[Richard C]

Originally Posted by wnut

I hope that they have compared the F2 cars in the wind tunnel with their ideas.

Following on the results of the OWG in 2009; extremely poor; which is proudly quoted by Symonds and looking at the large three element front wing and collating it with Lewis' earlier observations that he believed that they had made very little advance in solving the current problems from a drivers' point of view, I am deeply skeptical.

They have had a rocky history. However, I tend to think it was the solutions that was put forth and less about the process. Then as today, I think they had a solution in mind first, and then looked to tweak it. So if the under body wing and associated large diffuser is the wrong idea, then maybe this new effort will not work either.

I also tend to think that things are better now than before. But no doubt, we can debate this forever and provide examples of driver who think it is better or not. At this point I am looking more toward the future. And I expect they have learned from what did or didn't work from prior efforts.

So the question is... what should they do differently this time? As you say.. run multiple cars in the tunnel?

Originally Posted by wnut

Then add:

You might be wondering why the research and development teams haven’t put a second car behind the front car to test the wake. Symonds says that is “not necessary”.

Really!

Hope this lot are being paid at the end of the 2021 season following a practical demonstration of how good their changes are!

Originally Posted by chillibowl

That robot arm rake deal seems alright no?

Are they even able to run 2 cars on a rolling wind tunnel?

So that is my thinking as well.

First, I think with the movable rake, they can pretty accurately measure what is going on behind the leading car. Ideally, yes, they should then run two back to back (in various configurations), but that leads to your question chilibowl about space.

The full article has lots of info. It says that teams typically run 60% models. But to view more of the wake effect in the same tunnel size, they went with a 50% model. So that gives them more space being the car to gather "wake" data.

Then if you wanted to run two cars, the models have to be even smaller. Which starts to create problems with trusting the results. When asked about running two cars in the tunnel the answer was (quote from article)...

We did do that in 2008, with the overtaking studies we did then for 2009, and for that, we had to go down to a quarter scale model which really is getting too small. That is what negates us doing it. Even in a big tunnel like Sauber’s, you could only really run one configuration with the cars really very close. What we’re trying to do is use CFD as our real simulation tool and this is just the correlation.

So, no doubt they would love to run two models of appropriate size, but don't have a tunnel large enough. The focus is on CFD analysis and this tunnel data just helps them see if the CFD model is working (generating wake that matches reality). If they have correlation then they should be able to hopefully trust the CFD. Teams may be limited to tunnel and CFD time. This exercise would have no limits outside of budget allocated.

Richard