25-11-2017, 09:47 AM
So, the technical ruling clearly wasn’t enough (and I said it would just lead to shorter shark fins) soooo... they just upped and banned them. No technical limitations designed at stopping them, no measures, no angles, no deflection tests, no geometry calculations... just “if we eyeball your car and you have a shark fin, we’ll deem your car illegal”... job done:
https://www.motorsport.com/f1/news/shark...on-982404/
But who does this hurt and why? Well for that you have to understand what the shark fin, and it’s ugly little brother the T-wing were doing:
1) The main reason we saw the return on the shark fin in 2017 was because of the regs on rear wings setting them back and lower. This means that they no sit aerodynamically in a potential ‘dirty’ or ‘uncontrolled’ air area on the car, massively reducing the effectiveness of rear wings. The shark fin cleans that air up by forcing in along it’s surface and making sure it hits the wing perpendicular to it.
2) Given the larger / wider wheelbase and its aim to increase cornering speeds engineers needed a device or trick to allow cars to maintain stability through the corners and to counteract yaw and roll in the chassis. The fin does this by providing a counter force of pressure from the other side, like a sail on a boat.
3) The T-wings job was to direct clean air from higher up towards the rear wing to increase it’s effectiveness.
So who does this hit hardest? In simple terms points 1 and 2 will certainly impact on shorter wheelbase cars the hardest. Having less bodywork surface between the sidepods and rearwing gives the aero guys less surface to clean the air up and re-energise it. The same is true of the T-wings. There’s a reason RBR didn’t need one at the start of the season when their car ran longer, and why Mercedes still run the smallest T-wing of the lot. Point 2 however isn’t clear, as it depends on the nature of the corner, but generally speaking in high speed corners you’d expect longer wheelbase cars to cope better without the fin, as long as they can get the rearwing working efficiently. It shouldn’t matter as much in slower corners as there are less lateral forces trying to pitch the car.
So out of the current design philosophies you’d have to say the least effected would be Mercedes, Toro Rosso, Renault and McLaren... funny that. Whereas the teams who’ll suffer most are Ferrari, Red Bull and Force India, in fact given the work they put into their fins and T-wings Force India will probably take a big hit. Personally, from an aesthetics point of view I’m pleased to see them go, but from a pure speed and convergence point of view... well, it’s clear who it hurts, the big boys with the budgets will cope, and hearing how essentially it was Renault, Mercedes and McLaren who conspired to grind it to a halt, my guess is they have solutions already in the pipeline. Thoughts?
https://www.motorsport.com/f1/news/shark...on-982404/
But who does this hurt and why? Well for that you have to understand what the shark fin, and it’s ugly little brother the T-wing were doing:
1) The main reason we saw the return on the shark fin in 2017 was because of the regs on rear wings setting them back and lower. This means that they no sit aerodynamically in a potential ‘dirty’ or ‘uncontrolled’ air area on the car, massively reducing the effectiveness of rear wings. The shark fin cleans that air up by forcing in along it’s surface and making sure it hits the wing perpendicular to it.
2) Given the larger / wider wheelbase and its aim to increase cornering speeds engineers needed a device or trick to allow cars to maintain stability through the corners and to counteract yaw and roll in the chassis. The fin does this by providing a counter force of pressure from the other side, like a sail on a boat.
3) The T-wings job was to direct clean air from higher up towards the rear wing to increase it’s effectiveness.
So who does this hit hardest? In simple terms points 1 and 2 will certainly impact on shorter wheelbase cars the hardest. Having less bodywork surface between the sidepods and rearwing gives the aero guys less surface to clean the air up and re-energise it. The same is true of the T-wings. There’s a reason RBR didn’t need one at the start of the season when their car ran longer, and why Mercedes still run the smallest T-wing of the lot. Point 2 however isn’t clear, as it depends on the nature of the corner, but generally speaking in high speed corners you’d expect longer wheelbase cars to cope better without the fin, as long as they can get the rearwing working efficiently. It shouldn’t matter as much in slower corners as there are less lateral forces trying to pitch the car.
So out of the current design philosophies you’d have to say the least effected would be Mercedes, Toro Rosso, Renault and McLaren... funny that. Whereas the teams who’ll suffer most are Ferrari, Red Bull and Force India, in fact given the work they put into their fins and T-wings Force India will probably take a big hit. Personally, from an aesthetics point of view I’m pleased to see them go, but from a pure speed and convergence point of view... well, it’s clear who it hurts, the big boys with the budgets will cope, and hearing how essentially it was Renault, Mercedes and McLaren who conspired to grind it to a halt, my guess is they have solutions already in the pipeline. Thoughts?
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