I would like to say I am in no way opposed to it as a design and I think it's a rather clever piece of engineering that would certainly be at home in GP2 or A1GP.

ive always loved the look of F1 cars since they are pure funtion. doubt they will look exactly like that though, running that in real life and you'd have 2 flat tires on the rear since the wings are only supported on the inside :P

this years unvailing was fantastic seeing how the teams dealth with the lose of downforce and it looks like next year and 2007 will be even more interesting.

great idea, hope it works.....flippin ugly to look at though isn't it?.......

I'm trying to imagine how the car would feel without one of those two wings... like if someone hit one... how would the car perform?

Quote from Tweaker :

I'm trying to imagine how the car would feel without one of those two wings... like if someone hit one... how would the car perform?

It would be totally undrivable, just like loosing your wing atm, a wing failure at speed would still result in a total loss of control just like it does now, but I don't really think there is an added safety issue.

Probably better than if you only had one big wing and lost that.

This wing works because in a finite-span wing there are vortices shed at the tips of the wing in counter-rotating directions. Have a look at the rear wing tips on F1 cars in damp conditions and you'll see condensation in the vortices. These vortices rotate to cause an upwash at the centre of the wing and a downwash outboard of the wing tips. By splitting the wing in two you create a downwash in the centre, hence the 'centreline downwash generating wing' name.

However, there will now be two upwash zones at the centre of each of the smaller wings. Since the aspect ratio of the wing will be reduced (shorter span for the same chord) the upwash will be a lot stronger than that currently seen in F1. So the whole picture has a downwash along the car centreline then two strong upwash zones directly behind each wing then a downwash zone outboard of each wing. This would seem to me to be a much worse aerodynamic condition than having a single rear wing. Especially when you consider that, according to those crude diagrams, only the centre section of the front wing will benefit from the downwash. The outboard thirds will be in the upwash from the two rear wings. I'd really like to see a more complete CFD analysis of the new wing before I said I'd be happy with it. A single stagnation pressure distribution along the centreline really doesn't show much. Especially since it looks to me to be a highly sanitised 'show them the benefits but none of the drawbacks' diagram.

Why don't they just rise the bloody rear wing, even higher than in A1GP?

i think, if you lost one of the two wings it may not be as disasterous as losing the whole thing because, I was a formula3 video (1999 i think? had sato and pizzonia in it)ANYWAYS. and one car lost half a front wing, but managed to carry on and finish the race.....he was pretty darn slow, but not as bad as if he lost the whole wing....

phew that was long winded:melting:

Quote from detail :

Why don't they just rise the bloody rear wing, even higher than in A1GP?

1968 graham hill style

The dangers involved in loosing a wing are when there is a load on it, driving down a straight you should be alright (maybe worse with the imbalance of two wings), but if a wing fails under load there is nothing the driver can do about it. Most small single seaters (be they F3, Formula Renault etc.) can race without wings. Look at Formula Ford 1800 add wings to them and it will completely change the car. In practice at Brands Hatch for a Formula 4 (club racing with a mixture of Zetec, CVH and bike engined single seaters running wings and slicks) a car crashed damaging the rear wing. The rear wing could not be repaired in time so both wings were sawn off to keep the car balanced and it raced without problems.

The reasoning against high wings would be on safety grounds, even with lenient 1960s safety standards they only lasted a year.

Quote from ajp71 :

The dangers involved in loosing a wing are when there is a load on it, driving down a straight you should be alright (maybe worse with the imbalance of two wings), but if a wing fails under load there is nothing the driver can do about it.

The wings are never under more load than at the end of a fast straight. That's why if they fail, they usually fail when the car is doing some serious speed, just before the braking area for the next turn.

at high speed i'd say it will be just like a normal wing failure (maybe a bit less dramatic)
at low speed they could limp back to the pits as usual


i'm sure the dual wings will be pretty pointless to replace as the single ones where before and will be next year. from what i've seen they are attached to the chassis and the new ones will be aswell.

