Extreme vs conventional - 2019's wing design battleground

On the track, the story of the past two years has been the on-track battle between Mercedes and Ferrari. After a rather hefty regulation change over the off-season, the two have taken different design philosophies, hurling their feud even further into the realms of the off-track arena.

Each of the 10 teams has had to spend the winter searching for the downforce lost to the new breed of front wings, now two metres wide and stripped of their complexities. As a result, the rest of the car will have less opportunity to turn difficult-to-manage airflow around it, squandering the performance of the floor and diffuser.

As the cars emerged from the Barcelona pit garages for the first time as a collective, the aerodynamicists back at their respective bases will have been praying - hoping that their own interpretations of the brand new rules can reclaim the deficit and stake their claim as the best of the field.

Teams' interpretations can be split into groups - 'conventional' designs, closer in line to what the spirit of the rules intended, and those with a clearer attempt to reintroduce the outwash characteristic of the new wings

Already, there are teams that have stumbled across similar solutions to each other, while others are forging their own paths in making sure their front wings integrate seamlessly with the rest of their cars. The clock's ticking; it's just a few weeks until the season starts properly in Melbourne and, when the music stops, each team needs to have its house in order - or risk turning up with no real performance to speak of if they've taken the wrong path.

It's not anything new, of course. Front wings have always been massively important in F1; it's the first part of the car that comes into contact with the oncoming airflow after all.

Since 2009's wider front wings were introduced (pictured below), spanning the maximum allowable width of the car, a number of teams came across the benefit of outwash - the act of directing airflow outboard. In doing so, the tyre wake becomes penned in by the outwashed air and the vortex produced by the inboard section of the wing, ensuring that it's kept away from the floor.

Previously, the old generation of front wings had done the opposite; the endplates were turned inwards at the trailing edge, poking the oncoming rush of air inwards and leaving it for the bargeboards to deal with, but the larger span gave the teams a brand new option to exploit.

It became a phenomenon that the teams were reliant on. As the 2019 ruleset was developed to slash the amount of outwash produced by each car - having found that pumping a mass of air outboard was somewhat detrimental to allowing cars to close up to each other - the focus of the aerodynamicists wasn't on finding an alternative solution, it was on clawing that outwash back.

Come launch week, each team was showcasing (or in the case of the first couple of launches, hiding) its own interpretation of the new front wing regulations. These can be separated into groups; the more 'conventional' designs, probably closer in line to what the spirit of the rules intended, and the designs making a clearer attempt at reintroducing the outwash characteristic of the new wings - to varying extremes.

In the first group, there's heavyweights Mercedes and Red Bull. Although the two teams conform to the common trends of curling up the outboard ends of the wing upwards to attempt to develop a vortex to be driven around the car, they have used all of the bounding box available within the rules to maximise front-end downforce. In Mercedes' case, the team has created a spoon shape on each flap - swooping up towards the inboard section to develop another vortex there.

The Red Bull front wing takes a different look at that, rising a little later from the endplate to make the most use of the strakes underneath. Those strakes develop their own vorticity to improve the suction underneath, and teams are limited to just two for this season - meaning that placement must be carefully measured.

There's also a different approach to the top three elements, with Red Bull using the break in the flap adjuster to raise them ahead of the front tyre - washing airflow away from it.

Arguably, all the other teams fall into the other bracket - save for Haas and perhaps Williams, from which we've only seen a launch-spec rendition so far. But the noise from the British team's camp is that the 2019 car is a little undercooked, so expect a complete rethink amid the technical team's current turmoil.

The other school of thought in front wing design involves a more extreme view in shaping the top three elements. Here, the inboard section uses as much of the bounding box as possible, but compresses up as the wing sweeps towards the endplate. In this, the design sacrifices outright downforce as the elements twist to lower angles of attack, creating an anhedral shape to allow the flow on the wing to wash downwards.

There's almost two sub-categories here, and Renault, McLaren and Racing Point have slightly muted versions of this concept - although their respective designs show the closed-up elements at the endplates, looking like a concertina mid-bend, it's nowhere near as extreme as the remaining designs.

Those are being run by Ferrari, Alfa Romeo and Toro Rosso. Here, the outboard portions of the wing are closed up as much as possible, trying to develop an effect similar to the previously-seen vortex tunnels - now banned under the regulations governing curvature in the wing. Toro Rosso's launch specification wing was a far simpler affair, perhaps trying to hide its concept before Ferrari and Alfa emerged with similar philosophies.

Of course, there's some differences between them. Toro Rosso seems to be running with less wing outright, while Ferrari has taken great care in meticulously shaping the inboard section to drive a barrier between the wake from the tyre and the floor of the car.

And then there's Alfa's wing, a brilliantly pragmatic piece of design with the most acute approach to finding some extra outwash performance. Using the flap adjuster to essentially create two different zones, the lead flaps are conjoined to boost downforce at the expense of a little extra drag, but that's offset by the closely-nestled collection of elements at the endplate to drive flow outwards.

Could it be that Mercedes, the winner of the last five constructors' championships, has played it safe? Team principal Toto Wolff certainly contends against that, insisting that his squad's philosophy is no cause for concern.

"We have evaluated many different possibilities and philosophies before we started, and the big risk with new regulations is that you've overlooked a loophole, a massive loophole, like happened in 2009 [when double diffusers appeared]. We haven't seen any major innovation on the car that we haven't anticipated before.

"Having said that, we're still very open-minded about what others put on the car and whether we've spotted all the possibilities. We will be following our path and trying to make this car as quick as possible - and if we spot something on the car that would be worthwhile to develop, we will look at it."

There's always going to be some degree of convergence with design philosophies in F1, as engineers will always gravitate towards the fastest package

Of course, there's always the chance in testing that teams aren't showing their full hands just yet; 'sandbagging' is a frequent pre-season term, thrown about in an accusatory manner when people suspect there's some gamesmanship going on.

Wolff addressed that too, suggesting Mercedes has plenty more in the pipeline to roll out ahead of the season opener in Australia - perhaps earmarked for a debut run in next week's second block of test days.

"You obviously need to get the balance right between to the last possible moment and therefore then putting parts to race in Melbourne but not having tested them," he adds.

"So we always try to find a way in the middle of bringing parts to the car that we want to test and see how they function rather than coming up with an aero package in Melbourne that we haven't understood before. Our cars tend to be already in a good spec in the first test in order to increase the learning."

As is natural in Formula 1, there's always going to be some degree of convergence with design philosophies, as engineers will always gravitate towards the fastest package. The early 1970s was awash with Lotus 72 clones, for example, while the majority of the 2003 field turned up with Ferrari F2002 lookalikes. Even though there's plenty of criticism levelled at F1's lack of variation, the new rules have at least quelled the dissenters somewhat.

But in time, one of the three different solutions will ultimately prove to be the strongest. And shortly after that becomes clear, a number of teams will turn up with their own versions of it - albeit presumably slightly compromised as there needs to be a degree of adaptation to work with other designs.

Of course, there's always the off-chance that one team will find a spark of inspiration, and turn up with something completely different; teams employ engineers to scour the regulations for loopholes, leaving no stone unturned in the pursuit for an advantage over the field.

This year, there's a lot to be gained from getting the front wing just right, and with teams having to learn to walk all over again, clawing back the downforce lost over the winter is the real race in 2019. And it's pleasing to see that there are plenty of different approaches to that race being taken.