybody spent money on the V10 because it was at the time the best solution. Then Toyota was planning to enter with a V12 because they thought the technology was mature for it to be competitive; to avoid the possibility they were right (forcing everybody to make a V12) the manufacturers already in F1 preferred to make the V10 mandatory. That’s just an example, probably the most famous of the recent years, but there’s plenty of similar situations even on the smallest things.

The great history of motor racing is mainly about cars and drivers, especially drivers. Make the drivers the focus of attention, place the greatest demands on all their skills, let them succeed, or fail.
Get rid of technologies designed just for sheer performance. Bring back manual shifted transmissions, get rid of the wings, limit the power from the engines.

Here I’m sorry but I disagree with you.
Technology doesn’t exclude driver importance, on the contrary.
I heard from an ex F1 engineer that when Mansell and Patrese were teammates at the Williams, driving the car with active suspensions etc... often Patrese was walking in the pits scratching his head because he was unable to understand how the hell was Mansell capable to be 3 to 5 km/h faster than him in a corner that both were taking at full throttle and with, apparently, the same line...
Or... ask 10 people what’s the Senna’s race they remember the most. I bet at least 5 or 6 will say “Donington 1993”. Well the McLaren Senna was driving that year was possibly the car with the highest number of driving aids of the whole history. But nobody says that the TC, active suspensions, fly by wire etc etc diminished the greatness of Senna driving that day. In the last two races of that year that car also did feature a servo brake system to maximise the pressure at highest speed; that is, at the start of braking Senna just touched the brake pedal and the pressure on the brake circuit was set to maximum level reducing it giving it back to driver the control only at lower speed to avoid blockage. Senna won two races undoubtedly also thanks to that system. Does it diminishes his driving these days ? IMO no, because he had to exploit that system at maximum and certainly it wasn’t easy.
At the end the manual shifted transmission, I honestly can’t see why people make big deal about it. I mean, a driver doesn’t require a particular gift to operate a manual gearbox, hundreds of drivers in the world do it. Furthermore since 90s even the completely manual gearboxes in lower series don’t require to use the clutch anymore, just move the lever and that’s it for upshift, for downshift you just add a blip on the throttle. All the drivers know very well how to do it, they did it in all the lower series, way back since karting days. Once they are in F1 they don’t need to show that they can do it anymore, just like a physics professor doesn’t need to say “I know that F = ma” at the start of a seminar; A F1 driver just need to show that he can push to the limit these cars that, in spite of the fact that aren’t as fast as a dragster in straight line or have, on road tracks including 40 Mph corners, an average speed lower than NASCAR in ovals, are way faster than anything else in the same given road track and are far from easy to drive even with all the aids.

As a side note, I'd like to offer one specific rule change. Allow refuelling, and tire changes. Allow the teams as much as they desire. But allow only one task per pit stop. You can change tires, but not refuel, and vice versa. Would make for interesting strategies.

Here on the contrary I’m totally with you. At least about the intention, I would just change a bit the details : you can change tyre and refuel on the same pit stop, but you can’t do it contemporarily (first change tyres, then refuel, or vice versa). And since we are at it, a drastic reduction of both the pit crew (4 people maximum to change tyres + 2 to lift the car + 2 to refuel) and the refuelling fuel rate (5 or 6 lt/sec instead of 12).

Many years ago, in the heyday of skirted ground effect cars, I recall being told that the skirted chassis generated almost all the downforce, the the then tiny wings attached to the cars were there primarily to balance the aero effect.

In fact during that era cars also ran without the front wing. That was because the cp of the underfloor was more or less at the throat of the tunnel (hence in the first part of it) and a front wing would have moved the car cp too much at the front, also considering that these car had usually a very high percentage of mass at the rear.

I'm gonna disagree with Reca on the moveable devices (kind of).

My opinion is that the main problem in overtaking is a loss of balance when closely following another car - the front wing loses grip, and the car understeers.

Solution, allow a moveable front wing only.