Remove the back wing and they will just do what was done this year, add more little aero parts all over the car to regain downforce. Unless they address that issue too. Although obviously the aero parts wouldnt be able to go directly above the rear tires.

Quote from sinbad :

The wings are never under more load than at the end of a fast straight. That's why if they fail, they usually fail when the car is doing some serious speed, just before the braking area for the next turn.

I was talking about the lateral load on the car, if a wing fails down the straight (where the wing produces the most downforce but there is no lateral load) the car may spin out of control but it will generally bounce off the wall with less of an impact than flying off on a corner which is where the real danger is.

Also notice that without rear wing the rear tires lock always when braking. Without nosewing the car must be quite pushy, or the nose just jumps up and the whole car is upsidedown after some air time . Was it JJ Lehto who has done that?

Quote from ajp71 :

Why on earth do the FIA feel they should be designing F1 cars? That job should be down to the teams, wing shapes should not be laid down by regulation, there's no room for innovation in F1 now.

lol, think again - FIa is regulating everything very well already - you cannot be very innovative

Quote from PLAYLIFE :

lol, think again - FIa is regulating everything very well already - you cannot be very innovative

My point is not that by redesigning the wing they are taking any pre-existing chances of innovation away from the teams, more that they shouldn't have this much control in the first place. If electric trickery is the way to go, so be it I don't like it but if thats the way to make your car fastest then why shouldn't you be allowed to do it? With the current system the teams with the most money should always be the fastest because they have now been honing the same basic design for the last 10 years. A single tire maker would level the playing field hugely (remember F1 cars are so stiff they run high profile tires where most of the suspension is in the sidewall).

IMO the best thing F1 can do is force a single tire supplier and derestrict a lot of other things, frankly why you can't have a 3L single seater championship beats me, somethings may be banned either for safety or to keep the costs down but if F1 car design was governed by a looser set of rules then an underbudgeted team could still keep the bigger teams on their toes.

Hmmm If we wan't overtaking to be better, forget about asking AMD for tech help, they should call this guy!

http://www.negative-camber.org ... 4_2002/super_formula1.jpg
http://www.negative-camber.org ... 4_2002/super_formula2.jpg

Quote from Tweaker :

Hmmm If we wan't overtaking to be better, forget about asking AMD for tech help, they should call this guy!

http://www.negative-camber.org ... 4_2002/super_formula1.jpg
http://www.negative-camber.org ... 4_2002/super_formula2.jpg

that a home built single seater?......see now thats what f1 would look like if there wasent design restrictions, everyone sincerely repeat after me "THANK YOU SO VERY MUCH MR MOSELY!"

What a wing

Woah - that's more like a car attached to a wing than a wing attached to a car...

Quote from Michael Miskella :

ive always loved the look of F1 cars since they are pure funtion. doubt they will look exactly like that though, running that in real life and you'd have 2 flat tires on the rear since the wings are only supported on the inside :P

F1 cars (unfortunately) haven't been close to pure function for thirty years, and haven't been pure function for more than fifty.

You want to talk about function over form, then you'd attach the wings directly to the suspension uprights rather than the body. This was how it was originally done, but it was soon thereafter legislated out of existence. Thus the compromise aero/mechanical grip setups of today.

Also...purely functional race cars don't have open wheels....

Quote from skiingman :

This was how it was originally done, but it was soon thereafter legislated out of existence.

Why was that?

Quote from Bob Smith :

Why was that?

I don't know the exact rationale, but it probably had something to do with the governing bodies being able to more easily check the safety of the wing-mounts, as well as desire to reduce the benefit provided by the wings. Wing mounted to back of body is a little easier to inspect for safety than a wing mounted through the body directly to the suspension uprights I would suppose.

Think about how great that would be today though....you can set the car up for nearly optimum mechanical grip, and the thousands of pounds of downforce you create are fed directly into the tires, not through the springs and dampers.