The wierdest Wings I've seen yet (you never know what comes next)

[janneppi]

Because when a car looses control at high speeds in corners, crash will most likely be worse.

[Valve Bounce]

I never quite understood why it is so bad to have a car safely corner at high speed? Yes, the G force would go up, but designers would have to limit that based on what the human body could stand. Why is there such a big need for regulations that let the cars go very fast in a straight line, but very slow when cornering?

Because Max passed himself off as an emininent Engineer, and he worked it out that for every 10 kph increase in velocity, the damage to a vehicle in any accident is doubled.

PLease don't ask me for a link, because this discussion took place more than three years ago.

[Valve Bounce]

OK, after careful re-thinking, it was 10% and not 10 kph. But that meant that if the speed around any corner was doubled, the the damage was quadroupled. And Max came out with some mathematical formulae to prove his point.

[Valve Bounce]

OK, after careful re-thinking, it was 10% and not 10 kph. But that meant that if the speed around any corner was doubled, the the damage was quadroupled. And Max came out with some mathematical formulae to prove his point.

What I meant to say wass that if the cornering speed was increased by 20%, then the forces which cause damage would be quadrupled. That's what Max claimed.

As for the wierd wings on the Honda, they are Yoda wings.

[CarlMetro]

Yoda wings.

Go faster they will, the force will be strong in these wings, but stupid they will look :

[Gannex]

As a former aerodynamicist, the answer is that aircraft design is not regulated, whereas the flat-bottom regulation of an F1 car means that the only surface an aerodynamicist has to play with is the top half of the car. In effect, this means that the top surface has to do twice the work, hence the appendages and aero-tricks.

If aircraft were restricted to only having aerodynamic work on the top surface in this way......they wouldn't fly.

I don't agree entirely with your analysis here, tamburello. I believe that even if there were no flat-bottom regulation in F1, the cars would still have winglets and flips. As I see it, the differences between F1 cars and aeroplanes which account for the latter being more streamlined than the former are these:

F1 cars have massive bits sticking out which interfere with the flow over the wings. Aeroplanes don't. The only bits sticking out on an airliner, in clean configuration (i.e., gear up, flaps up, ailerons and elevator neutral), are the engine nascelles. These are deliberately placed out of the airflow going to the wings, so as not to interfere with the wings' efficiency. Of course, you have the fuselage as well, and that renders the inboard section of the wings less effective, but you overcome that, on an aeroplane, by making the wings longer than they would otherwise be.

On an F1 car, by contrast, you have the radiator intakes, the engine air intake, the driver's head, and, of huge importance, the four wheels, all interfering with the airflow to the wings. You can't move these objects away from the wings' airflow, as you can with aircraft engine nascelles, and you can't make the wings longer, to take the wings away from the interfering objects, as you can with an aeroplane. So you are left with winglets, and flips, and other rather ineffective devices designed to "condition" the airflow, to smooth it out after it hits the interfering objects, so that by the time it reaches the wings, it is a unidirectional non-turbulent flow of air. Others of the winglets and flips are designed to produce downforce themselves, rather than for conditioning the airflow, but this too is only necessary because the air acting on the winglet or flip is disrupted by the interfering objects, and has to be used to create downforce immediately after disruption, before it becomes chaotically turbulent.

If you could have an F1 car with a wingspan of about fifty feet, or you could have the wings moved up about fifteen feet out of the dirty air behind the wheels and chassis, you would find no benefit from, or need for winglets or flips. I rather doubt, however, that the car would be very fast round corners, and I am certain it would not be legal!

[wedge]

Grounds effect isn't entirely fool-proof, is it?

It doesn't like bumps and undulations.

If the car has bad aero, the car can go airborne. Peter Dumbreck flipped 360 degrees in the air in his Merc CLK GTR and a similar thing happened to Mario Andretti when he tested at Indy.

[johnny shell]

the winglets on F1 cars are there to help guide the air around the car's rough shape, and guide the air over the wings.

airplanes don't need winglets because they have a pure shape already - no wheels, driver's heads, engine covers, radiaters, size-goverened wings, brake ducts, etc etc etc.

the airplanes shape is more effecient.

that's why only open wheel cars have all the winglets - closed wheel/cockpit cars are much more effeciant and don't need all the winglets either.

[Valve Bounce]

As I have already posted above, the velocity of those huge wheels at the top of travel are twice the speed of the moving car. This creates a huge aerodynamic problem to solve, and winglets are part of this measure.

However, if we ban all winglets, then all cars would be equally affected by those wheels.

[Gannex]

Valve, I think you're over-estimating the aerodynamic effect of the movement of the tyres. The cross-section of the tyres is huge, and this large cross-section is the overwhelming cause of the turbulence the tyres cause. Far less disruption is caused by the skin-friction between the rubber and the air, and even less than that is the result of the forward motion of the tyres' top side, relative to the air. Of course, there is SOME effect on the behaviour of the air from the fact that the tyre surface is moving, and that is partly why teams have invested the considerable amount of money that is needed to build "rolling road" systems into their wind-tunnels. But all I'm saying is that it is not quite as significant a factor as you are suggesting, and CERTAINLY not the main reason that aerodynamicists find themselves designing winglets and flips.