The pic show in post 5 is indeed the rear end of the renault R24 (2004) f1 car, the rear suspension setup in that car has been used for several seasons since and almost every other team use the same configuration (exception being this years red bull technologies cars the use pull rods)
The setup is as follows,
carbon fibre double wishbones, and carbon fibre pushrods. (the wishbones have a designed spring flex in the vertical direction)
The pushrods act on titanium rockers which have inbuilt torsion springs (twist) around the pivot point.
The rockers then have push rods to dampers on either side and they have pull rods that connect the two sides together via the J (jounce) damper. The J damper consists of standard coil over damper unit and is used to control the pure vertical movement of the car.
This setup allows the car to have 'soft' independent suspension when only one wheel is excited (say over a kurb) and quite a 'hard' suspension when both wheels are simultaneously loaded (down force at high speed, pitch under acceleration)
In automotive terms you pretty much always compress a spring under jounce as the static weight of the vehicle provides a 'preload' onto the spring.
If you were to stretch the spring under load you would have to weld the springs to the spring cups and eventually the welds would fatigue and your suspension would collapse
I was mearly making a reference to the use of multiple fences jees.
The 'fish scale' swimsuits you reference to, are an attempt to clone the compliant surfaces found on many waterbourne creatures most notably dolphins.
A compliant surface is believed to provide a matching layer between the density difference of the solid body and the passing fluid. The texture also helps to dampen out Tollmien-Schlichting waves formation which are a primary cause for turbulent flow thus delaying transition to turbulent boundary layer thus reduces drag. The exact matching surface is difficult to calculate and will change along the legnth of the body which is why dolphins have distinct sections where the pattern changes.
One effect it will have is every team will now be mocking it up in the wind tunnel just like the walrus williams nose cone of a few years ago
It can be defined as yaw angle yes. As you said the car doesnt actually go where the tyres are pointing (unless at slow enough speed -> ackerman steering)
The primary airflow will hit the car at a slight angle when cornering it wont be straight down the middle.
Its why some wings have fences to them to impede flow along the span of the wing.
Most notable for this are the Subaru Impreza WRC and the Mitsubishi Evo 8 WRC's rear wings are designed to sustain down force levels whilst the car is being 'drifted' around the corner. Rally cars intentionally induce oversteer to get more turn in. These wings just increase the stability of the tail and make it more progressive (Anti stall)
Have you actually done the numbers on it with the profiles and angle of attack they're using (notice they've not entirely vertical nor is the chord parallel to the x axis.
I wouldn't trust what a team says they do, after all they'll be telling the opposition exactly what they're aero's are thinking.
Also have you considered the slip angle the car has during cornering ?
Only recently have f1 teams actually started modeling there cars at cornering angles rather than straight ahead.
BMW.Sauber have one of the finest wind tunnels in f1 backed up with a very fast supercomputer. Its why BMW brought out the team they could see the infrastructure to develop aero was there and they lacked engines & chassis development.
And as for those fins on the front of side pods they control the flow being kicked out around the car, some teams have been known to use aero profiles in the support mounts and the vertical plane as an end plate which creates a mini mid wing
Those wings are incredibly ugly and i wish them to be banned now, they certainly are in the fov so quite how they've been allowed i dont know.
As for my opinion on what they actually do ...
They appear to have a wing profile to them. When turning into a corner the wings would be angled into the airflow. I'd of guessed they have done the cfd so that this relative motion to the airflow would create a horizontal force into the apex of the corner and thus get more turn in at high speed.
Its a big problem in setting up an f1 to get neutral balance between low and high speed corners.
The mac clone horns in the middle of the car have a similar effect of pulling the car into the turn
next thing you lot will be moaning that the rev limiters are too low!
you dont have to rev the engine all the way to the limit you know .. you can shift before it cuts power.
Oh and having peak power just before a limiter is poor for racing purposes, when racing you use a rev band which you operate within, ideally this band should have the most average power avaliable. If you have a late peak in power when you change to the next gear your not at optimum power and you've got to climp the power hill yet again.
It is why most boyracers are fooled by there apparent power gain, because there power output is steaper they think they've got more power avaliable.
A typical large bore exhaust system will loose you 20-30 hp in the low to mid rev band if your lucky (quite easily more) and if your really really lucky you might gain 1-5hp near peak power. As i said its an apparent power increase because it feels more violent when coming on cam etc.
Give me a venturi effect exhaust and mild cam any day
As an automotive mechanical engineer those videoes (hoping up the kerb) and rolling out of the left hander are actually quite realistic.
When your comparing these incidents to real life your forgetting one thing, your setups. Road cars will not ever be setup that stiff because of the low frequency bounce effect.
All please google how a spring responds to differing frequency input and how the stiffness of the spring effects this.
A spring at low frequency tends to respond with a unit displacement (what goes in pretty much comes out) as it tends towards the natural frequency (resonance) of the spring the response becomes infinite (with damping the response is not infinite but instead very large) after this frequency the respone drops back to unity and then tails of at 20dB/decade in frequency.
The stiffness of a spring effects where the natural frequency is and the stiffer the spring the higher the frequency to which it occurs.
In road setups its stupidly low so it'll never happen unless forced (low riders using pnuematics) but in lfs you can have very high levels of spring stiffness coupled with high levels of damping and anti roll yields to one very stiff setup.
If you want an example of this effect drive over a cattle grid slow, and then drive over it faster.
You will notice as you get faster the displacment gets much lower. (but the acceleration as its dependant on your speed will get faster)
Edit - I almost forgot, if you want to have a easy roll over setup, set the the bog standard gti to have the max stiffness of suspension, max damping, max anti roll and the highest ground clearence (raises CoG) and then drive it on blackwood, you'll find if you run over the kurbs there (mainly into turn one) and you clip the inside you'll either go up onto two wheels or over onto your side very easily