Hi I am new to this forum so might ask a few questions form time to time to get up to date. Anyway I found this on the BBC F1 website. [video]http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/motorsport/formula_one/f1_videos/9426773.stm[/video] Cannot wait for Friday!
Speed Breeze, Welcome to the forum! Thanks for the link. Just looking at the their body language you can see that they look defeated - as in, they know they cannot challenge for the win in Melbourne even if the updates give a huge performance boost. As a Ferrari fan, I am glad to see Ferrari ahead of them, but I love to see Ferrari vs McLaren fights. It just doesn't seem right if Jenson and Lewis were to get knocked out in Q2 every other weekend.
McLaren gambled a lot with various radical ideas on this new car, and their gambling was played out during testing. - They lost. The new parts for next weekend have essentially not been tested (for all practical purposes) and reliability is fragile in these circumstances. That said, they had already lost their 'stake' and in a sense, have little left to lose with these late changes. On top of that, they were not designed as part of an holistic package and the result, even if it works, can be no more than a compromise, especially when compared to Red Bull and Ferrari. What really surprises me is that they did not reign-in their gambling losses a bit earlier and give themselves the chance to change their strategy (with more conservative parts) sooner. But I have been critical of their obstinate insistence on the long wheel-base all along. In my opinion it is inherently less able to control the airflow, and in the most basic sense, a longer wheelbase finds more difficulty in cornering. (Compare a limo to a hot hatch down a country lane: even if their power to weight ratios are identical, the 'squarer' wheelbase gives a far better steering response to inputs and the tyres are less stressed; and the limo only has the advantage on motorway-like straights).
Cosicave, have a read of this Any reason why Brawn disagrees with you? I've heard numerous drivers (admittedly without links at this time) say that the longer wheelbase has no real effect on the handling around corners, as its not a major difference in length.
A shorter wheelbase helps though. I'm sure all teams (bar McLaren who seem to think it's an advantage to have a longer wheelbase) try to get optimum weight distribution and reduce rear blockage for the smallest possible wheelbase.
Ideally yes, a more compact car is beneficial, although this makes interesting reading: Taken from here, which substantiates my comment about the lack of a 'real' difference. As an aside, is a larger car easier to cool, as the components don't need to be as densely packed?
I am talking about a principal. If you read carefully, you'll see that Ross Brawn is not actually disagreeing with me; he is saying pretty much what I'd have said at the time of Ferrari's small alteration, as a relative thing to performance at the time. But a longer wheelbase does nothing to help cornering. - The longer it gets, the more difficult cornering becomes in principal but of course many other things (not least a chassis' ability to generate downforce) may offset relatively small differences.
It might be easier to suggest that I'm at odds with the McLaren technical boffins, but I understand that their insistence on the long wheelbase philosophy is to help with balance, particularly with large fuel tanks and the siting of their KERS unit. However, if I were in charge at McLaren, I'd be looking at the evidence of the past three years where other teams have easily outperformed McLaren in terms of downforce generated. After all, F1 is all about going around corners as fast as possible. One more thing to add: Adrian Newey is widely recognised as the top chassis designer. Why has he not ever chosen a similar route?
I guess this is what F1 is all about - compromise! Theoretically yes, the shorter wheelbase should allow better cornering, however when considering a whole car, the disadvantage of the longer wheelbase is only 0.02%, and other things make up for this. I mean 0.02% of a 107 second lap of spa is about 2 hundredths of a second, which compared to driver input, is ignorable. The gains coming from other parts of the car are likely to be more substantial. Obviously an ideal F1 car would have excellent packaging, the ideal aero and a short wheelbase, but of the three the wheelbase seems to have the least input, so thats why its sacrificed. I'm not sure what the difference between a 'short' and 'long' wheelbase car is in F1 terms, I'm imagining a few centimetres?
DHC: I wrote both of my posts above, without seeing your last post. Incidentally, your 'here' link does not take me to a web-site and seems to be a .pdf document I am unable to download. And I have no idea what type of vehicle Toronto University were experimenting with, but I suspect it is a road vehicle with a relatively high cM (centre of Mass), which dramatically increases its relevance to the whole package as compared with an F1 car. As I have said already, there are all manner of different factors to consider but I repeat: in principal, a longer wheelbase does not help.
Will be interesting to see what this new update does for McLaren this weekend. It may give minimal benefits, or it may make the McLaren one of the fastest on the grid. Either way no one on here can tell us what difference it'll make till Saturday, and I'm happy to live with high hopes until proven otherwise.
Whilst Toronto uni used a road car, the data is relative. Whilst it won't perfectly relate to an F1 car, the orders of magnitude are likely to be broadly the same. I've found a better explanation by good old ScarbsF1 here which sums it up better. His article corroborates the headline data from the Toronto test I stated earlier, but also offers an explanation to why not all teams go for a longer wheelbase, which is interesting. Perhaps this explains the point about Newey? Maybe he felt that the money needed to develop the lighter composites could be better spent on aero development (or another area) and would result in greater gains in performance? I don't think there is a clear answer to this...good debate though!
It is indeed interesting and I completely agree that success is only found as a result of compromises in the right balance. I had written a very lengthy response explaining some of the principals involved and why disagree in part with Scarbs, who has always has a somewhat myopic view with regard to the relationship between aerodynamics and wheelbase - having got hold of an idea long ago - and stuck to it as rigidly as McLaren sticking with their design philosophy! Unfortunately I lost my connection as I finished writing and need to get to bed now. (I'll try to re-write it tomorrow if you're still interested).
Good luck to them both. I hope these new developments bring them that second they need, it will also be interesting to see how much milage they do in free practice, not too much because of engine life of course but i expect them to be at the top in mileage.
It may seem odd but I do not expect them to be at the top in terms of mileage. Here is my reasoning: Tyres are going to be the biggest single factor (assuming that a car is reliable enough to complete a race distance). And although Pirelli will be making a 12th set available to each team, this is still a substantial loss of available mileage when compared with last year's 14 sets of durable rubber - as opposed to 11 (or 12) sets of black, circular cardboard things. McLaren's drivers will need to go out and immediately find the limit. They will then go out and try to very quickly find a good balance. And then they will do as little as possible, just as I predict for most of the other leading teams. I hope I'm wrong, but I cannot see it any other way at the moment.
I can see these practices being ludicrous. Hopefully more tyres will be made available in the future. By my workings teams only really have a range of 90ish laps in total for the 3 practices, that's not ideal.
Hmm, for HRT, who seriously need to get the miles done, I wonder how they'll play it? They could write-off the race and concentrate on improving the car for Malaysia in the free practice sessions, or use the race itself as a test too. I guess that'll depend on how competitive they think they are, and how their reliability is. I don't think they'll have the tyres available to run the amount of testing that I think they'd like to, which I imagine would be pretty much solid testing! I guess the tyre situation is now going to benefit the teams who got their designs to work 'out of the box' so to speak. With testing now limited even further because the tyres simply won't last, the likes of Mclaren, and perhaps Force India, who are behind where they'd like to be, may struggle to catch up the performance now.
