Yeah, it's also interesting that they sit about the same height now, Jenson seemed to be about 2 or 3 inches higher on the first test.

No 'seemed' about it. He was higher.

im curious also about that.

It's about the pod-wings, not the sidepods.

I read that the engines are allowed to be made more robust. So while the design can't change, the materials and thickness of component parts can change. Which probably increments the engine designation. Though don't quote me on that.

it couldn't be anything but 'reliability updates' could it?

all the engines but the cosworth were locked?

Interesting comments on the separate development that they have done in the past. Is it an admission that they have developed the car around Lewis before?

Nope, JPM and Kimi had separate developement programmes back in the day.

It's been made to look like Telex, the way we used to get news flashes by teleprinter.

Cheers!

It's been reported that Ferrari had over a hundred "reliability" updates to their engine. No idea if that number is correct or not, but you can be pretty sure that the likes of Merc would be doing the same to their engine.

http://formula-one.speedtv.com/article/f1-...ed-at-thursday/

Nothing there we didn't already know, but what I think is really significant is that I have yet to see a single report that gives any indication of what rule is being infringed.

Why do I get the impression from articles like that that anything that resembles innovation or independent thought is, by default, seen with suspicion and is suspected to be illegal until proven otherwise. It should be the other way around.

you knew what the german magazine claims?

You know that rumour about the hole in the nose being a valve, well I'm not too sure here's a pic of an Ferrari from a few years back with a 'scoop' in the nose http://trendsupdates.com/wp-content/upload...lSchumacher.jpg

Yes. It's all been said on the various threads here for the last few weeks.

Horner, the insitigator of the complaint, has even come out and said that he suspects the McLaren is probably legal. That sounds like him admitting to a frivolous appeal.

If you are just pointing at random bits of a rival car for the pure hell of it and it turns out to be legal, then you should foot the bill of every cost that results from the FIA investigating that car. Maybe then teams would concentrate on designing a better car for themselves and not bitching about everyone elses innovation.

Anyone else reckon that the hole in the nose could be there to reduce turbulence instead?

The whole sharfin/slot thing I saw here right from the begining, but hadn't see what the german magazine says.

Anyway, Noele already said that the others will copy it although he reckons they'll not fully benefit of it. But it isn't necessary for a team to completely benefit of it, if this Sauber tyre management is for real then as soon as they incorporate a good version of the Mclaren apparatus in their car, they have a chance to be better than Mclaren.

Ermm this whole snorkel concept isn't going to magically bring you a few tenths, it'll make you quicker on the straights but cornering wise it'll have no effect. You don't want a wing stalling mid corner, so the concept takes a lot of tuning.

No one's aiming to stall the rear wing, not even Mclaren.

On the straights they are effectively.

Honestly, it ain't stalling.
That means LOTS of extra drag.

They are managing to reduce the drag at high speed.
The bleed air surely is helping the flow to detach earlier, lower on the back of the wing.
But its keeping it 'laminar' (smooth streamline flow), preventing it from stalling and going chaotically turbulent.

Hence it would be more accurate to talk of the wing being feathered, or even partially-feathered, to describe its being 'switched' into a low drag configuration.

Sure F1 cars have a LOT of 'induced drag' from their extreme airflow management creating vortices that bound the laminar flows.
But there is no way that letting the flow behind the wing become more turbulent would reduce drag. Quite the opposite!

I've been wondering whether there would be any possibility of similarly "switching off" (or even just reducing the intensity of) any of the other deliberately induced vortices ... hmmm.




Now, please people, explain to me what Lowe and Goss were talking about when they said the 'dorsal fin' (which supplies the bleed air to the wing) was "... a logical development of the high-downforce wing we ran last year at races like Monaco, which feeds air more efficiently to the rear wing upper element."
That sounds VERY interesting.
But I'm not sure what there was showing on last year's "high downforce circuit" wing.
Anyone able to shed some light on what we missed?

