F1technical.net

At least one high end performance car introduced a 'radical' rear wing and air dam upgrade which was designed by Styling and then modded by the aero people until it produced no reduction in performance. So it is certainly true that for one vehicle at least, the aero mods were for looks not performance.

I think Erunanethiel has raised an interesting point. If we are to ask why F1 levels of downforce are required for a road car, perhaps we should also consider why 1000hp+ and 250mph+ is a requirement.

I think as has been mentioned, the problem is one of compromise as well as there being some technical challenges to overcome. It was suggested that the body work would have to look like a current LMP 1 car and certainly such a design avenue would have a substantial aero benefit, but it would also compromise the styling of the car (and we do know that styling is very important for the road car market).

If we look further back in time to the IMSA GTP cars of the early 90's, the last generation of those road rockets were producing downforce figures approaching 10000lbs at 200mph. The external styling of those bygone cars had more in common with today's hyper cars than current LMPs do. Those IMSA beasts were endowed with huge venturi tunnels underneath, but packaging these in a road where consideration has to be give to cooling fans etc, while possible would perhaps be more difficult.
To reap the full benefits of the tunnels, a large rear wing will be required. Ideally it would overhang the rear bodywork allowing interaction with the tunnels, however these would likely contravene road worthiness regs. Having a huge rear wing above the rear body work would reduce its effectiveness. It would probably require a (heavy) system and complex design (I'm thinking airliner retractable flaps but in reverse).

With the exception of one contributor here (self proclaimed) very few people drive their road cars at anything like the limit around corners, deliberately. In fact I doubt many people regularly corner their car under control at 0.6g on public roads. So why on earth bother with all the downsides of a high downforce car when you'll never use it?

Let's see, you wander down to Supercar Bragging forum

"My car gets 1g of downforce at 100 mph"

"Cool"

"The ride's crap cos the springs are so hard, the tires wear out in no time at all, fuel economy (and hence range) is abysmal"

"Not so cool"

"...and of course the theoretical top speed and the 0-60 and 0-100 time are worse"

"You idiot why did you bother"

Exactly Greg

It is similar to the argument for 'wider' tyres for use in snow or sand.

Instead of downforce, what if the question said 'aero'?

We know that there are huge benefits to fitting aero packages to the back of lorry trailers, and they do not exceed speeds of 55mph.

So we know downforce is useless below something like 150kph, but what about reducing drag for increase in fuel economy using f1 aero tricks?

What would you guys do?

mzivtins wrote:Instead of downforce, what if the question said 'aero'?

We know that there are huge benefits to fitting aero packages to the back of lorry trailers, and they do not exceed speeds of 55mph.

So we know downforce is useless below something like 150kph, but what about reducing drag for increase in fuel economy using f1 aero tricks?

What would you guys do?

Buy a DS?

Why would you look at F1 for aero tricks to reduce drag when solar cars and production cars are already way ahead of them?

Greg Locock wrote:With the exception of one contributor here (self proclaimed) very few people drive their road cars at anything like the limit around corners, deliberately. In fact I doubt many people regularly corner their car under control at 0.6g on public roads. So why on earth bother with all the downsides of a high downforce car when you'll never use it?

Let's see, you wander down to Supercar Bragging forum

"My car gets 1g of downforce at 100 mph"

"Cool"

"The ride's crap cos the springs are so hard, the tires wear out in no time at all, fuel economy (and hence range) is abysmal"

"Not so cool"

"...and of course the theoretical top speed and the 0-60 and 0-100 time are worse"

"You idiot why did you bother"

My thoughts exactly:

rjsa wrote:Just add a Cl field here and everyone will be happy:

At least it was kicked off the Aero section.

Greg Locock wrote:With the exception of one contributor here (self proclaimed) very few people drive their road cars at anything like the limit around corners, deliberately. In fact I doubt many people regularly corner their car under control at 0.6g on public roads. So why on earth bother with all the downsides of a high downforce car when you'll never use it?

Let's see, you wander down to Supercar Bragging forum

"My car gets 1g of downforce at 100 mph"

"Cool"

"The ride's crap cos the springs are so hard, the tires wear out in no time at all, fuel economy (and hence range) is abysmal"

"Not so cool"

"...and of course the theoretical top speed and the 0-60 and 0-100 time are worse"

"You idiot why did you bother"

I agree, but the fact remains that supercar and hypercar manufacturers continue to design performance into their cars that very very few will ever use and they strive to increase this performance with every new model.

They don't really strive for performance. The point in making hyper cars is creating an image for the brand. Otherwise they wouldn't make overweight hybrids.

mertol wrote:They don't really strive for performance. The point in making hyper cars is creating an image for the brand. Otherwise they wouldn't make overweight hybrids.

Of course they strive for performance, however they are limited because of other compromises that need to be made. The Bugatti has actually achieved almost 270mph, so performance is there.

With regards to downforce, one thing that perhaps hasn't been discussed are tyre limitations. There is possibly only so much that can be extracted even from high performance road tyres. So it may be a case of the tyres not being able to utilise all the downforce available.

2 tons weight is only good for performance when you look at figures like top speed and 0-60mph. Radical sr8 is a car that was made for performance. The hybrid hypercars are "image" cars.

mertol wrote:2 tons weight is only good for performance when you look at figures like top speed and 0-60mph. Radical sr8 is a car that was made for performance. The hybrid hypercars are "image" cars.

Again they are compromises and image/styling is part of the compromise.

That's what I'm saying. Their main purpose isn't performance that's why it gets compromised.

There is one more thing:
For F1 races, on road courses, the manhole covers get welded, so they can not fly away due tu the pressure difference.

In 2004 the DTM race in Shanghai was stopped for that reason.

So if a road car had that much downforce, and the downforce was created from tunnels or a diffuser, it could not run fast over manhole covers.