From the French Grand Prix, the FIA will make its rear wing deflection tests even more strict
after Mercedes remarked that Red Bull’s rear wings were bending in a suspicious way at high speeds.
So what’s the deal with these so called flexi wings? Why are they coveted? How
are they policed? And is Christian Horner right to be annoyed about the FIA quote ‘changing the
rules’ mid season? Advert
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So, after Lewis Hamilton and Mercedes pointed out
that Red Bull’s rear wing seemed to be deforming excessively on the straights,
Christian Horner of Red Bull said Toto Wolff seemed to be more interested in Red Bull’s
wings than his own car’s development. Which is pretty funny as Red Bull are
forever scrutinising the legality of Mercedes’ cars and practices and,
let’s be honest, teams policing each other is a healthy and vital part of Formula 1.
As teams watch each other’s developments for insight into their innovations to spark potential
avenues for development ideas on their own cars, they also quickly spot designs that… skirt the
edges of the rules? Are they legal? Are they not? Well, what rival teams will do is officially
‘question’ the legality of the innovations or practices they spot to the FIA so that either:
the innovation is shown illegal and removed from a rival team
OR the questioning team can feel confident in implementing their own version of the idea.
And so in questioning the flexing and movement of Red Bull’s rear wing,
the FIA have responding in beefing up the rear wing tests, which we’ll get to.
But why would you want your wings to flex in the first place?
So wings are a bit of a double-edged sword. On the one hand a beefy wing will give you lots
of lovely downforce so you can so fast around corners with all the increased grip that gives
you by pushing the tyres down into the ground. On the flip side, those big wings have a lot of
drag so will reduce the car’s top speed and its ability to accelerate quickly to those speeds.
F1 wings push the car down but also pull it backwards.
With DRS, a driver can reduce that drag on the straight by
flipped a wing element up so its incidence with the high speed air is diminished
but otherwise wings are fixed so, in design and setup, the wing must be
optimised to deliver the right balance of downforce and drag for the current circuit.
But if you could allow the wing to flex, the drag or downforce on the wing could rotate
it such that the planes are flattened against the air flow, reducing the drag.
There are other advantages to flexible bodywork including deforming the front wing to change the
airflow down the entire chassis at hig speeds but let’s stick with what’s relevant to right now.
What do the rules say? Well let’s open the old Technical Regulations to
paragraph 3.8. Now obviously, we all know it off by heart but let me summarise it for you anyway.
So basically the rules are blah, blah, blah then ‘any specific part of the car influencing its
aerodynamic performance must remain immobile in relation to the sprung part of the car’
not including the deployment of the DRS obviously. Now this is a tricky little regulation because
‘immobile’ is impossible. You just can’t make the bodywork that stiff. That’s just
the natural of materials - if the wing mounting was perfectly stiff if would also be perfectly
brittle and break into pieces under load. So there’s always going to be a little bit of give
in materials. A bit of elasticity, which basically means if you deform
an object under force it will return to its original shape when you release that force.
But something doesn’t have to be as bendy and pliable as a 30 centimetre ruler. It can
be incredibly resistant to deformation while having a tiny amount of give.
And that’s basically what the FIA are asking. But bearing in mind that some deformation
is inevitable, how do you regulate bodywork to remain immobile? With flexibility tests.
The whole of the very next article, 3.9, describes a series of load tests given
around particular points of the car and the tolerances in movement each part is permitted.
But relevant here are 3.9.3 and 3.9.4, which state the bodywork may not move more than one
degree horizontally when subject to a rearward force of 1000 Newtons from defined points
and the bodywork may not deflect more than 3 millimeters vertically when a 500
Newton load is applied to it as defined points. The rules even defined exactly the shape of the
pads that will exert the load on the bodywork so the teams are prepared to meet the test.
For reference, 1000 Newtons as a force is very roughly the same as 100 kilograms of
weight which is about 1.4 Max Verstappens. So, if it helps, imagine the downward test
being 0.7 Verstappens sitting on the rear wing and it only being allowed to budge 3 mm.
So for the rearward test, imagine the car hanging from its nose and 1.4 Verstappens
sitting on the wing and it only being allowed to bend back one degree. That’s pretty tough.
So at this point it’s important to note that the Red Bull IS legal with respect to
the tests as specified in the regulations. It has been put under the required loads and not
flexed beyond the allowed tolerances. That’s how the legality of flexibility is defined.
However, the vagaries of article 3.8 which state aerodynamic devices must be immobile combined with
the final clause of article 3.9 which states that ‘the FIA reserves the right to introduce further
load/deflection tests on any part of the bodywork which appears to be moving whilst the car is in
motion’ give the FIA scope to enforce the spirit of the rules - ‘must be immobile’ - by adding
further requirements to the testing procedure. So the FIA aren’t ‘changing the rules’ as
Christian Horner suggested. The RULE is that the relevant bodywork mustn’t move and the FIA
can increase the strength of the tests to make sure teams aren’t
circumnavigating the rule but exploiting the difference between the test environment
and the real world running. But where Horner and
other annoyed teams might have a point is the costs involved in a mid season change like this.
Team budgets are now capped so adjusting their designs to meet the new tests bites a chunk
out of the limited spending they are allowed on development, which can be a real problem for them.
But the flip side to this is quite simple really. That is the risk teams take
if they exploit the testing limitations to spiritually sidestep the rules
They know the tests can be ramped up at any moment - it’s right there in the regulations.
And they know that an onboard camera can easily spot if your wing is misbehaving.
So it’s hard to be too sympathetic when everything is pretty clearly on the table.
Though I will say if you’re a smaller team, with a smaller budget,
and your wing doesn’t flex on track and yet you know it won’t pass the stricter tests…
well, that’s got to sting a little. And all due to another team’s shenanigans.
Should Toto be aggressively pursuing potential protests against the results
of Azerbaijan and Monaco as he seems to be suggesting? It seems a little catty to me,
particularly as the FIA has already given a fairly small window for teams to change up their designs.
But that’s F1 isn’t it? Like I said, teams policing each other hard is all part of the sports
internal checks and balances. It does leave a bit of a dirty taste in the mouth though, doesn’t it?