We know the 24 started off by being so short of downforce that they had to either crank up the wing angle to the point that it was REALLY stalling on the straights or use the 2008 wing.
And they came up with some sort of fix for their 'Monaco' wing -- but what was that? How did it "feed air more efficiently to the rear wing upper element" ? Was that a top-central wing scoop feeding a similar slot, but the whole thing designed to prevent detachment and stalling at an extreme angle of attack?

I'm inclined to think that the fluidically-controlled featherable wing did indeed come from what they did to/with the 24, rather than being the fruit of any 3-year programme.

James Allen took a trip to Mclaren

Its gone up another tenth Annual Interest?

Great explanation, TBH I hadn't bothered to trawl through forums to find the explanation behind the snorkel but the whole fluidics argument makes sense. The high downforce wing had a 15cm slot in last year aka the Basking Shark Wing I think Lowe and Goss made a reference to the 'bleeding' element.
http://www.formula1.com/news/technical/2009/810/662.html

Annual interest is an outdated model. Its daily interest now.

Well thats how it works in the mortgage industry these days. Not sure about the F1 model though. But considering how much a car develops over a season I'd put my money on daily interest.

My only suggestion is to not dig in your heels quite so deep on this one. Leave yourself a little wiggle room, and it will be easier in the end.

By the way, whether he was answering my request or not, Scarbs put up an article about wing stalling on his blog... http://scarbsf1.wordpress.com/2010/03/04/b...g-and-stalling/

I disagree with some of what he says, and I wish he would go into more explanation as to the why, but it's a good article. In particular, he says that McLaren aren't blowing the main plane, and I think they are; and the other thing is his describing last year's wings as 'blown', when they are really just three element wings - semantics, but still.

Hey Pup read the comments below in the article about induced drag and from drag, Scarbs and a Very Knowledgable poster known as Tristan discuss its relative merits, the whole stalling effect described by Scarbs actually makes little sense and TBF Scarbs admitted this theory was based on what the tech. directors had said however to quote Tristan:

"It comes all from some confusions with the terminology.In aerodynamics, the term stalling refers to a drop of lift (or downforce) due to highly separated flow at the upper (or lower for cars) surface of a wing. This will produce a significant increase of drag no matter the wing you refer to (included the highly cambered and high lift generator wing). So any post-stall situation should be prohibited whatsoever.

HOWEVER, you can improve the performance of any wings before stall by blowing some air on the upper (or lower for cars) surface on the wing. You increase slightly the boundary layer speed and in turns, you can increase significantly the lift (or downforce) generated almost twice more but you also increase a bit the drag. A solution to blow some air in the upper (or lower for cars) surface can be done with a small slot on this surface. This is a known theory, for instance, this has been tested for wings in 1929, see the book from I. Abbot, Thoery of wind section, 1959.

Now, imagine that you are on a straight line and that you remove the action of the slot, you will switch from one wing situation (high lift, higher drag) to another (normal lift, normal drag). You have lowered the drag and lift, but please, don't call that stalling!

So how does the slot know when it's a straight and when it's a corner? Does it just affect the wing above a certain speed?

If the McLaren wing will be declared illegal on thursday, this thread will make history being the first to affect real life F1 business in a significant way. It's obviously that the 200+ pages of analyzing every little detail and changes were a gold mine for the other competitors. They were probably led on track here of the interior airflow solution and appealed to the FIA...

At least Ron Dennis isn't amused at all about what was speculated here...

Or maybe Adrian Newey worked it out himself.

I assure you, it has nothing to do with this thread

It may be dependant on the amount(perhaps velocity)of airflow coming into it.

Regradless this seems an incredibly difficult concept to tune and perfect, esp. with no testing left.

I'd pay more attention to SLC's comments than Tristan's. Unfortunately, Tristan was a one-day wonder, who made the same argument on F1tech, but failed to answer any of the criticisms or questions about his theory. Never posted back. His background seems to be purely classical aeronautics (quoting pages from 1959 textbooks), whereas SLC is an F1 guy.

