mrluke wrote:Bhall,
[...]
Perhaps this would explain why each year the cars have been getting slower at Monza than they have at other tracks (sorry for clumsy wording).
At the risk of veering
way off-topic...
(Quick note: Because I think the quest for all-out accuracy often lends itself to creating more problems than it's worth, I've deliberately chosen what I feel are broadly representative, but uncontroversial figures for frontal area, drag coefficient, and horsepower. Real-world numbers would undoubtedly change the final result, but I'm confident it would still conform to the trends we can identify here. Nevertheless, I welcome all comments and corrections.)
Above 100kph, drag and power are the dominant factors that determine how fast a car can accelerate. This is because drag squares with speed and the power needed to overcome that exponentially increasing drag load is cubed. The major drag reductions imposed by the 2009 rule change and the 2014 elimination of the beam wing are why the latest cars are similar in terms of straight-line performance when compared to V10-era machinery, despite being 100kg heavier, down on power by
at least 100bhp, and somewhat paradoxically having much higher theoretical top-speeds.
V6t era from 70kph
V10 era from 70kph
Due to the greater penalties imposed by a larger frontal area and a higher drag coefficient, the significantly higher power and substantially lighter weight of the V10 car yield a paltry ET advantage of only 0.15s at the end of a 1000m run that starts at 70kph and results in a top-speed that's 17.36kph
lower than its V6t counterpart. Such is the nature of drag and speed that the V10's ET advantage drops to just 0.1s when that same run is started at 100kph.
V6t vs V10 from 100kph
To contextualize this a bit further, if you reduced the drag of a V10-era car to V6t-era levels, the resulting hybrid would be 0.64s quicker and 17.26kph faster than current cars.
V6t vs V10 hybrid from 70kph
How does this relate to the matter at hand? (Good question.)
For any given circuit, and for all cars with a given amount of power, there exists a level of downforce that can be considered a threshold beyond which the benefits of additional downforce are negated by the drag penalty imposed to create it. Understandably, teams never cross this circuit/power-dependent threshold.
But...
The same dynamic also exists
within each circuit for each sector, and teams
routinely suffer the penalty of carrying too much downforce through sector(s) in which downforce is unnecessary, because the penalty is completely offset by gains made through other critical sector(s). An excellent example of this is Sepang.
Within the highlighted sections of the track, downforce is more or less a hindrance to performance. But, high downforce levels throughout the rest of the lap yield huge gains, so teams gladly suffer the penalty of running too much downforce elsewhere.
In terms of sheer, cumulative distance, F1 circuits are all primarily composed of sectors in which downforce is unneeded. That ultimately means the 2009 and 2014 downforce reductions have created opportunities for performance gains, via reduced drag, throughout most sectors within most circuits, and it's responsible for the following:
mrluke wrote:Considering how little the lap times have increased for the increased weight I struggle to see how it can be possible that the cars have less power than before....
In general on the aero circuits the cars are slower but on the more power focused circuits the cars are setting very competitive times...
Melbourne 3.35%
Sepang 18.63%
Bahrain 3.03%
Shanghai 2.22%
Barcelona 13.44%
Monaco 2.10%
Because overall downforce reductions have reduced the scope in which teams can self-impose large, partial-lap restrictions, so to speak, lap times are relatively comparable for circuits that aren't necessarily downforce-critical. In those cases, the teams have mostly lost what was never needed in the first place and can now take advantage of higher top-speeds that were never feasible before. (The big difference is seen on so-called "aero tracks" where performance losses have been staggering.)
So, what can easily appear to be the result of comparable/more power at first glance is actually the result of greatly reduced drag.
Or something like that.
(By the way, I was much younger when I started writing this tome and probably had a more coherent notion of the idea I intend to convey. So, I apologize if I've failed to connect the dots as cohesively as possible. Age changes a man, yanno?)