How teams are converging on leftfield wings for 2020

It's often said that hindsight is 20/20. But for one year only, the prescience of Formula 1's engineers will surely be enhanced by the fact that all of next year's planning will be done with 2020 vision.

Before you roll your eyes at that somewhat-contrived pun, there's actually some truth to that. For the final stage in F1's current rules cycle before the much-anticipated 2021 overhaul crashes into the paddock, there's very little change from 2019.

In light of that most - if not all - of the teams will use evolutions of their current cars this year in a bid to pump unrestricted costs into their designs for the final time, before F1's cost cap will ostensibly put creative accounting to the ultimate test.

The work for 2020 has begun in earnest, and plenty of teams have dedicated parts of Friday's practice sessions in Brazil to laying the foundations for next season.

Predominantly, the focus has been on trialling new front wings, which can run pretty much unaffected by the rest of the car. Engineers can assess how they manipulate the airflow aft of that by loading up the car with Kiel probes and Pitot tubes to read how the air responds in real time, allowing for track data to be correlated with that seen in the windtunnel.

While plenty of practice experimentation has been carried out by smaller teams, which paused 2019 developments early to accelerate the development of the 2020 car, Red Bull joined in during the Brazil weekend to validate some of the ongoing work for next year's machine.

Having been one of the last teams left using a 'deep pan' front wing this year, Red Bull tested a completely revised design - strongly rooted in the inboard-loaded front wing that Ferrari, Alfa Romeo and Toro Rosso began the year with.

We've discussed that design plenty of times over the season, as one-by-one more teams have gravitated towards that particular school of thought - but for completionist's sake, let's do so again.

By making the inboard section of the front wing as large as it can be within the permitted scope of the rules, the outboard section (yellow arrow) can be pinched up. The mainplane sweeps upwards towards the endplates, while the upper elements drop downwards to clear a space ahead of the front wheels for the airflow to spill out of.

Joining up with the endplate, this geometry creates an 'outwash' effect, a phenomenon that F1's designers crave in their efforts to mitigate the damaging properties that the wake of the front tyres produces.

Red Bull tested a completely revised front wing design in Brazil - strongly rooted in the inboard-loaded design that Ferrari began the year with

Red Bull also pioneered a split-end middle element earlier in the year, but this has been abandoned in favour of extending the final element downwards (green arrow) - further towards the neutral section.

With such a change in concept, it appears as if the team is attempting to compare the best way to create the strongest rotation of airflow here - which is released down the flanks of the car.

The team had a spot of troubleshooting to do with the new wing, however, and the nose locating pins proved somewhat difficult to slot into place as the team swapped specifications in practice at a glacial pace. But that's easy to fix.

Ultimately, there are several things that drive the shape of the front wing - the flow structures created, and the downforce produced. While the sweeping, anhedral front wings suggest that the front wings produce less overall downforce, that's generally acceptable so long as it balances out with the rear.

That seems to be where Haas's 2019 woes appear to be rooted, and the team has also handed a couple of appearances to a Ferrari-style front wing in practice. Romain Grosjean has given the design some mileage in America and Brazil and, while it has yet to see the cut-and-thrust of a race so far, Haas hopes that this solution can present an opportunity to remove some of the flaws of its troubled VF-19 design.

It seems that an inherent lack of balance in the Haas car is behind the difficulty it faces when attempting to get its Pirelli tyres up to temperature and keep them within a working window. And although the front wing produces a healthy amount of downforce, the rear of the car is somewhat disconnected from it.

Although the team has thrown multiple upgrades at the bargeboard and floor area, it doesn't seem to link up with what the front wing is throwing at it.

That's part of the rationale behind the early testing with a completely different front wing concept. Aiming to get back among the front of the midfield in 2020, Haas might end up being grateful for the lessons of this season - so long as the engineers have a clear picture of what not to do with the car.

As Gunther Steiner speculated a few races back that the front wing may have been the culprit all along, Haas now has a new avenue to explore to extract pace from its current car concept.

Alfa Romeo has also joined in with its own 2020 front wing experiments, but the new design was actually carried forward into the race.

It deposed the original conjoined-element front wing, a concept so unusual it made this writer rush back from McLaren's 2019 launch to file a story specifically on it. The conjoinment was an effort to squeeze more downforce out of the wing, as it had heavily slanted the wing downwards at the outboard section - possibly to a level more extreme than Ferrari's.

A longer-chord wing profile generally produces more downforce, but at the risk of greater flow separation. That's why teams tend to break the front wing into smaller parts, maintaining attachment at the cost of overall downforce. You can't have your cake and eat it, after all.

To try to capture the same overall downforce output, the final element on Alfa's new front wing was given a healthy dose of camber to expand the pressure difference between the top and bottom faces. The rest of the wing remained quite similar, so it seems the top three elements in particular were directly swapped to give the wing a bit more flexibility.

At the beginning of the season, there was much talk of convergence as vastly different front wing concepts all broke ground in testing. Although one suspected that these might ultimately diffuse into a middle-ground design between the deeper Mercedes/Red Bull wings and the more radical Ferrari/Alfa designs, the balance has shifted towards the more leftfield concepts. It wouldn't be too much of a surprise to see a full house of inboard-loaded front wings in 2020.

But what other developments can one expect for next season? Mercedes's extra duct nestled into its rear suspension geometry has already been enquired about by other teams, as it appears the Brackley-based designers have pioneered another solution to manage the temperatures of their car's rear tyres.

A static ruleset, over time, has proven to be something of an equaliser of the field. The convergence of design will afford the current pecking order the chance to mix

When a team approaches the FIA with an enquiry, it's usually a precursor towards a team developing an idea for its own means. After all, it's senseless to pour money into a concept that quickly turns out to be illegal, which also gives a team the ammunition to protest a result if the FIA's technical delegates give an idea the thumbs-down. After all, that's how Renault lost its result at Suzuka after an ex-Enstone engineer at Racing Point wanted to include the pre-set brake bias adjuster system in next year's car for their new employer.

One thing that will definitely change for next season is the design of the mirrors, which teams have been eager to derive some kind of tangible aerodynamic benefit from throughout the year. There's been lots of clever uses of mirror shrouds throughout 2019, as the repositioning of mirrors over the off-season have allowed more creative methods of limiting their impact.

As a result, they've been moved back inboard as concerns rose about visibility - although their inclusion, especially in the days of rear-facing cameras on road cars, do seem incongruous with the aesthetic of a modern racing car. The overall area allowed for the mirror bodywork has also shrunk, trimming the shrouds back further.

Further mandated changes for 2020 are minimal, and the rest are largely concerned with clutch positioning and operation to provide more of a challenge to the drivers at the start of the race. With the FIA heavily monitoring mapping practices to stop teams getting an advantage off of the line, the driver has more of an influence on getting a good getaway out of the blocks.

As the preparations for next season have already begun, the battle is certainly on among the teams to determine who can get the best start to life in a new decade. With each car an evolution of its predecessor, the fear of a stagnant order does linger - but each team will eventually hit a development wall as upgrade returns begin to slowly diminish.

A static ruleset, over time, has proven to be something of an equaliser of the field. The convergence of designs, the potential of parity between engine suppliers and the greater responsibility of the driver at the start line will certainly afford the current pecking order plenty of opportunity to mix.

2021's completely new technical formula is much-heralded as a 'new breed' of Formula 1 car. But if the convergence continues, the 'old breed' could be treated to a real swansong.

Unfortunately, foresight isn't 20/20.