I'd still like to see Scarbs do an in-depth, better researched, article on this on Autosport. It sounds like he might be planning do that.

There's a rumour the driver has a control to alter that airflow...

This is the blown flap idea again. You have to blow the air very fast at low speeds to keep the air attached. It's a dead end. It can't be powered. Planes do this and use the spare engine power while landing. They'd use it in the air too if they could but it costs too much in terms of power compared to the gains.

See the diagram above. That is an unpowered (and therefore plausible) idea of how it works which means more air from the slot at high speed. This is the opposite idea of a blown slot to detach the laminar air flow. This is the only plausible explanation and it matches what Horner has said.

This discussion is going around in circles about every 5 pages... you can find this discussion on blown flap versus blown slot at least three or four times already in this thread. I can see now why it deserved its own thread, at least people could have read from the start to catch up.

It can't be driver adjustable. That would very easily make it illegal.

Yep I think the diagram above is exactly how it works. Just adjust the valve.

That's just not true.



You do NOT get LOTS of extra drag once the stall starts, you might get more, you might get less. If you get it right, you get less.

McLaren obviously know that with their set-up they get less.

Christian Horner said: ""Basically, if you stall the wing you take all the drag off it and pick up straight-line speed. It's something that's been done quite a lot over the years but with the wing separators you're not supposed to do that."

The two rear wing elements are supposed to be far enough apart to not allow one big wing to be stalled, but by routing air through the intake and into the wing, they are managing to stall at least one element.

i loved the new site it is more elegant now. I think they will imrpove it after some time. Did you watch speed Quiz video? It was so fun to watch : ) and also Jerez video. We could see onboard camera views there. I think the camera's place is a bit strange i want a onboard camera image like in 2008. I think you will understand what i mean after comparing 2009 and 2008 onboard camera views.

pup, I've managed to find the images I was looking for previously at F1technical and I have to agree with Scarbs, I don't believe the main plane has a slot, its probably just surface reflection that makes it seem so.



Obi

Are you serious? That is just myth, find me a piece of quantifiable evidence that would have a car going a full 5.5 seconds faster by the end of the year at Bahrain due to .3 of a second pickups between races and I am not including 2 week gap or the break in the summer, where there is supposed to be a complete break. There is no way the teams will find 6 seconds over a season.

Possibly - it's not something I'd get into a bar fight with Scarbs about. But here's the pic that makes me think the bottom wing is also blown - the slot seems pretty evident, at least to me...

Yes that comment alone ought to delete about 20 pages of garbage from the usual suspects on this matter.


I would be interested to hear from some of the more learned on the matter of cross wind effect on the rear elements with a blown wing I am with wdh on how it works, one could assume on a fixed item the effect would be constant but airflow on airflow I am having a little more difficulty visualizing.

You were right pup Scarbs got it a little wrong. The McLaren and BMW Sauber didn't run full length/near full length exits at the rear of their respective wing elements last year, so the Williams version is a different solution, v2.5 is how I think you described it .

MP4-24 at Monaco
MP4-24 & BMW Sauber, Singapore 2009

Obi

Do your math. And consider it there may be steps which are smaller or doesn't work and even stepbacks. I have read it from an F1 team, probably McLaren. It was meant to be a potential trend which cannot work evereytime, but in general the car is progressing to itself by a couple of tenths from GP to GP. I described the best case for a no-big-upgrade time period for a brand new car, which has huge potential.

So it's around ca. 2 sec per season. A good team can develop on the car 2+ sec under the whole season.

It does look that way I must admit, but in comparison, where the shark fin meets the upper wing element, it begins to diverge so there is smooth curved 90 degree transition from the fin to the wing, I assume helps regulate the internal airflow. With the wing support strut there is no such design, which makes me reconsider the viability of a slotted main plane.