Ask Gary: What will ground effect mean for F1?

Before I start answering your questions, there is something that must take priority.

Last Friday night we lost a very talented and extremely friendly young man in Jules Bianchi. He was a pleasure to speak with and, unlike so many of his colleagues, he always had time for you.

No words can ever relieve the pain his family are going through, but our thoughts and prayers are with them.

Above all the changes that are being proposed to make Formula 1 "more exciting", the main one must be to make very sure a needless accident such as what happened to Jules never occurs again.

In my 43 years of being involved in motorsport in one way or another, many things have changed but one element has returned consistently - a completely unprotected digger driving on to the racetrack to retrieve an abandoned car.

Finding a solution is the responsibility of the FIA. Because it will be passed through legislation on safety grounds, no committee, working group or team-owner ego can stand in the way of any changes the governing body needs to make.

Now is the time to act before we lose someone else.

If F1 brings back ground-effect aerodynamics, will the cars need to be wider?
Patrick Byrne, via Twitter

Patrick, they don't really need to be wider. All that needs to happen is the underfloor regulations, and how the outer side of the underfloor is dimensionally regulated, need to take into account the width of the inner sidewall of the current tyre.

If you look back at the previous era of ground-effect cars, which I think everyone is comparing the potential new regulations with, yes the cars were very wide.

However, the critical area is the gap between the inner sidewall of the rear tyre and the gearbox sides. Compared with the past, the bulk of the current gearboxes is moved well forward for weight-distribution reasons.

Because of that, they are very narrow at this critical point. This means that the diffuser width, which is what makes the underfloor work, will be able to be wider than in the past.

The one thing that they don't want to try and copy from the past is the sliding-skirt arrangement. This is the area they need to stay well away from and just allow some sort of a vortex-generating lowered section at the outer extremities of the floor sides.

That said, the overall width of the cars will need to be wider to accommodate wider tyres - especially at the rear. At the moment the overall width is 180cm; with a 5cm wider rear tyre this will need to go up to 190cm.

I would be looking at a larger increase in rear-tyre width than this. I believe the tyres need to be the dominant grip component, and if you do this the teams with huge budgets won't be able to overpower the smaller, less-well-funded teams. So the competition will be closer.

Also, the cars will not only look more aggressive, they will be more aggressive.

My suggestion would be 200cm overall car width, with the rear-rim width of 34.8cm (+/- 0.5mm) increasing to 44.8cm (+/- 0.5mm).

This will put more emphasis on suspension geometry, since it won't be easy to get a tyre-to-track contact patch over that width. But if you can, it will make a big difference to tyre degradation, since currently everything is compromised for aerodynamic efficiency,

It will also increase the drag level of the cars, stopping them achieving stupid top speeds.

Pat Symonds mentioned in the work they did in the overtaking working group finding that the dirty air from wings was "good downforce", since it was far less dirty than from the body/underfloor/diffuser, which was "bad downforce" and made it even harder for a car to follow. I would have thought it was the other way around?
Stuart Crooks, via email

Stuart, I think the overtaking working group findings were completely flawed. The model they were using, and especially the wing designs, were decades out of date.

The front wing was a very simple design, not the complex multi-element design we currently see, which stresses the wing's undersurface airflow to a maximum.

The car as a complete package, and mainly the tyres, produces the turbulence. The rear wing produces an upswept airflow, which creates a low-pressure area following the leading car.

This low-pressure area is why a following car gets a tow, but it is also part of the lost downforce. Lower air pressure produces less downforce and less drag than higher air pressure.

The underfloor is good at producing very efficient downforce. It doesn't care too much about being fed with dirty airflow because it is working as an expanding duct.

If you can keep the airflow attached to the expanding surfaces at the rear of the underfloor, the high-speed airflow coming through the throat nearest to the ground will sort itself out and produce the downforce.

With any aerodynamic component, the better the airflow the better the downforce. But what is required is to minimise the losses in traffic or turbulent airflow, and using the underfloor will achieve that.

What are the pros and cons of switching to larger-diameter wheels?
@motorace_addict, via Twitter

There are many pros but I'm not sure there are any cons. If there are, none of them are insurmountable.

The first question is, is it necessary and for what reason?

In my book, the only reason would be to bring it into line with more current tyre technology. But in doing that we need to remember that racing-car sidewall construction is very different from road-car sidewall technology.

So in that respect, it is more of a visual thing than anything else. We don't need to go silly with it, so I think an 18-inch diameter rim would be a nice balance.

PROS:

A larger and flatter rubber-to-ground contact patch can be achieved with this type of tyre design. As I said above, it will increase the emphasis on suspension geometry.

A higher percentage of the car's movement will go through the suspension, so it will be able to control this movement better by using the dampers.

At the moment, about 50 per cent of the car's movement goes through the tyre, which as you can see from slow-motion shots is basically uncontrolled.

To get the steering lock and suspension stiffness that is required, the outer ends of the suspension wishbones and steering trackrods are one of the most complicated design areas of a current car. Larger-diameter wheels would make this simpler.

CONS:

I can't think of any right now.

Why are there such different approaches to airboxes this year?
Andrew Potter, via Twitter

Andrew, after the last turbo era, and up until 2014, all F1 engines were normally aspirated, which means that the engine has to do all its own breathing and get as much air as possible in through the airbox, through the inlet valves, picking up fuel on the way and into the cylinder.

A normally aspirated engine has an inlet tract system that works at roughly 125 per cent efficiency. This basically means that, if the airbox design was working properly, a 2.4-litre engine would actually put out the power of a three-litre engine.

