Formula One – Hearts and Minds are Racing

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 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

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.

The porpoise returns

‘Porpoising’ is back in F1, having been largely missing from the vocabulary for the last 40 years. Virtually every team was complaining of the phenomenon on the first day of testing for the new generation of cars. A violent bouncing on the suspension at high speeds is what the driver feels. The cause is an aerodynamic one, where either the leading edge of the floor, or perhaps the front wing, is pushed ever closer to the ground as the downforce acting upon it increases. The closer to the ground it gets, the more powerful the ground effect is, as the air rushes ever faster through the shrinking gap. This increases the pressure difference between the underside and upper surfaces, so increasing the downforce yet more until it stalls. At which point, much of the load is suddenly released, the front of the car rises up suddenly in response, which allows the ground effect to begin working again! Repeat in cyclic fashion until it’s time to brake for the corner.With much more underbody downforce, stiffer suspensions and stiffer tyres (so not as much cushioning effect) the problem has returned with a vengeance. None of the teams had seen this effect in simulation. In a wind tunnel, even the stiffest belt of the rolling road is more flexible than the track surface, and accurately modelling the dynamics of the springs and dampers in this situation is not really possible. So, the teams are now back in the same position as the early ground effect pioneers of the late 1970s/early 1980s of trying to make the underside of the car a little less switch-like and critical – either through changing the shape of the surfaces or adjusting the suspension.

Red Bull has its nose in the air

Red Bull has opted for a high nose with a big clearance under the centre section of the wing to maximise the volume of airflow to the underfloor. The underside of the nose tip can be between 125mm and 250mm above the ground. The wing elements attached to it will tend to generate greater direct downforce from the wing itself. Operating closer to the ground there should be a bigger difference in air pressure between the underside and upper surface of the wing. But the lower wing also forms a blockage to the flow being fed to the floor and the inlets for the crucial venturi tunnels which create the car’s underbody downforce. Because there are dimensional allowances for where the front axle is in relation to the nose tip, there are significant variations between cars in the distance between the axle and the sidepods which contain those inlets. As such, the optimum nose/front wing height needs to be considered as a three-dimensional challenge. Part of that includes how the front suspension is packaged and Red Bull has joined the McLaren club switching to a pullrod front with the inboard rockers down low. At the rear, Red Bull, like McLaren and Alfa Romeo, has switched to a push-rod layout. Given that AlphaTauri is taking the full Red Bull rear end, it means that the AT03 is also pushrod at the rear.

At 23 races this 2022 F1 season has the longest calendar ever.

Race 1 – 20th March Bahrain Grand Prix Bahrain International Circuit Race 2 – 27th March Saudi Arabian Grand Prix Saudi Arabia, Jeddah Race 3 – 10th April Australian Grand Prix Albert Park, Melbourne Race 4 – 24th April Emilia Romagna Grand Prix Italy, Autodromo Internazionale Enzo e Dino Ferrari, Imola Race 5 – 8th May Miami Grand Prix, USA Circuit of the Americas, Austin Race 6 – 22nd May Spanish Grand Prix Spain, Circuit de Catalunya, Barcelona Race 7 – 29th May Monaco Grand Prix Monaco Race 8 – 12th June Azerbaijan Grand Prix Azerbaijan, Baku City Circuit Race 9 – 19th June Canadian Grand Prix Canada, Circuit Gilles Villeneuve Race 10 – 3rd July British Grand Prix UK, Silverstone Race 11 – 10th July Austrian Grand Prix Austria, Red Bull Ring, Spielberg Race 12 – 24th July French Grand Prix France, Circuit Paul Ricard, Le Castellet Race 13 – 31st July Hungarian Grand Prix Hungary, Hungaroring, Budapest Race 14 – 28th August Belgian Grand Prix Belgium, Spa-Francorchamps Race 15 – 4th September Dutch Grand Prix Netherlands, Zandvoort Race 16 – 11th September Italian Grand Prix Italy, Monza Race 17 – 2nd October Singapore Grand Prix Singapore, Marina Bay Street Circuit Race 19 – 9th October Japanese Grand Prix Japan, Suzuka International Circuit Race 20 – 23rd October US Grand Prix USA, Circuit of the Americas, Austin Race 21 – 30th October Mexican Grand Prix Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez, Mexico City Race 22 – 13th November Brazilian Grand Prix Brazil, Interlagos Race 23 – 20th November Abu Dhabi Grand Prix UAE, Yas Marina Circuit

