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Formula One published some of their in-progress design concepts for the chassis regulations
revisions due to come into effect in, hopefully, 2021.
Although, immediately, that’s a bit of a lie and we all kind of know it. One concept
image was leaked from a talk Ross Brawn gave in Singapore and FOM realised they had to
produce some form of press release to stop the wildfire gossip around this one image
spreading misinformation and leading people down the wrong paths.
So, Formula One’s hand was forced, and it’s likely these images were never supposed to
be shared widely and may or may not bear any resemblance to the regulations brought into
sporting law for 2021. Nonetheless, we can still explore the ideas
being played with in these images. The main objectives of revolutionising the
aero in 2021 is twofold - firstly, and most importantly, to improve racing.
Ross Brawn, hilariously, said, ‘we established very early on in our research that the cars
are very bad at following each other’. Yeah, Ross, that’s as obvious as the tail on a
peacock. Was your research “watching F1 in 2004?”.
Anyway, he’s right. Once a chasing car gets within a few car lengths of the car in front,
it loses about 50% of its downforce, according to models.
According to Brawn, and - let’s maybe not be as optimistic yet as he is - their research
and development has managed to bring this down to just a 20% loss of downforce.
The second objective is an aesthetic one - Formula One wants aggressive, exciting looking cars
that people drool over and stick on their bedroom walls. [LOTUS 2014 ON KIDS WALL]
Brawn insists the overtaking problem takes precedence and making the cars look awesome
is a tangential issue that won’t override the needs of the racing. We saw how that went
in 2017. Now these cars look pretty nice, depending
on your tastes, and we will go into them in a minute. But first, let’s just make sure
we’ve got our feet planted on planet Earth and remember the monumental challenge Formula
1 has here in crafting these regulations. Remember - rules can often breed very strange
looking car indeed, even with the best intentions from the rule makers.
Engineers are single-minded machines. They will only seek to extract maximum performance
from within the rulespace. They don’t care about aesthetics, or environmentalism or really
even safety at the heart of it. When their design head is on, they are simply aiming
to build the fastest possible car the rules will allow.
And this is how loopholes get wrenched open and suddenly we have a load of cars with trunk
noses, an outbreak of winglets or a massive bit of scaffolding on an otherwise elegant
chassis. Remember, at this stage no rules have been
announced, just the concepts. The concepts explain the objectives, as discussed,
and some of the ways they aim to achieve them. The rules or regulations specifically describe
a legal framework, a space in which teams can design freely and implement their ideas.
And you have to create this framework very carefully to get the end result that you really
want. For example, if we were inventing football,
we might think it’s enough to say: a) you can’t use your hands
b) you have to keep the ball inside this painted box.
c) score points by getting the ball into the other goal.
You might then be surprised when one team turns up with cricket bats to beat the other
team with, and the other team turns up covered in glue so the ball sticks to their bodies.
At this point you might need to go and make the rules a bit more specific and this is
how we end up with a regulations framework 4 million pages long.
This happened with noses in F1 in 2012. The FIA wanted to lower the noses so that they
lined up with the side impact structures, such that a t-boning wouldn’t take someone’s
head off. So they mandated that, past a certain point,
the nose could only be so high. Unfortunately, F1 engineers really wanted
high noses, so they kept the noses high for as long as they could and then stepped down
to the mandatory height, creating some truly inelegant designs.
The rule makers assumed designers would just create a nice flowing shape, but the designers
didn’t care about that at all. The rules didn’t account for interpretation - they
didn’t understand what gains the engineers would seek to exploit.
Hilariously, they made the same mistake again in 2014 when they lowered the noses again,
leading to… nightmare beasts that belong under the sea with the water bears.
My point is that your concept - your intentions and idealised versions of the rules - may
be great, but if you don’t structure the rules properly, engineers will walk right
around them and the cars that turn up on track in 2021 may look nothing like the these: the
most optimistic interpretations possible. That slight diversion out of the way, let’s
look at this concept art. Three concepts were shown to the public but
they represent three stages of evolution in their research and thinking so let’s step
through them in order. The first concept is not hugely different
from the cars we have today, save for the simplified wing due to appear next year. This
concept is mainly to demonstrate how they want to evolve the Halo design to be more
aesthetically integrated into the car. There’s no particular word on whether this
Halo we see here is structurally capable or whether it’s just a - forgive the expression
- pipe dream. Clearly the current Halo has a very specific
engineering that allows it to be as super strong as it is. Hopefully they’ll be able
to keep this strength in the device as they modify its shape, or perhaps we’ll end up
with some non-structural aesthetic shaping over the top.
This version of the Halo is pretty elegant and aggressive, though - complimenting the
lines of the car, as if it’s been carved by the air rushing over the chassis.
The second concept image here seems more fundamentally focussed on the aesthetics, following the
2017 philosophy that cars look faster if you skew them backwards and pumping it up a notch
However, there are some aero ideas here that follow through to the third concept and may
likely give clues as to some fundamentals that FOM and the FIA are moving forward with.
First we’ve got this dolphin-tail style front wing with the upper elements cascading
from the nose instead of being stacked on the lower base elements.
Other than being stylistically… a choice… this kind of wing design will start to minimise
the vortices generated off the tips and edges of the front wing elements.
As we saw in previous videos, these vortices contribute massively to the disrupted airflow
behind the car that ultimately wrecked the downforce of the following car.
We’re also seeing flat-sculpted covers for the suspension and what’s being called ‘sharkfin
posts’ and winglets further back. Both of these devices are right in the heavy
airflow through which engineers purposely send energised air and vortices around the
body of the car. Again this airflow contributes to the mess
send out behind the car so the idea here looks to be to clear up and homologate this airflow
a bit and/or prevent designers from doing anything too wild with it.
We can see this taken further in the third concept where we now have these big vanes
positioned down the side of the car to smooth turbulence and de-energise vortices moving
through this area. This is supposedly the most up-to-date culmination
of their R&D work, but seeing as the car has the old F1 logo on it, we can be pretty sure
this work is at least a year old. Nevertheless, we can still appreciate the ideas at play.
A lot of this sidepod area is currently heavily biased towards looks, not airflow cleanup,
with the team seemingly borrowing heavily from other concept-style designs like the
BMW i-series that involve folding layers into each other like sexy pastry.
The front wings now have much larger end plates which again will do a lot to kerb vortex generation
off the element tips. The rear wing is now even lower and wider,
both aesthetically aggressive and a solid move towards downforce and balance.
However, the concept removes the rear wing end plates from the main plane which are important
for boosting the efficiency of the wing. It also appears the rear wing angle can no
longer be adjusted, unless this second flap here moves? A fixed rear wing could be interesting
for setup. And does this wing allow for DRS? Very little has been said to explain the thought
process behind this. It may just be an initial idea from a graphic designer that will be
re-interpreted by the technical team. All in all, we need to take these designs
with a pinch of salt. They are designed to both excite and inspire with no information
given at all given on the kind of rules these concepts will lead to.
It’s interesting that there’s not been much talk given to shifting aero away from
the wings and overbody and more towards the underbody and ground effect - an aero less
susceptible to disruption and dirty air. But who knows what’s going on behind the scenes.
Ross Brawn is a talented engineer and he and his team are less likely to be blindsided
by engineers exploiting loopholes that rule-makers before them. So let’s be optimistic that
the eventual set of rules will be the first step towards getting the cars racing again.
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