Ask Gary: The fundamental flaw with F1's 2021 plan

Gary's verdict on the 2021 F1 regulations

Do you think the 2021 concept is the right direction for F1?
Mario Colombo, via email

I totally agree with the Formula 1 teams that if the new 2021 regs are too prescriptive then all the cars will be indistinguishable and may lack design intrigue and any wow-factor. I fail to understand why the rules cannot be 'restrictive' rather than 'prescriptive' so that the form and shape of the cars can be different. Yes, maybe, the cars will all eventually converge on a similar optimum design but we may at least get a few years of divergence.
Guy Dormehl, via email

How can Formula 1 improve overtaking as some drivers are still struggling even with DRS due to a lack of front downforce?
Carl Bailey, via Facebook

I will answer these three related questions as one, because it will reduce the need for me to repeat myself and allow me to cover the complete subject in one answer.

I haven't seen the regulations in full and I don't really think they fully exist yet, so what we are seeing is still really a list of suggestions and a styling exercise.

I am also not a big fan of the regulations being too prescriptive. There needs to be a high percentage of latitude to allow the teams to put their own stamp on the concepts and designs.

F1 has set up a group to examine these regulations and 'hopefully' (its word, not mine) find any potential loopholes that might just eliminate something exploitative. By doing so, it is reducing the potential for innovation from any of the teams.

The teams have fought any change that potentially makes F1 into what could be considered a one-make formula. But under the surface that seems to be what has been proposed here. I have sat in many meetings with the FIA and the teams' technical directors and the one person that would have fought these proposed changes more than anyone else was Ross Brawn. He presided over Ferrari in the days when it dominated with Michael Schumacher but still would not recognise that F1 needed help even back then.

We all want to see changes that allow the drivers to race closer for longer, but no matter what those changes are, any car that produces downforce to give it increased grip will by definition suffer when in the turbulence of another car. I would dispute the claims of 45% loss of downforce, and even more strongly dispute the 90% reduction in this that is being talked about with this new concept.

Just as an example - take an aeroplane flying along smoothly in free air. Then it hits some turbulence and it gets a bit rocky. Planes that have flightplans that mean they must cross each other or follow each other have to fly at something like 500 feet altitude separation just to reduce the potential turbulence of flying in 'dirty air'.

That said, the intention of the 2021 concept seems to be to generate a much higher percentage of the car's downforce from using ground effect. This can only be positive as it is less critical to turbulent airflow.

However, and it's a big however, the devil will be in the detail and that needs to be left up to the teams' designers as opposed to an underfloor profile defined by the FOM research group. Coming up with a workable solution for the complete package will be a balancing act of the tunnel throat location, its leading-edge profile and its diffuser ramp rate. This, combined with how the outer 5-10cm of the floor edge interacts with the underfloor, will define the underfloor's centre of pressure.

That, in turn, will define how much load is required from the front and rear wing assemblies and so it goes around in a circle until you end up with a car that can be aerodynamically balanced - in clean air. And that's where the problem will still lie.

It has always been and always will be very difficult to write regulations that will define a racing car that will work in all environments, even IndyCar, which is after all a one-make formula, still has its cars suffering in traffic at the high downforce circuits and even at Indianapolis - where they run more or less no wing. So the problem doesn't just go away because of running less wing downforce. The car set-ups get optimised to suit a required circuit level of downforce and anything that effects that airflow will have a detrimental effect on its handling.

At the moment, and for the foreseeable future, the teams are tasked with designing the fastest car possible from a set of regulations. Until some changes are put in place that forces the teams to have to design a car that works in traffic, I believe the problems are here to stay.

Many people, myself included, though that the Austrian and British races were really exciting. I still think they were pretty good but in hindsight it might just be because the others were so bad.

I spoke with a few of my casual motorsport-watching friends, who after all are the big viewing numbers, and they didn't really agree with me. They did think they were less boring but when you do look at them in depth the excitement was limited to a couple of laps at the beginning and a few highlights through the race.

It was interesting to hear Max Verstappen's problem in qualifying at Silvertone wasn't turbo lag as such, but a difference in throttle position and actual position. Isn't this a form of traction control?
Desmond Senior, via Twitter

As Red Bull has said, the improvements in the chassis traction have allowed Verstappen - in qualifying at least - to be more aggressive on the throttle. But the engine mapping has not come into line with that.

The engine mapping will probably include a maximum rate of change of turbo speed. This will be controlled by the MGU-H. In other words, the MGU-H will be holding the turbo back and in doing so producing electrical energy that can go directly to the MGU-K, in effect giving the driver more electrical power while optimising the boost pressure, which in turn is saving fuel.

The new mapping will allow the turbo to speed up that little bit faster, giving the driver less of an impression of turbo lag. But it will not all be a win-win situation as there will be less electrical energy generated.

The answer to your question, 'is this a form of traction control?' is yes, but then so many of the electronic control systems on a current F1 car are optimised to produce more controllable torque to the rear wheels.

The driver still has to regulate it with their right foot, but all these things give them a larger and more consistent working window. Gone are the days of peaky torque curves that spun up the rear wheels - the driver can do it but it will only be at their discretion.

