Quote:
Originally Posted by nkoske
Not sure I see the innovation of the Delta-Wing.
- Lighter cars needs less energy to go the same speed. Not innovative, Porsche has done that forever, not to mention others. Basic high school level physics.
- Giant tunnels are more efficient than wings. Not innovative Again has been happening for some time.
- Torque vectoring. Not innovative, happened in F1 a long time ago and banned.
- The delta wing shape (narrow front track). Probably to only innovative thing, but I think at this point had to be proven not as good as a wide track. The delta wing has a greater power to weight than an LMP1 yet laps slower than a LMP2, which means it has to be losing it in the turns. Maybe someone has sector data that can disprove this, but the data I've seen seems to support it.
Have I missed anything? |
Bowlby himself admitted there was nothing new about the component ideas incorporated in the Deltawing. It was all about uniting them in a way that would make an efficient vehicle that could run similar lap times to existing classified protoypes using approximately half the resources. The innovation is in the way those ideas are combined and if you care to do the research you will realize there is a lot more than power to weight involved. I doubt anyone has built any form of racing vehicle that hasn't required considerable trial and error to get it working properly so why should the Deltawing be any different? There is a great deal of evidence that already establishes the concept was well on the way to fulfilling its potential but the history of the car has now been so beset with changes including personnel, tyres and design that the current version of it is struggling to resurrect the performance it was showing at last year's Petit Le Mans. If Bowlby and Nissan had continued development of the original car throughout this year it seems certain that it would have been doing what it said on the box in the first place. After all it is only an experiment in car design that either works or doesn't. It conforms to the requirements the ACO stipulated for Garage 56. If it conformed to the rulebook it wouldn't have been running in Garage 56. Quite why it polarizes us all in the way it does perhaps is one aspect of it that Bowlby didn't expect when he first designed it.