swifteddie1 wrote: ↑20 Mar 2023, 06:41
I am a bit confused about the upcoming Baku upgrade.
The consensus is that the current aero philosophy was abandoned 5 months ago when the team were going down a dead end. However i've also read that the update for Baku is probably going to be worth a few tenths. Granted the midfield battle is so tight that a few tenths puts you much more comfortably into the top 10....my question is if the current concept was abandoned so long ago shouldn't the expected gains be more than a few tenths?
Unluckily there is no “magic bullet” in order to gain performance / lap time… Performance in an F1 car from roughly 3 factors:
Aerodynamics / Downforce efficiency
Suspension
Chassis (COG, Weight)
They all have to work together in order to provide lap time, The MCL60 already has received improvements in the Suspension and Chassis… We can see this in the lap times and the improvement year over year, even though they are using the same front wing and the same floor edge treatment as in 2022… So further improvement will simply come from the aero portion of the package (arguably the most important part).
There is a lot of speculation in regards to how much lap time it will provide, the reality is that no one really knows and people are trying to read between the lines to guess how much that would be worth… We are lucky that we get from PhillipM a little bit of information before everyone else and what we “know” is that the changes are coming from the floor and potentially a new front wing (which makes sense, given that this two parts are for the most part a carry over from the previous season, which if they found a different way to manage airflow to, in the tunnels at at the edge of the floor is to be expected that this would be the areas of focus.
In regards to the team finding a dead end… Part of the development process is to analyze different avenues / paths and then they iterate those to see how much additional performance can be extracted from those… At certain point they realized that they were finding more performance out of the “new concept” than the current one and decided that since it was showing more potential to focus on that one instead.
The problem when talking about “concepts” is that a lot of fans quickly infer that implies new sidepods or something like that (given that it is the largest and most visible part of the car, people assume them as the biggest differentiator… But a new concept could simply be a different Tunnel entrance, different geometry on the tunnels, vortices created by the fences, different treatment of the edge of the floor, etc… Funny thing is, they could actually have a very different concept and none of us would probably realize it if it’s in the underside.
How much more performance? Why speculate? Most of us would be wrong if anyone tries to put a number of tenths to it (also, how much performance it brings could be very track specific)… It won’t be long until we found out, one more race (Australia) and hopefully we will be able to analyze the data a bit in Baku.