It’s true that the loss of balance is a big problem because that’s what the driver feels (drivers are more sensitive to the downforce distribution than to the amount of downforce itself, just look how their confidence on the car changes with just a couple of “turns” on the flap at the pitstop) and that’s one of the main issues, driver will probably complain about lack of grip even if grip is possibly there, just because they lack confidence on it. And obviously this will also be very personal, not the same for all drivers.
Unfortunately exactly because of that sensitivity it would be very difficult to correct the problem with a movable device, the downforce loss is dependant by speed, distance from the leading car, rake, yaw etc etc, a quantity of parameters that would make simply impossible to continuously adapt the wing configuration in the right way to “fix” the driver feeling, the attempt could possibly make the car behaviour even less predictable than it is now.
Furthermore you have to consider that it’s F1. You (ie FIA) give them the nail of a finger and they (the teams) take the whole arm... as a start... This means that even if your intention is to allow movable front wing to “fix” the loss of downforce while following another car, the designers would think about performance only finding the way to convert this possibility in an advantage all the time. For example they would focus the design on the usage of maximum downforce from the front wing and then just reduce the angle in high speed sections. After all that’s more or less the same thing that they are doing right now with the front wing flap deformation. It’s aimed to shift the DF distribution to the rear in high speed section increasing driver confidence via a slight understeer while still keeping a slightly more oversteering attitude in the slow sections; obviously this happen gradually and in a very predictable way.

[DaveKillens]

Even though moveable aero aids are now in some production vehicles, IMO, I don't want them in racing.
For two reasons, the first of which is the unpredictability of the system. If a wind decides to change angle without the driver being fully aware, the car could easily make an unwanted direction change. As mentioned in the previous posts about moveable front wings, yes, they could be altered to compensate for dirty air in front. But if that same wing does the same change in angle of attack going into a corner, the car will definitely go into a serious oversteer condition, possible resulting in collision with another car, or an off track excursion.
My second reason is safety. When wings were first tried, they broke at unopportune times. Yes, the first generation of F1 wings were attached directly to the suspension uprights, and that definitely fed harsh loads back intop the wing structure. But in racing, parts break. And just making it any easier in any way for a wing to break, makes my safety concerns arise. These aren't rectratable rear spoilers in a Porsche, or even wing flaps on a Boeing 747. These are components subjected to just about every form of abuse. It's a much harsher environment, one that seeks out the weak components and breaks them.

[Ciro Pabón]

I suppose you could put Ayrton Senna in charge of an interstellar atomic cruiser and then, after he gets the knack of it, he will drive it around the moon 5 seconds faster than Prost. But that could be boring to watch, at least if you work with cars.

Then, I wonder how Kart World Racing series gets so low exposure in the news. Lets accept it: if it is "only" a pilot race, it is not precissely the most exciting thing in the world. If you are a big guy, you look funny in a little kart...

F1 is about getting the top guys to drive the top cars, I think. It has been for ages.

Movable devices have been used (I remember Fangio using them on a Mercedes, really 50ish or so), and they have been proved a "no-no". First, they are UGLY. Cars tend to seem like birds spreading their feathers at the entrance of a curve, something like the moto GP driver's gestures of "body braking". And, second, they are really dangerous for everyday use in any mode of failure you can imagine. If a "feather" twists, you slam into something...

That it is why traditionally the emphasis has been on the tyres limitations, my friends: no downforce or weight can be used for lateral force that it is not transmitted through the tyres UNLESS you allow movable aero parts. They can brake and STEER your car without using the tires. It is a Pandora's box. They can become something like ailerons and flaps: it is a car, it is a plane, it is Superman...

I have been offering for a while a remedy for today's cars foes: improve the circuits. Yes, I know, I design highways...

Anyway, I believe Turkey it is a first approximation, with a couple of "multiple-line-of-race" curves. Nurburgring used to be another solution: a circuit so long you could not possibly remember everything. Then there was the first Monza, long before NASCAR, back in 1920s or 30s, with its super-wide steep-peralted curves.

You could have "multiple lane" circuits if you want to be able to overtake, specially if you want circuits that "develop" a wider race line, in terms of rubber stuck to the ground. Today's circuits offer only a railroad track design, at least to my civil-engineered eye.

Maybe you should let the pilots tell you what they need in a car (and in a circuit) to make it fun and driveable under the newest tech. I do not hear them asking for movable aero-parts.

What I imagine to hear from the pilots is, definitely, some restraint on G force, more than in newtons of down force and this is a tyre (and circuit design, ehem...) department thing. Car design has always been about cars and designs for people.