Per tracksideonline.com asking for fan responses to the Delta Wing
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Early returns to TSO HQ have DeltaWing more hated than T George and R Miller combined. At least all OWR fans have something in common now.
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Per tracksideonline.com asking for fan responses to the Delta Wing
Quote:
Early returns to TSO HQ have DeltaWing more hated than T George and R Miller combined. At least all OWR fans have something in common now.
Agreed. The designs from either one look interesting and both companies know how to build very good real world race cars.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mark in Oshawa
After reading more technical analysis of the "Delta Wing", IHMO, the "outside of the box" thinking including some thinking outside of the box named "physics". it appears to have been designed around steady state conditions, while racing is anything but "steady state".
So now they want a computer to steer the car? How is that a good thing? Using any form of differential steer to get the car to turn doesn't fly as a driver has to make corrections and be able to very precisely position the car on the track. Not only that, but the rear tires will be doing all of the work. The computing power to do that with differential steer is very high. F1 has used electronic diffs to help steer the car, and much of that was banned as too expensive as well as having some safety concerns.
Taking a risk of this magnitude IMHO is just not smart considering the fragile state of racing in general. The risk of failure is too high, and the sport can't stand a failure of the basic technology
Any engineering project is a set of compromises. You start with a set of desired characteristics, and design towards the goal of accomplishing them. When I look at this design, I wonder what those characteristics were. If the goal was to get around a high speed oval at nearly the same speed as the current car, but to use a much smaller engine to do so, then I can see where this design makes sense. In order to get a 300 hp car around the track at those sort of speeds, then a radical reduction in drag is required. The narrow nose and faired wheels make a lot of sense in that context. I'm not sure why 300 hp was the chosen engine output. A turbo four is capable of putting out way more than that. Remember the turbo four F1 engines of 20 years ago? They were putting out 900 hp or more in race trim, from 1.5 liters.
I still can't get over that narrow track front end, when a wide track is standard operating practice if lots of grip is the desired characteristic. One of the things that I've noticed about computer models is that they are very good when there is lots of data to draw from in their design. I don't doubt that a simulation of a hypothetical suspension that is similar in design to a currently used one can be carried out successfully. I have my doubts about the modeling of this car because it is so far from current practice. As far as we know, this is only a mockup, and no such car has ever been run on a track, correct? I don't see how they can accurately model a car that is so far in design from any that they have good data for. With that super narrow front end, I can't see any way to avoid having a very short swing arm length, which almost always leads to twitchy handling due to a poor camber change curve. One way to get around that is to make the springing very stiff which limits wheel travel, but considering how little weight there will be on the front wheels, I wouldn't think that would be desirable. I'd also be concerned about roll stiffness at the front. I'd think to get a decent roll couple out of that car, the front would need to be fairly soft in roll and the rear fairly firm, otherwise the inside front may very well lift, like some old Porsche 911s did. Another approach might be to tie the front wheels together with a de Dion tube or some similar arrangement.
Start with a clean sheet of paper and draw up your design characteristics. What's the number one priority? Good racing! Everything else is secondary. If the racing is not good, the car is a failure. So let's start with that, and work backwards. What's the best open wheel racing you've seen? From a road racing standpoint, the best I've seen is Formula Ford. The characteristics of a Formula Ford are low power, lots of mechanical grip, no aero grip at all, and because of the exposed wheels, a fairly poor coefficient of drag. What this means on the track is that the cars are pretty quick for 115 hp, that they can race very close to each other because of the lack of aero push, and because they are draggy, drafting is very possible. On the oval side of things, the open wheel racing I've most enjoyed were wingless midgets and sprinters. I'm not sure the lessons from those series are as applicable to high speed oval racing, but they do share a couple of the same characteristics with a Formula Ford: they're draggy, and they don't suffer from aero push.
There are some minimum characteristics for a top line racing car. I wouldn't want to see an Indycar with less than 500 hp. 300 hp? Excuse me, my wife's van has 245 hp! There are lots of street cars with more power than that. I don't care if they were still doing 220 mph laps at Indy, I'd not want to promote a top line series with cars that have that little power. 500 hp could easily be achieved with a turbo 4 or normally aspirated V6 or V8. I'd want enough mechanical grip to get around a road course at a pace similar to or a little quicker than an ALMS P1 car. Since the open wheeler would be much lighter than the P1 car, that should be achievable with 500 or 600 hp. Wings? Nah, I'd leave them off if possible, the less aero grip the better. I do recall racing (in a Formula Ford) one guy who had a very similar car to mine, and there were a number of times that we came down the hill at Road Atlanta and into turn 12 where if you measured from the front of his car to the end of mine, the distance would have been less than the length of our two cars. If I'd had a front wing, I couldn't have done that as it would have been where his transmission was. The whole thing about open wheel racing is that since you can see exactly where your wheels are, you can get really close, and that's where the excitement is.
Damn, Nigelred already posted the "Ace and Gary" car earlier in this thread.
Nice work, my friend. That is what I immediately thought of, when I saw the Chicken Wing unveiling.
Aftere finding out that the leaked pictures really were what Delta Wing was proposing, I think this old music video from some friends of mine pretty much sums up my thoughts.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpMGvRWZ4gs
Gary
Graham has a picture link on his Twitter feed and I must say it looks better in real life than the rendering but stilll... "Earth to Grandma, what the hell is that"?
http://www.zannel.com/viewupdate.htm?id=PA388U
Gary
What a waste of time and money....
http://tomheroes.com/images7/COMICAD...ind_tunnel.jpg
Might as well bring the red one into production..... :rolleyes:
Or the Ram Jet.....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5X7hdyTPeIY&NR=1
As others sayd:
IndyCar is officially dead. This is bull, they are riding it and hired the right person for the job.
If Dixon says this is an 11 he may actually mean a double 1 ... so bad one doens't tell enough. This is.... I can't believe this.
Can we all have Tony George back please? Man...
Friggin unbelievable.
okay, mark this post: IndyCar will be deader than dead before this hits the road. There will never be a 2012 season. This car will never roll.
So dead... wow. I can't get a grip LOL
The difference is, the Cooper and the turbines were designed to go quicker than the opposition, not get more shock value.
For me the best part of the launch wasn't the car itself, but this:
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Bowlby does not want the DeltaWing to become a spec chassis for the IndyCar Series, and wants multiple chassis builders to be able to enter cars built within the rules framework established by his concept.
"Just as we hope to see multiple engine suppliers with different configurations and displacements, we also hope to create a framework that will allow us to see a varied and ever changing grid of racing machines in a sustainable, cost controlled and high value manner," he said.
The car itself looks more like a LSR car than an Indycar.... The only value see is as an exercise in possibilities - overall, the Honda concept is the 'best" looking so far - the yellow Dallara looks ok and the Swift could be interesting but it looks a bit unfinished... I vote for all three!!!!