Alfa Romeo’s bold C42

Initially during testing Alfa Romeo opted for camouflage livery in an attempt to disguise its innovative new platform which was later shown in the team’s official red and white colour scheme that shows off the car’s elegant lines and relatively short wheelbase. Its notable features include: • A sophisticated front wing • A push-rod rear suspension (like Red Bull,

AlphaTauri and McLaren) and an unusual geometry of its front push-rod layout • Similar packaging of the Ferrari cooling system, as seen on Ferrari and the Haas with sidepods which are fat but heavily undercut at the front, with heavily louvred sidepod tops. The 2022 regulations stipulate a wheelbase length of between 3460-3600mm. Everyone but Alfa is towards or at the upper end of this, as packaging of the power unit and their cooling systems is very demanding. But Alfa has managed to package everything into a wheelbase of just over 3500mm, making it easier to bring the car down to the regulation minimum weight. The front wing continues the team’s tradition of the elements falling away heavily at the outboard ends to encourage outwash around the tyre. It is unusual in how heavily the lower edge of the wing is contoured, making for quite a wavy line with the ground. These curves reflect how the wing elements across the span of the wing are separated into three quite distinct sections: 1. Around the nose, where the elements are quite full and heavily cambered up to the flap adjusters. The nose and central section of the wing are positioned quite high – not as extreme as the Aston Martin but higher than most. This is prioritising airflow to the underfloor. The nose tip sits within a small drop-down extension of the lowest of the four elements, creating a slot there which will condition the airflow to the shaped underside of the nose, accelerating it towards the venturi tunnel inlets. There is a complex contouring of the four elements relative to each other in this inboard section as they manipulate the airflow between them, despite regulations which limit the overlap allowed between each element, and therefore their effectiveness. 2. The central section of the elements, from the flap adjusters to around level with the tyre’s inner face, are medium-cambered. 3. The outboard flaps which reduce dramatically in profile and are ramped steeply down, carrying very little camber. A wing creates downforce by the pressure difference induced over its upper and lower surfaces. The aerofoil shape creates a low pressure beneath, which the air rushes to fill, and a high pressure on top. This pressure difference creates the downward force. As the elements on the Alfa’s wing become less aggressively shaped from inboard to outboard, so the downforce they create can be tuned with the shape of the lower edge relative to the ground. The closer to the ground, the lower the air pressure on the wing’s underside will be and the harder the elements will work. As the elements are reducing in how aggressive their upper contours are, so the bottom edge of the wing is closer to the ground, giving a compensating effect. Although the C42’s front suspension retains a conventional push-rod operation of the inboard rockers, the geometry is quite extreme. The top wishbone’s front leg is mounted high, the rear leg much lower. This will give a big resistance to dive when the car brakes, thereby keeping the aerodynamic platform of the car more stable. The venturi channels below the 2022 generation of cars dominate almost every aspect of car design and keeping them fed with air throughout all the different states the car will see in roll, pitch and dive is crucial. Alfa’s Jan Moncheaux-led technical team has opted to prioritise keeping the car as level as possible under braking to retain as much of the ground effect induced by the tunnels as possible. The radiator arrangement for water, oil and intercooler on the new Ferrari power unit looks much the same as on the Ferrari and Haas, with a relatively small airbox inlet, a concentration of area into the front of the sidepod, giving a wide front but a teardrop shape in plan-view. Because of the shorter wheelbase, that teardrop stays fat at the front for longer. While the teardrop shape helps accelerate the overbody airflow as it travels to the back of the car, it reduces the space available for cooling exits. Hence the facility for a lot of louvred cooling on the upper face of the sidepods and hence also the big radiator inlets at the front of the pods.