One thing I haven't seen discussed much - if at all - is why the drivers were able to race, often very close together, at Silverstone. It's a mixed corner circuit, albeit a very fast one, but it appeared to me that the problem of being unable to race in close quarters with competitors didn't exist? Why was/is this?
Geoff Thomas, via email

Yes, it was a bit strange on a track that has fast sweeping corners that the cars were able to follow each other as much as they were. But I think this was all down to the tyres being the hardest in Pirelli's range.

When you consider that Lewis Hamilton did the fastest race lap on the last lap of the race and on the 32nd lap for that set, I think this shows that if you had done your homework correctly and had a car that could qualify for the final part of qualifying on the medium tyre, then a one-stop race was definitely the best strategy.

You also need to consider that the race will always be easier on the tyres compared to short, high-fuel runs on Friday afternoon when there is very little rubber on the track.

The problems we are seeing are that the following cars lose downforce and slide around, overheating their tyres that little bit more. These tyres are critical to temperature so the problem compounds itself - cars that have not got the downforce of the leading teams struggle with this problem even without following another car.

The drivers need to drive within the tyre and not slide the car too much. But when one driver catches another the objective is to pass them - so they accept the car sliding around that bit more while they try to pull off a move. But if it takes too long, the tyres cry enough and that's when they have to drop back.

So, to sum up, harder tyres will give a little more durability and time to pull off an overtaking manoeuvre when following another car but will in turn reduce the amount of pitstops a driver needs to do.

But if a softer tyre was used just to potentially introduce more pitstops, the drivers would drive within that tyre to conserve it and try to achieve what the simulations suggest is the fastest race strategy.

McLaren has committed to building a new windtunnel at the MTC. But what is so great about Toyota's tunnel in Cologne? Who else has a top-notch tunnel? What is the cutting edge of windtunnels? What kinds of innovations are only possible with a new tunnel?
Kenny Stolz, via email

Why does it take two years to build a windtunnel? McLaren recently announced a new construction project and, for Macca fans, the timeline seems excessively long!
@sanigene, via Twitter

Again I would like to answer these two questions in one as they both relate to more or less the same thing.

The McLaren factory was built around the initial windtunnel and, in fact, the lake at the building is used for cooling the fluid that in turn cools the working section of the tunnel. So, replacing it has an added headache as it as the heart of the building.

You just don't go off to your local hardware supplier and buy a windtunnel. Each one will have its own design criteria and requirements both from the team and the company that is supplying it, so it just takes time to put that all together. From making the decision to getting a first set of calibrated windtunnel results, two years is not a long time and it wouldn't surprise me if this timescale is a little ambitious.

The Toyota windtunnel was built with no restriction on budget. Toyota's directive was to spend its way to success. Going off track, as an example we at Jordan at the time had one hydraulic machine that could load up suspension components to check their strength and stiffness. With each different component you would have to change the mounting devices so it took time. At Toyota, they just bought a machine for each suspension component so instead of one they had eight!

The Toyota tunnel is similar in that when built it was state of the art and money was no object. Within that, the working section, which is where the model sits, is bigger than most. This then takes a bigger fan to get the airspeed required and so it goes on.

The larger working section is the critical area with the current regulations. The models are 60% of full size, which means the width of the model is 120cm, but with what is called the outwash you need roughly the same again either side of the model otherwise the walls of the tunnel will affect it. This, in turn, will affect your results. That means the working section of the tunnel needs to be a minimum of 3.6m wide or even more otherwise the results will be questionable.

Currently, and for the future, it's difficult to answer the question of what makes a good windtunnel. But the basics are that it needs to cater for the size of a model - 60% is now the norm in F1 and the maximum allowed - have high-quality airflow, be very well temperature controlled, with a stable belt system. After that, it is down to the balance system that gives all the numbers and wheel pans under the belt that gives the unsprung loads.

Then it is down to the people using it. Any windtunnel is just a tool to give you numbers and after that comes the correlation between the tunnel and the track. No matter which tunnel, there will always be some sort of an offset or questionable area and it is the people using it that need to recognise this and cater for it. If everything that came out of the tunnel was gospel then there would be no need for all those aero rakes we see during the first practice sessions of a race weekend.

I think you could say that any team that is successful relative to its manpower and budget has a windtunnel that its aerodynamics department understands well. The most sophisticated windtunnel in the world won't make up for a lack of good aerodynamicists, but the combination of both will be very powerful.

The one spanner I would throw into the works here is that if the new regulations do change, as the proposals presented suggest, then in effect with the reduction in what's called aerodynamic outwash the cars will be aerodynamically smaller. So, a windtunnel that gave you spurious results with these bigger and aerodynamically more intrusive cars won't be as big a problem for the 2021 regulations.

That is, if they ever get through...

Why were Jordan one of the later adopters of a high nose tip in 1996, given other teams went that way in the seasons before?
Marc Jameson, via email

I was always keen to keep the centre of gravity as low as possible and was never happy with some of the suspension systems that you need to create to allow for a high nose. Also, we didn't really see the aerodynamic improvement that you needed to justify it.

For 1995, we also changed to using the Peugeot engines and as a small team I spent most of my time trying to get that relationship up and running. If you look at the Jordan 195, we had a fairly different radiator inlet concept to hopefully allow the bargeboards, which were something relatively new, room for development.

I suppose the basic answer is we missed it and from the numbers we got from testing in that area we couldn't justify it. As a small team, you can only do so much.

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