F1technical.net

McLaren ran with an illegal upper wing element for quite a while last year testing.

I don;t really think the rules come into the equation here.... it's not a performance component, just a research item.

While it could be a sophisticated sensor I think it's just a rubbing strip to determine how much the sidewall deflects in case they need to mount something in that location in the future.

I like this pic, how they're covering up what they're sponsored by

LOL! =D>

Any comments on the positioning of the opening in the static disc..??
The Toyota and Renault layout seems to copy the Ferrari. Naturally McLaren has done it a bit differently. One might guess they have spent the time in the wind tunnel to understand it a bit better. Or how the different positions react to different aero designs.
Since this is a device to take advantage of the wake generated by the front wheel and the wake most likely extends well back of the front wheel, are the now common chimneys being used to dump rediator outlet air into a low pressure region in the shadow of the front wheel.??
The question comes up since some teams have introduced new cars with chimneys but these are blanked off in early season testing.
If the static wheel covers offer significant benefits, there must be designers burning the midnight oil to come up with the rear wheel equivalent. Shouldn't be too difficult once you get to accept that the whell nut will form part of the outer wheel bearing or contain a bearing of its own. This is the time I suspect the FIA will step in and halt the whole process.

Ian P.

Not wishing to sound thick but how do you test brake ducting in a wind tunnel?? As surely you need to brake and heat some air?? Or blow some from the caliper...something anyway.

So how's it done? Or is it tested on the brake testing dyno.

Simulating the flow over the car with rotating wheels is a common feature of F1 wind tunnels. In fact it is absolutely necessary to get the interraction between all the bits, moving and stationary. They use a moving ground-plane or rolling road to give the effect of a car moving through stationary air.

http://www.motorsport.com/photos/select ... wind_tunne

There is also a Sauber site with good pictures of their rolling road which will go up to 150 mph and house a full size car. Most teams use 50% or 60% scale models for testing, cheaper and faster to fabricate parts.

As for simulating the heated air comming off the brakes, that is one for the CFD simulators. It would be near impossible to duplicate this in a tunnel.

Ian P.

I figured it was CFD driven, but didn't know if they could innovate in the wind tunnel.

axle wrote:I figured it was CFD driven, but didn't know if they could innovate in the wind tunnel.

I would build an Aluminum rotor disk and use it like an electrical resistance to generate heat. Then you could film the wind flowing through with a thermal camera and see how the heat flux moves.

Ian P. wrote: As for simulating the heated air comming off the brakes, that is one for the CFD simulators. It would be near impossible to duplicate this in a tunnel.

Whats does the word impossible means?
Didn´t you see Adidas comercial, man?

Ian P. wrote:There is also a Sauber site with good pictures of their rolling road which will go up to 150 mph and house a full size car. Most teams use 50% or 60% scale models for testing, cheaper and faster to fabricate parts.

As for simulating the heated air comming off the brakes, that is one for the CFD simulators. It would be near impossible to duplicate this in a tunnel.

These days, it's often marginally more expensive to make parts for a wind tunnel model than a full-scale car. The parts on the full scale car are designed to be right on the margins in terms of their construction, so making a 60% scale copy can be a nightmare if the part is complex - the little aero signposts ('air this way, please') that cars are festooned with these days are particularly annoying because they have such delicate shapes. Something that is a carbon part on the car may be steel or alu on the model for ease of manufacture.

The reason teams use a scale model is accuracy. Although they like to put out publicity photos showing their full-size cars in the tunnel ("Look how big our shiny new tunnel is!"), that setup is hardly ever used for any kind of testing, because the cross section of the working area isn't big enough to accurately model the airflow in the space around and behind the car.

To make sure you get proper resolution of the behavior of the air not directly in contact with the car, you need a lot of space - too small in some dimension and it will fatally skew your results, as Honda discovered on the RA107. In CFD, the 'working section' simulated for a full size car is typically a 'box' of air something like 90ft high, 90ft wide and 300ft long. You can cut this down somewhat before it has any really major effects on accuracy - in CFD the mesh around the edges of the section has pretty big cells - but a full scale tunnel accurate enough for F1 would still have to be enormous, with subsequently massive demands for power and cooling. Even with the stratospheric budgets of modern F1, anything bigger than 60% is uneconomical to build.

Getting back to the original question, Ian is absolutely right, you use CFD for this kind of thing. It's far, far easier (and cheaper!) than anything you could come up with for a tunnel.

they have new wheelcovers. I think these are smaller then the previous ones. Maybe the found a way to implemend them into the rules

If the last cover extension was to test how much the tyre deflects under normal conditions this will be the sensor pack that that test has led to. They don't look like ducts to me...more a temporary sensor unit.

axle wrote:...They don't look like ducts to me...more a temporary sensor unit.

You're probably right. They would seem to fall foul of the width rules as mentioned a page back here by someone.

R

In my view this ---> http://images.gpupdate.net/large/92121.jpg complies with the regulations.

11.4 Air ducts :
Air ducts around the front and rear brakes will be considered part of the braking system and shall not
protrude beyond :
- a plane parallel to the ground situated at a distance of 160mm above the horizontal centre line of the
wheel ;

They do not extend up further than 160mm from the hub nut.

- a plane parallel to the ground situated at a distance of 160mm below the horizontal centre line of the
wheel ;

They do not extend below further than 160mm from the hub nut.

- a vertical plane parallel to the inner face of the wheel rim and displaced from it by 120mm toward the
centre line of the car.

They are on the outside of the wheel, and therefore are not affected by this.

Furthermore, when viewed from the side the ducts must not protrude forwards beyond the periphery of the
tyre or backwards beyond the wheel rim.

Crucially, they do not extend beyond the tyre and only protrude forwards beyond the wheel rim.

All measurements will be made with the wheel held in a vertical position.