Life in the fast lane

Australian Krystina Emmanouilides is forging a career with Alfa Romeo F1 Team ORLEN and forging a legacy for Australian women in Formula One engineering

Women have been trying to push their way into the motor industry and professional motor racing since the 1970s, back then in dribs and drabs held back by gender and sometimes incredibly low glass ceilings. Most of the glass has been shattered but still there is a shortage of female engineers and nowhere more so than in Formula One. Melbourne born Krystina Emmanoulides is one engineer who has made the grade and works with the Sauber Alfa Romeo F1 Team ORLEN. “Within the Sauber Group, in which there are 513 employees, we have 53 (9.7 percent) women. The largest presence is 28 within marketing, communications, finance, HR, admin, purchasing and facilities management. This is reduced when comparing to the technical department, in which only 15 women are working, and 10 in production, and 11 of the women are in management/key positions,” she explained. “When I think about how we can get more women into engineering, I ask myself, why are women not entering into engineering at the same rate as men? Are we still leading our children to believe that certain industries are not suited for women? Is there a misrepresentation of what engineering is when we advertise careers (language and imagery)? “I believe the answer to all of these is yes, and, as with many industries where women have lower representation or lower funding (such as in sport), we must continue to build from the ground up. We must ensure that girls today are introduced to STEM programs in school, in order to ensure that we see women in STEM tomorrow.” Ms Emmanoulides works in the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) area as part of a team of 12 employees in the correlation group whose job it is to make sure that what is undergoing simulation lines-up with what is seen with wind tunnel and track testing, and so constantly improving the simulations and processes for users. Growing up she could hear the F1 cars race from her home, but of course being interested in F1 is not enough to get you there. Initially Ms Emmanoulides wanted to be a race engineer atop the pit wall but through her studies her interests turned to vehicle dynamics, and she eventually found herself completing a Masters’ project in aerodynamics focussing on CFD and wind tunnel (WT) testing. “It wasn’t until then that I realised I had a deeper interest for aerodynamics. I think it’s an important part of the story to share, as while I was certain I wanted to be an engineer, it was through my studies and work experience that I was able to really find an area to focus on,” she said. Towards the end of her studies, she began the laborious task of find a job – the job – but finding an entry point into F1 is not for the faint hearted, male or female. “I used to have a spreadsheet to keep track of applications I was sending out, and their status. My applications were rejected many times, at different stages in the interviewing process, and at the end it always came back to ‘we hired someone with more experience’. I grew increasingly frustrated that F1 teams were hiring for experience, but not giving any opportunities to grow experience,” Ms Emmanoulides said. “I never thought I wouldn’t work in F1, it was more a matter of when not if. Of course, it was difficult to receive rejections, but I was resilient, and I knew in the end that an opportunity would come at the right time in the right place.” A phone call out of the blue, from a F1 engineer who had interviewed her was the tipoff that pointed her in the right direction saying that she needed to get relevant working experience to make her more appealing to the industry so she headed to work in CFD for a software company in the UK called EXA who was responsible for automotive clients including F1 teams. After three years she finally found her way into a position with Sauber Motorsport which is now the Alfa Romeo F1 Team ORLEN. “I’ve long said that being and staying in F1 is crucial to me for various reasons; to show young girls that we are here and that there is space for them, to be a visible reminder to my colleagues, in all teams, that women have a place in F1, and subsequently to help shape the workplace environment to be one that is more welcoming for women and LGBTQ+ people, who often feel it is not one where they are safe. I’d like to leave one day knowing, and seeing, that the workforce is more diverse in all of its areas,” Ms Emmanoulides explained. Over the last few years, Ms Emmanoulides has fielded many questions from current engineering students about how to get into F1, how to prepare for interviews for which she has always been happy to provide advice based on her experiences. This year, she joined as an ambassador for Motorsport Australia and their FIA Girls on Track program, for which she will be working with the other ambassadors to provide support for the Motorsport Australia FIA Girls on Track events throughout Australia, as well as acting as a career mentor for one of the participants chosen to participate in the event at the 2022 Formula 1 Heineken Australian Grand Prix. “I am a strong believer in the ‘see it, be it’ concept, and I am committed to doing my part in showing young girls and other women that they belong in motorsport,” she said.