The FIA's Plans for Downforce Limitation and More Overtaking

One of the most interesting elements of Max Mosley's Monza press conference was the FIA's plan to limit F1 downforce to around 50% of current levels, through quantity rather than by fixing bodywork dimensions from 2008.

"In other words," Mosley said, "we are going to say that the car must never have more than N thousand Newtons of downforce in any circumstances. You can work on the drag but you can't exceed that downforce."

Controlling downforce sounds good, but how do you achieve it?

"Well," Mosley went on, "we're going to wheel the car onto the famous weighbridge we use and put weights on it equal to the maximum downforce you are allowed. And if the plank (the lowest part of the car's underbody) is touching the bridge at all points, the car is legal, and if it's not, then it's not. That would be done after the cars go into parc ferme following qualifying. We think it's foolproof and so we've more or less said to them that if you can think of a very clever way of getting around it, could you please tell us now instead of screwing up the season in 2008!"

Now, in the press room, a number of us immediately thought back to the 6cm skirt rule of the early eighties. The era was famed for the advances of 'ground effect' wing cars, where a vacuum was created under the car, sucking it onto the ground and creating mind-boggling cornering speeds.

The vacuum was sealed by sliding skirts at the outer edges of the sidepods. When speeds got out of hand, the governing body banned the skirts. They introduced a law requiring them to be a minimum 6cm off the ground. Measuring devices were used as the cars came into the pits. So what did the teams do? They developed dodgy suspension systems that allowed the cars to look like they were on stilts when they came down the pitlane and dumped them straight on the ground again as soon as they were back on the track...

In his presentation, Mosley gave the impression that the FIA was well on top of this and that concrete regulations would evolve by the end of the year. Out in the paddock, amid the fragile peace that currently seems to have broken out, nobody wanted to be seen to poo-poo Max's suggestions too viciously but, predictably, there were some Doubting Thomases.

Ross Brawn - technical director of the team to first sign up to an extended Concorde Agreemeement, whose Ferraris are sponsored by AMD, the FIA's newly-announced technology partner - one might have suspected, would have known of the FIA's plan for a good while, but even Ross seemed to suggest that it was still in the formative stages.

"I think Max is really just asking the teams to consider it," he said. "We think it's got some potential but what we would like is for the 10 teams to sit down and work through the problems that may occur and what sort of cars would evolve with that approach." All very PC.

If it works, it is a fascinating idea.

"At the moment," Brawn conceded, "we sit around saying that if we cut this bit off and change that bit and stop using these bits, then we'll lose 25% of downforce. Everyone knew that at the end of 2004, but here we are now very close to what we had last year and I suspect that some teams have even more because they've done a better job this year."

This is one of the key attractions to Mosley.

"We won't keep on having this problem about cornering speeds going up every year," he says. "They might be able to do something like stall the air at a certain speed on some circuits, so they don't have the downforce on the straight and then it gets unstalled in the corner. But in a way we don't care if they do. What we're worried about is the downforce in those quick Eau Rouge-type corners. That's what's dangerous. And, in fact, the difficulty of arranging it so that air stalls at some speeds and not at others, is massive."

Turning his thoughts to what might emerge, Brawn said: "If we say we are going to cap downforce, the objective will then be to generate it at as low a speed as possible so you reach the limit, but it does mean that in fast corners you won't have more than a certain amount of downforce and the objectives of developing the car will be different. You will be developing on the basis of low drag, driveability and good stability in the corners. Those things will become important."

Brawn admitted, however, that there could be problems.

"Measuring downforce is not an easy thing to do and a lot of teams do it differently. But it's an interesting approach because at the moment we are all working to these boxes, the cars all end up looking the same and you can never anticipate which way it's going to evolve. So we end up like this year, with all these fins and wings and bits and pieces on the car.

"Trick suspension systems which try to bypass the intended rules will have to be carefully covered but I think the idea is that we'll have the parc ferme regs as we have now, you'll finish the race and go on to a scrutineering system where a load is applied to the car and if the car shows it can support more than a certain load, then you have to explain why."

Mosley confirms: "You will do this when they are in parc ferme, so they can't change the ride height, they can't change the springs, they can't change the settings and even if they've got a really clever damper, we would discover it. The people we've talked to so far in F1, some of the best engineers, can't see a way around it."

Brawn didn't agree that it all sounds a bit primitive.

"Actually, what we are doing now is primitive," he argued. "We're saying that here's a box and you can't put any bodywork in it. If you work through the current regulations we've got so many no-go zones around the car that it's a nightmare. Whereas if you just say that it can't be more than a certain width or length, there's some safety requirements and you can't generate more downforce than 'X', now go off and do a racing car, I think lots of interesting solutions might arise. And I don't think it would be any more expensive and potentially could even save some money if the competitive advantage from the aero side is reduced."

