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So the 2022 season has basically begun now with all the new cars unveiled and with a
full three days testing behind them, even if some teams’ days were less full than others.
And now that we’ve actually got to see a bunch of the design choices from teams,
understand a little bit about their approach to these new rules and see the cars out on track
it’s a good time to go through some of the main common talking points,
bits of jargon and general things you’ll be hearing about these new cars through the season.
Yes, including porpoising. But let’s start with why there’s a whole raft
of technical changes for this season. F1 wants to improve car-on-car action and let drivers race
closer without being hampered by dirty air. Previously teams exploited every avenue of
bodywork they could to create vortices right down the car from the tips of the winglets and
endplates to the many, many turning vanes and bargeboards seen down the middle of the cars.
This ejected horrible, messy, dirty air into the airstream behind them causing any car following
in that wake to suffer horrible understeer and fall back through medium-to-high speed corners.
The cars need front downforce so the front of the car can bite, steer into the corner
effectively and lead the line through the corner. If that front downforce is hampered by dirty air,
the car isn’t able to turn in properly and hold its high speed through the corner.
So, gone are all these bargeboardy bits in the middle for a start.
The wings now form solid continuous shapes that flow into what used to be endplates. At the
front they join directly onto the nose so there are now no winglet tips to generate vortices.
The DRS is now hideous, but the less spoken about that, the better.
The wheels have covers on the outside and fins on the inside to clean up some of the mess in
the air they generate when they spin at high speeds. There’s a whole other video on that.
But the biggest difference is the shift to what we’re generally calling ground effect.
There’s debate among purists over whether this is true ground effect, but
for the purposes of understanding what’s going on - and because that’s what we’re all calling it,
let’s be honest - that’s the term we’ll use. So F1 cars want to generate a lot of downforce.
That’s using the moving air to push the car down so the tyres can grip the road more effectively
and hold the car to the road through high speed corners.
Now, for the last many-a-year, we’ve focussed a lot on overbody downforce - that is using the air
over the top of the car to generate downforce by using the front and rear wings for the most part.
But you can also generate air from underneath the car. In fact,
teams have been doing that for years, too, but in a more restricted way using the diffuser.
The cars previously had flat bottoms, up to a point. Now, the cars are allowed sculpted
three-dimensional floors that channel airflow through Venturi tunnels.
Ok, so how does this generate downforce. Well, these tunnels have a large mouth, drawing
in air from the front. They also have a large opening at the exit, where the air escapes again.
But underneath the car, the space in which the air can flow is shrunk dramatically by bringing
the floor surface incredibly close to the ground. So at the front of the Venturi tunnel you’ve got a
large mass of air, moving at the speed of the normal airflow, and at the back, you’ve also
got a large mass of air moving at the speed of the normal airflow. But these two airflows are
connected, unbroken through this narrow tunnel and the only way all of this air can get through this
small space at the same rate is to accelerate. So the airflow speed underneath the car is much
faster than the airflow speed over and around the car which means it’s a much lower pressure.
And low pressure areas create a suction. So this fast moving air under the car pulls the car down,
and that’s the ground effect downforce. And the advantage of underfloor downforce
is it’s less susceptible to disturbed air than overbody downforce is. So hopefully,
this makes for racier racing. Now, at the rear of the car we’ve got
beam wings returning - these things here - and in combination with the big diffusers and these rear
wheel flick ups, these designs will hopefully throw the airflow higher and more out of the
way of following traffic. And we’re actually seeing a lot of design variation in this area.
But the big question is: will it work? Is it working? After all, the drivers have tried
it now. And so far, the answer seems to be that driving behind other cars is markedly improved,
with some reservation. Drivers have noticed a difference.
While Verstappen said there are some understeer/oversteer problems still,
there’s not a big drop in downforce anymore. And Leclerc, Sainz, Albon and Schumacher
have all reported how it does seem noticeably easier to drive in the wake of another car now. So
that’s good. That’s hopeful, isn’t it? The front wing is still being asked to
do a lot of work at the front of the car, so we can’t get complacent yet. The downforce across
the length of the car is biased rearwards with the front wing working to balance the aero load.
However, the downforce work at the rear of the car is split between the rear wing and the diffuser,
whereas at the front the vast majority of the downforce comes from the front wing
alone. So if the front wing efficacy is compromised by dirty air, you’ll immediately
get hit by understeer in ways the underfloor can’t save. So - something to keep an eye on.
