Of all the innovations that have appeared on the new Formula 1 cars, one in particular has tickled my curiosity since the first tests on the track; not the bellies of exotic shape, not the increasingly ‘spoon-shaped’ wings, not the bottoms (also because they are not visible), instead I was struck by the tie rod which reappeared in the area in front of the rear wheels.
I opened the drawer of memories and I went back thirty years when the tie rods were put on to keep the front wings still and prevent them from flexing downwards, and I wondered: but how is it possible that, in 2022, it is not possible to hold together a small flap of carbon without binding it as it were “The wing of the Red Baron’s biplane” (so the engineer Mauro Forghieri told me, right in Imola, in 1991 about the front wing of the Lambo).
As it happens, he has installed a CFD calculation module (the now famous computational fluid dynamics), simple stuff, light years away from what teams use, which runs on a small home PC that takes almost a week to manage the model of a Formula 1, and also very simplified.
However, some curiosity can be tried to remove it. And here is what appeared on the screen simply deforming the bottom in front of the rear wheels until it touches the ground (below the two images in a scrolling gallery).
If you manage to deform that small strip of carbon until it rubs on the ground, the calculation tells us (in the absence of a wind tunnel we can only believe it) that you get a ‘miniskirt‘perfect, the pressure under the bottom drops dramatically (top in the figure) and the downforce generated by the fund increases by 20%an enormity.
Nothing new under the sun, mind you, but the suspicion that someone is trying to drive down old, busy streets in the past comes. They are dangerous and delicate games that are based on the deformation of the structure by a few millimeters which (and here we come full circle) only a calibrated tie rod could control with due precision. All this can only remain a hypothesis but that number – 20% – made a certain effect on me when it appeared on the PC screen.
Marco Giachi
#ground #effect #miniskirts #FormulaPassionit