Of course, the cynics were quick to have a laugh at that. Who doesn't appear to have particularly efficient aero at the moment? If you need convincing, Monza is all about aero efficiency and consider that in Sunday's Grand Prix, Michael Schumacher's best race lap, 1:23.584, was just 1.23 up on Tiago Monteiro's Jordan and 1.38 quicker than Christijan Albers managed in the Minardi. A year ago, Ferrari's respective fastest lap margins to Jordan and Minardi at Monza were 3.0 and 5.3. And they're all still on the same tyres.

I'm probably being a bit obtuse and mention it only mischievously, because a good bit of cynicism is always amusing. I'm sure nobody is really looking at the present at the expense of the bigger picture. We are, after all, looking post-2008 and, to coin the cliche, a week's a long time in motor racing, never mind a couple of years.

Elsewhere, Ron Dennis was trying his best to be positive but had his reservations.

"As regards the downforce, I don't want to be critical," he said, "but just from a practical standpoint, when you put that weight on a car, you can't put it on a single point. How are you going to spread those forces all over the car and on surfaces that are not designed to take loads? And if the objective is to put enough force through the car but for it not to touch the ground, if you imagine, you can just run out of suspension. Which means that we're going to have incredibly stiff cars with downforce limited only by the characteristics of rising-rate suspension. There's some good ideas and we can embrace them, but personally I would like to see some of them developed before we introduce them to F1. But I'm not at all negative."

Dennis was, however, a little more sceptical about Mosley's hopes of solving F1's overtaking problems by the end of the year via the help of an AMD super-computer and computational fluid dynamics (CFD).

"I obviously have an understanding of what we (McLaren Mercedes) do and when I listened to Max's thoughts, I struggled to come to terms with some aspects. For example, the vast majority of CFD work is basically aeronautical. The modelling of CFD applied to a static surface is a completely different discipline. The principles are the same, but the interaction between the road and the car and the difficulty you have in controlling the characteristics of the flow off the front wing and the flows coming off the wheels, makes it a completely different challenge to aeroplanes.

"We have been doing CFD work for over 10 years, our computing power is phenomenal and is backed up by some of the biggest super-computers in the world based at BA systems, one of our technology partners. When you break down the mathematical model you need into modules, the whole car is about 100 modules and you spend months on each. We are only just coming to grips with modelling whole cars and the interaction with tyres, wheels, deflections and so forth.

"This is a phenomenally complex thing and I am in awe of what resource Max seems to have at his fingertips. Because, from our standpoint, we are multi millions of spend and 10 years into the programme with some of the best experts that have engineered automotive vehicles."

Dennis denied having any problem with the FIA's new technology partner being a Ferrari sponsor.

"That's not an issue," he said, "but what I understand is that AMD use microprocessors, they do not produce computer hardware. The chain is: microprocesors, computer hardware then computer software. If that's all sat there and it's the best in the world, nothing is going to happen. You've got to have high quality input data to get high quality coming out. And of course, anyone familiar with CFD will know that what it actually produces is images, not numbers.

"When you are looking at those images you have to understand what you are looking at. You have to have a deep, deep understanding. I can assure you that inevitably if there are 10 experts, they will all think they are the best, but it is very complex and you certainly need lots of experience because to a certain degree reading these images is about trial and error.

"It's challenging stuff. It was conceptualised as a technology for the purity of aerospace - a flying plane has to cope with turbulence certainly, but you are looking at lift and drag in clean air with no moving parts. In racing we've got rotating wheels, differentials of temperature, pressure, ground surface, the undulations of the surfaces, vortices off the front wing, exhausts. Modelling these things is far more complex than modelling aeroplanes, for which CFD was invented."

It looks far from a done deal, then, and while the FIA's plans are certainly novel and interesting, it remains to be seen what emerges.

"We're not dismissing anything," Paul Stoddart said, "but the downforce idea could give rise, I think, to some interesting post-race scrutineering. The principle is probably good but the devil is always in the detail. We'd all have to be convinced that there was a foolproof, immediate way of dealing with it, so it didn't give rise to allegations of cheating and God knows what else."

Where did the idea come from?

"I think Max has mentioned downforce caps many times," Brawn said. "When we want to have downforce information we find it difficult to generate and so it's a problem that has been studied for some time, but the concept was initially from the FIA, asking the teams to make proposals.

"I think Max, now, is waiting for better suggestions and if the teams have better ideas I'm sure he'll be happy to consider them. The objective, common among all the teams, is to create cars that can follow each other and all the investigations that the FIA is shaping are to study the influence of one car on a following car. To see if we can get cars to go through corners closer together without the one behind suffering too much in the wake. It's an important issue.

"But I think if we go to him and say, Max, we need to cut the wings off here and here and we promise you we'll only have 50% of the downforce in 2008, I don't think he'll believe us anymore...."

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