Presentations to be taken with a grain of salt
With the presentation phase of the Formula 1 cars for the new season, the championship start rite officially opens. The presentations of the drivers' suits and helmets will follow as per the liturgy, the so-called “fire ups” of the power units, a possible “filming day” and then, finally, we will start to get a little serious with the three days of testing in Bahrain . Enthusiasts and professionals, who have not raced for two months, are now pounced ravenous on the first images of the launch of the single-seaters, devouring them with curiosity and hope of being able to extract some preliminary hopes or verdicts for the season that is about to begin.
All beautiful and muscular when stationary and everyone saying that the beautiful car will be the one that goes fast. However, the risk of taking all these images as revealed truths is that of ingesting adulterated foods which can cause unwanted side effects including early disillusionment at the first turns of the wheel on the track. We start from the assumption, as many know, that only the cars that will leave the pits of the Sakhir track on February 21st will be the mothers of the real cars which contain all the technical innovations that will then be developed and evolved during the season.
It's clear that the presentations are mainly for the use and consumption of sponsors and social media so much so that some teams exclusively presented the new livery. It is now a moment of pure commercial communication, even well done in many cases, and yet some element of truth or technical trend can still be appreciated.
The trend of stripped cars continues
The problem of weight of the new ground effect single-seaters continues to grip the design offices of all the teams. Reaching the minimum weights is a real feat for everyone and this is made increasingly clear by theabuse of carbon black which appears more or less on all cars. It is not a paint job but rather the carbon that makes up the frame and the bodywork parts which are now simply covered by stickers where necessary in favor of sponsors. We are talking about hectograms saved or a little more but it is weight that is now added only where needed for the purposes of component reliability and weight distribution. Paradoxically, an extensive use of adhesives and paints can be an indication of a car that is within the ideal weight for the famous “custom test”. Proof of this is the Red Bull RB19 which had very little black on it.
Reduce unsightly belly fat
The shape of the side pods, or sidepods, had been, at the beginning of the era of these new ground effect cars, a distinctive element between the various teams and also with a certain pride. The various heretical schools of thought, with hindsight compared to the Red Bull doctrine, are progressively abandoned to converge on the single thought of the sloping bellies. The season of the “tortellini sidepods” of the Ferrari SF75 or the “zero pods” of the Mercedes lasted less than two years and now everyone, since these first presentations, is adapting the shapes of their bellies to the aerodynamic concept of the multi-victorious Red Bulls RB18 and RB19. However, this will not be an absolute guarantee of competitiveness of course. We are always chasing someone who has already taken that path at least two years ago and to catch him we can only hope that he stopped on that path at the end of development.
What we shouldn't trust
Everything that will be shown on real single-seaters or renderings that has an aerodynamic function must be taken with great care. Front and rear wings, bottom and extractor are never shown in their starting season conformation. Firstly because no one wants to show their opponents the fruit of their winter work and secondly because the wings will be adapted to the circuits on which they will race. Regarding the car floor, which we remember is the component that generates at least 60-70% of the aerodynamic load of the single-seater, the chiseling work on cuts, blowholes and edges is continuous and no one is good enough to hand in the homework in class within two weeks. ahead of the tests. The suspension configurations, however, are much more reliable (pull rod, push rod, inclination of the arms) which are the true cornerstone of the correct and constant functioning of the car floor and which, barring desperate cases, remain definitive for the car competing in the championship.
What to pay attention to during the tests
The three days of winter testing will then be the usual hide-and-seek race. Nobody will want to show off their performance level and will hide behind unknown fuel loads and long run tests to verify the correct functioning of the components. Understanding who is in the lead in terms of performance will not be as simple as it has ever been. However, some interesting clues can always be gleaned. The first element to observe is how long will the cars have the so-called “aerorakes” installed? that is, those bizarre rakes made of aerodynamic probes mounted near the wheels of single-seaters. These are devices that must verify that the flows behind the wheels, the most complex to tame, are behaving as expected in the simulator. If they are removed quickly, a good sign for that team, it means that everything on the track is working as per the simulator so we can move on to pushing on performance or reliability. However, if they stay for the second or third day it means that something is not going according to expectations for that team on the aerodynamic front. The same thing, but a little less invasive, is the use of flow wiz, that is, those paraffin-based fluorescent fluids that show, when the car is stationary, how the aerodynamic flows move on the car body. The abuse of flow wiz it is also a symptom of a certain difficulty of the team in question.
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