Feature | WIM
Hearts and Minds are Racing Formula One is about to start, by the time this magazine is in print it may have held its first event for 2022 the Bahrain Grand Prix but that race is neither the start nor the end for race car engineers
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The ruling class Two years of Covid have placed a great strain on the behemoth that is F1 racing, now finally it is returning to a more ‘normal’ schedule its organisers have released a calendar, but even then, it was hastily changed to exclude Russia. New rules were meant to be in place for 2021 but the pandemic saw to it that teams were unable to face the costs of developing new cars and so the changes were pushed to 2022. A quick look at the 2022 car regulations: • ground-effect floor with two long tunnels in place of a flat floor will ensure a greater proportion of the car’s total downforce is generated from the underbody, helping create a much cleaner wake and an aero platform less sensitive to wake. • Upwash of air from the floor is designed to be much higher, allowing it more time to dissipate its energy before falling upon the car behind. • Simplified front wing and endplate. Not standardised but highly prescriptive, with four-element wing attached directly to nose, transitioning into a much-simplified single-piece endplate. It will be far less sensitive to wake than current designs. • A prescriptively shaped rear wing with an incut wrap-round connection between main profile and lower beam wing, which effectively banishes the rear wing endplates and the strong vortices they shed. • Bargeboards are outlawed. • Flush wheel covers standardised to banish using the wheel/axle to create downforce-inducing airflows. • Front wheel deflector to limit ‘outwash’ of airflow. • Although the bodywork geometry and engine cover will differ from team to team, they will be defined within quite tight templates which to create as clean and unsensitive airflow as possible. • Limits placed upon brake duct shaping for downforce creation. • The combined effect showed in simulation that the following car retains 86 percent of its maximum downforce 22 | March 2022
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when one car length behind the car in front under the new rules, compared to current car’s 55 percent. The switch to 18-inch wheel rims from the current 13 inches means new lowprofile Pirelli tyres. The intention is for these to be less temperature-sensitive and allow drivers to push hard throughout stints while still having a performance drop-off to make strategy interesting. The way the suspension is attached to the wheels has been simplified, with the extended mounting points pioneered by Mercedes and what was Toro Rosso that have since become di rigeur outlawed. This means the suspension must now be attached directly to the wheel hub. Hydraulic suspension is outlawed, only the springs and dampers can control the stiffness. Inerters attached to the suspension are banned. A standard tyre pressure sensor will be used to monitor the running conditions of tyres. Formula One components are now divided into a group of five different designations as part of a push to allow cost savings when it comes to parts not deemed to be performance differentiators. Listed parts remain the components a team must design and own the IP to. This includes the monocoque and the any non-prescribed aero surfaces. Standard supply components are ones that are design and manufactured by a designated supplier. This includes parts such as the fuel pump and tyre pressure sensors. Transferrable parts are those that can be supplied from one team to another, for example the gearbox and hydraulics systems Prescribed parts are those that the teams build themselves but to a set specification Open-source parts are free for teams to design to their own specification. However, the full design details must be made available to all other teams. The 1.6-litre V6 turbo engine rules remain largely the same, but the design of the power units will be homologated at the start of the season and be frozen up to the end of at least 2025. At least 10 percent of the fuel must comprise “advanced sustainable ethanol” (E10).
Ripples and curls on the floor Because of the wide variation in cooling layouts and the associated sidepod design of the new generation of cars, the way in which teams are striving to maximise the effectiveness of the underbody venturi tunnels is similarly varied. The most visible area of this differentiation is in the wildly different contouring and detail of the outer edges of the floor. Although accelerating the airflow over the top of that floor, down the side of the sidepods (via the coke bottle section) is crucially important in maximising the effectiveness of the tunnels beneath, the contouring of the very edges of the floor is all about manipulating what the airflow is doing beneath. At the forward end of the floor’s outer edge, the downward ramp covering the beginning of the venturi tunnel accentuates the pressure difference between there and the floor beneath. The ramp creates a higher pressure on the external surface, increasing the pressure difference between there and the underfloor in that early part of the venturi tunnel, causing more air to be sucked into the tunnel inlets. As the air is directed around the side corner of the lower sidepod by the outermost of the four permitted fences, it will lose some of its energy – so behind that ramped section, most cars feature a further ‘curl’ where the floor edge rises up gently, then back down again. This ‘curl’ (above) is also about energising the airflow beneath, maximising its energy and its ability to pull the car into the ground. But rather than a single curl, the Mercedes has a series of small ripples which will create anti-clockwise vortices of air all the way down the sides of the floor, preventing the air around the back from being sucked into the diffuser’s low-pressure area and reducing its performance.
