How 2019 designs were maximised for extreme Monza

A Formula 1 throttle pedal gets its biggest workout of the year at Monza and, for three-quarters of every 3.6-mile lap, each driver pushes theirs to its limits. To borrow parlance from a driver's lexicon, each straight must be 'maximised' to tempt the speedometer to tick over one more digit before the brake pedal is similarly abused into the corners.

Each year at the Italian Grand Prix, a single extra Newton of drag is about as unwelcome as an ant at a picnic, and hence all the cars are trimmed out as much as they possibly can be to service each team's desire to have the slipperiest car of all. But at the same time, they actually need to have sufficient grip to navigate three Variantes, two Lesmos and a Parabolica without having to tip-toe around them.

Monza-spec upgrades are some of the most distinctive of the season, characterised by skinny rear wings and trimmed front wings to balance that out. Armed with our usual array of photographs and illustrations from Giorgio Piola, we can delve into how the designers tackled Monza in 2019.

High speed, low drag

As was heavily discussed last week, the rear wings at Spa were certainly on the 'skinny' side. But as always, the specifications for Monza are trimmed back even further to eke out more speed on the straights - in fact, that's been the case ever since wings were introduced to F1.

In 2019, there was a difference in how that was addressed; with bigger, taller and deeper rear wings, so the amount of drag created by each has been somewhat increased, and the effect of trimming out the rear wing has also shifted. There was a greater variance in the Monza-spec rear wings across the field this season as a result.

In particular, Renault, Red Bull and Haas all emerged at Monza with incredibly small rear wings to slash drag. To do this, the leading edge of the mainplane is often lifted, creating a negative angle of attack to accommodate a reduced-angle top flap to further reduce the size. As a result, the DRS is a little less effective, but taking a tow down the straights offers around half a second per lap extra in performance - so those two variables somewhat balance out.

The illustration above shows the difference between Red Bull's specification of wings from Spa to Monza. While the Spa specification was a lower downforce configuration of the RB15's normal wing package, the Monza spec has the short-chord DRS flap to allow for a higher mainplane.

Conversely, Williams ran with largely the same rear wing it had at Spa, trimming out the outboard ends but running with a spoon-section mainplane. Over the past few seasons, Williams has been a disciple in low-drag design, but a change in concept over the winter has left the team to swing too far in the other way - an overly-draggy design is paired with too little in the way of downforce. Due to the FW42's inherent dragginess, and the team's much-publicised issues with production and development at the start of the year, Williams had very little in the way of updates for Monza. Instead, it stuck with a deep-pan rear wing to make up some of the deficit in the corners.

One of the key parts of setting up a car's aerodynamics is that the output of the front must be balanced with the output of the rear

Although one could chastise a team for not simply producing a low-downforce wing, it's rarely that simple. Monza-spec packages must still be fully optimised to fit with the car, and if a car's limitations mean that developing a low-drag wing would actually be detrimental, then there's no point in wasting resources doing so.

Mercedes, it seemed, had developed a wing for both Spa and Monza. It featured a little more camber compared to Ferrari's rival wing in Italy, and that seemed to exacerbate the W10's disadvantage in a straight line against the SF90. Toto Wolff suggested after the race that his team had perhaps taken the wrong approach to the lower-downforce circuits and, having had its dominance put on hold since the summer break, he'll be glad to see the back of them.

Full frontal shrewdity

One of the key parts of setting up a car's aerodynamics is that the output of the front must be balanced with the output of the rear. If not, then all sorts of weird handling characteristics are introduced to the car, and no amount of tinkering with suspension set-up can dial that out.

When running a Monza rear wing, the reduced downforce output very much suggests that the front wing should be trimmed out to follow suit. At Spa, the top element received a little bit of attention - for example, Ferrari's already-lower drag front wing received a delicate trim to mine the straights of every single fraction of a second.

And while the Scuderia maintained the status quo, the Toro Rosso and Haas factions surfaced with an interesting pair of solutions at Monza.

Having been one of the teams to run this season with an 'inboard-focused' front wing, with which the responsibility of downforce production falls to the inner two-thirds of each side, Toro Rosso had to address the balance in output by reducing the angles of attack of each element. But these elements begin to protrude rearwards at the tips.

There's two reasons for that; first of all, some downforce is still necessary, and increasing the chord length at this point delivers that boost. But there's also a need to build, control and send the vortex produced by the tips of the inboard section - after all, the wheel turbulence still has to be controlled. Toro Rosso's solution is a little bit of a Swiss army knife design, giving the team lots of options to manage airflow and produce downforce, while also doing so with a minimal drag penalty. It seemed to be working nicely, until Daniil Kvyat's powertrain sprung a terminal oil leak.

Haas seemed to be working on similar lines, although this was more dramatically sculpted to fit in with the flap adjuster support structure. The curvature of the inboard section was done to manage the aforementioned vortex (known as the Y250, for fans of complex jargon), before transitioning into the rest of the wing.

At the centre of the geometry before the metal insert, the element twists around to limit drag, before the outboard section flares upwards to provide a smidgen of downforce.

One of the interesting themes of 2019 is how the teams work with the more restrictive front wing designs, and although the regulations seem to prescribe a single route it has arguably resulted in more novel solutions compared to the copy-paste wings from previous seasons. That's real creativity.