Not easy, but achievable, but it did mean that the inlet needed to be sized properly to allow good airflow at low speeds - but not too big, because of the airflow spoilage around the engine cover at high speeds, which hurts the rear wing performance.

With the current turbo engines, the turbo inlet needs to be presented with reasonable airflow. But then the turbo takes over and, basically, whatever boost pressure you are able to run, the turbo will achieve this at both low and high car speeds.

The inlet can therefore be smaller, so there is less airflow spillage around the sides of the engine cover, allowing the rear wing to work more efficiently.

Edd Straw recently put up a good case as to which two drivers to pick for 2016. If you had free rein of all of the drivers you have come across in your career in F1, which would you pick and why?
Jay Menon, via email

If I had free rein, and my decision was based on drivers that have actually driven an F1 car that I was directly involved with, my decision would be simple - Michael Schumacher.

In the one weekend that he drove for Jordan at Spa in 1991, his pure talent and total commitment stood out.

He understood what it took to be a winner. Yes, he needed time to achieve that but then so would anyone.

His commitment to physical fitness was second to none, but more importantly he brought to F1 something that I had never seen in a driver before - mental fitness.

He realised the more mental capacity he had left over when he was driving the car, the more he could analyse what was happening and use that to not only make the car better, but also to improve his own performance.

My second driver would be a lot more difficult and I would probably have to chose from four.

Giancarlo Fisichella was an exceptionally talented driver, but he let the Latin temperament step in and wear him down far too often. If he had had someone beside him that knew how to protect him from that, we would have seen a different person.

Rubens Barrichello, again exceptionally talented, but I think he let the death of Aryton Senna get in the way of his career.

I believe he thought that for the Brazilian public, he needed to be the next Ayrton and this affected his own true talent and created pressures.

He was trying to be something that he wasn't and could never be. There will never be another Ayrton Senna.

Roberto Moreno, someone who never got the opportunities his talent deserved. He got shafted by Benetton when Schumacher came along and never really recovered from that.

But in my time with him in 1988, when together we won the Formula 3000 championship, he was a pleasure to work with and had what I said about Michael - that extra capacity to take in what was happening as opposed to just driving the car.

My list wouldn't be complete without Eddie Irvine. Inherently very talented and a real character. He knew how to drive and get a laptime out of a car and he took no prisoners on the way - he just didn't give a damn about the establishment.

He drove me mad most of the time, but in a good way. How Bernie could do with a few of him around today.

What do you think of removing the requirement for backmarkers to jump out of the way when blue flags are shown? By all means retain the flags, but allow them to return to their original meaning of 'a faster driver is behind you'. Designers would then have to concentrate some of their effort in making the car work while following in the wake of a slower backmarker, and the lead drivers would be forced to overtake, not merely pass. This may allow the lead battle to close up naturally during the course of a race, and if the car in second place works better in traffic than the car in first place we may even see an on-track battle for the lead.
David Mortimore, via email

David, I couldn't agree with you more - this is exactly what needs to be done.

Passing backmarkers was what the good guys of the past were able to do and is part of the skill of being a grand prix driver.

I would be interested to hear what David Coulthard has to say on this. He spent most of the 2001 Monaco Grand Prix behind Enrique Bernoldi's Arrows, admittedly fighting for position, so he might not quite agree with your proposal!

But I am fairly positive that in the days when drivers had to deal with backmarkers, overall we had more complete drivers.

We seem to be seeing the proposals for F1's future moving closer to the kinds of common sense ideas that you have proposed over the past 18 months. Do you think that this is a sign of good sense taking over again in F1?
Marcus Briggs, via email

Marcus, I can only hope so. For far too long we have had the ego of the people who can make changes overpowering the people that actually can see the realistic side and make things work.

These groups that are set up either consist of the wrong people (the Strategy Group, as an example), or the people that are involved are handcuffed by the people at the top.

While this situation continues there will be a lot of hot air and in the end nothing will change.

The people involved in F1, and I was one of them for many years, think F1 is rocket science. When you get to the outside world, you actually realise that it is not.

What people want is a close and competitive proposition, and if the regulations were written in such a way as to not allow a team or an engine manufacturer to get too far ahead of the average grid performance, then that would happen.

It is not correct to blame Red Bull for its four years of near domination, or Mercedes for what looks like a second year of total domination.

Their job is to build the most competitive package within the regulations. Some teams push that a little bit further than others, but it is (currently) the FIA's job to write the regulations and to police them in such a way that domination is always counteracted. It's time it started doing that.

Do you own any of the cars you've designed, and did you take an interest in what happened to your cars once the season ended?
Ruraidh Conlon O'Reilly, via email

Ruraidh, remember I worked for Eddie Jordan and the prices he wanted were well out of my reach!

It didn't really turn me on, owning any of my cars. I was probably happy to see the back of them. For me, the challenge was the next season's cars and if and how you could move forward.

Things change dramatically as time goes by. From the middle of 1993, when we went to an electro/hydraulic gear-change, we used to have a picture of the 191 gearchange pinned to the drawing office noticeboard with the simple message 'lest we forget'.

It was just a steel tube with a universal joint connected to the gearbox selector. It was a reminder of how simple things could be, as opposed to where it was going with steering-wheel paddles, control boxes, various hydraulic actuators and hydraulic pumps just to achieve basically the same thing.

It does worry me a little bit where my cars went to. They, as with all high-performance cars, need a little 'tender loving care' and I am not sure that happens as it should in the outside world.

I sometimes help my brother-in-law Bob Simpson, who was my partner in Anson many years ago, and he has a company rebuilding older racing cars.

When you look at some of them and how they have been maintained, sometimes it's pretty scary.

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