Now, a noticeable change in the way the cars are designed and set up now is in the
stiffness of the suspension. Previously, with the flat floors, teams would elevate
their rear end to exaggerate the performance of their diffuser - a tilting known as rake.
This year though, these cars are planted firmly to the ground as that’s what you need to get
these ground effect floors working. And in order to hold them stable and low, the suspension has
been stiffened up so there’s less give in the way the car body moves relative to the wheels.
The knock on effect of this is, while the cars are noticeably faster in the high
speed corners thanks to ground effect, they are much more awkward and slow in the slow corners
because compliant suspension allows the cars more roll. This also means they’ll be much
worse over the bumps and kerbs and teams have been noticeably avoiding them in testing so far,
not risking damaging the floors of the cars or (as a second thought) their drivers’ spines.
But something that has been shaking drivers up is the new buzzword of 2022. Porpoising.
A porpoise is an animal like a dolphin. Everyone knows what a dolphin is but porpoises are a little
more obscure so I don’t know why porpoising has long been the expression over dolphinininining -
ah, I see. Anyway, you know how dolphins move across the surface of the sea - up and down,
up and down with grace, style and smugness.
So it is here in F1 with these new floors. At high speed, the rear end starts to bounce up
and down on its haunches. A pain on the driver, opening potential for damaging the floor and
possibly causing handling issues at high speeds. So what is it and why does it occur?
Well, you remember how the fast moving air under the floor causes a suction that pulls
the whole car down towards the ground? If you go fast enough, you may end up
bringing the floor so close to the track that you choke out the underfloor airflow.
And if that fast airflow stops, the downforce (the suction) stops and the cars suspension
springs the rear back up to full height again. But this reintroduces airflow under the car,
sucking it back down again. And when it gets sucked down, it chokes its own airflow
again, so loses downforces and springs back up. And so on in a cycle of bouncy badtimes.
This can most likely be sorted out. I suspect we’ll see a number of solutions in the final
test in Bahrain. Obviously raising the car up would help, but teams want that juicy,
juicy low floor downforce. So maybe they’ll cleverly work the suspension to handle it.
Or shape the floor to allow air to flow without stalling at tight compression.
But there is a chance we’ll see porpoising show itself throughout the season to some degree. It
all depends on what teams are happy to tolerate. Right, so what else are we going to hear about
this year? Weight. The cars are a staggering 43 kg heavier this year, up to 795 kg minimum weight.
This is a result of some improved safety systems and the much bigger wheels.
Heavier cars are less nimble and harder to handle in the slower corners (compounding the stiff
suspension problem). What’s extra interesting this year is that a few teams are struggling
to get their cars DOWN to the minimum weight. Typically cars are built underweight and then
heavy ballast moved strategically to bring the cars up to the required minimum. But this year,
some teams - including Red Bull - are starting overweight. Luckily this won’t result in drivers
starving themselves as in previous years as the driver and seat must mean their own minimum
weight. But still. These cars are some hefty lads. The last thing I want to touch on really are all
the different shaped sidepods and rear ends we’re seeing. It’s been genuinely fun and a relief to
see that teams have gone in a few directions under these new rules, and the sidepod and engine cover
shapes are about airflow and cooling solutions. So the teams want a nice, heavy, clean flow of
air out of the back of the overbody of the car. This is the airflow that the diffuser air will
meet and connect with so we want it to be a big heavy mass of fast-flowing air that helps suck as
much air as possible through the car underbody. Some teams have wide, elbows-out sidepods which
hope to nudge the messy tyre wake away from this clean flow. Some, like Mercedes have gone narrow,
with the idea that the body will far enough away from the tyre wake that it
won’t attach to the sidepod at all. Some of the teams, like Red Bull,
are sending their airflow over the top of the their sidepods, downwashing it into the
gap between the rear wheels. In these cases the sidepod remains quite wide at the rear.
Some of the teams, like the Ferrari, have undercuts at the rear of their sidepod,
driving the airflow around the side and up to the diffuser.
On some of the cars you’ll see cooling louvres or gills down the engine covers to let hot air
escape. You don’t really want the hot air sent into your main airflow so you’ll tend to see gills
more on cars that use the side-body flow, than the more downwashy, short sidepod teams. Those teams
are more likely to open up this gap at the rear of the car to let their hot air out into the world.
So we are seeing a decent amount of variation. There is an expectation that these different
designs will converge into whatever is concluded to be the best package for this ruleset.
A bit over this season and then more so over the next few years.
But perhaps these many solutions will all continue to be fast and relevant and we’ll
see different looking cars for seasons to come. Wouldn’t that be something>
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