[WRC] FORUM8 Rally Japan 2023

[ictus]

This forum is insane. 20 pages of demister chat and I'm just spending my Friday afternoon refreshing the page to see if anything got added. Well done lads.

It's way better that 20 posts of:
"Sordo is off", "Taka is up on split 1"
The info you get browsing any resaults page...

[Danny0405]

No Super Rally for Sordo and Fourmaux.
Would be a bit of a pity for Sordo to end his career like this.
And not a good news for Fourmaux considering the situation; well, even if Sordo also doing the mistake gives him a bit of comparison, clearly a bad stuff to end as soon as the first real stage.

[Tauri_J]

Formaux is just a driving disaster. He got a new chance after binning it regulalry, and now he crashes on a first proper stage.

[linni]

Listen to br21, he knows.

Please follow this small example.

It's cold outside and it's raining.

You have a road car with internalvolume 2 m3. There is 22°C inside. You come inside completely wet and the water starts to evaporate. The maximum amount of water the 2 m3 of air at 22°C can take is 38 gramms. The rest stays in the form of liquid in the clothes or on the floor.

Now you have a second car with the same internal volume but the inner temperature is 50°C. Again you bring some water inside on your clothes and shoes. The maximum amount of water which can evaporate in 2 m3 of air is now 164 gramms. So your air in the car now contains 4,3x more water.

Where the air hits the cold glass it cools itself and the water condenses because the colder the air is, the lesser amount of water it can take. If you have the same heated windsreen which is capable to heat the screen to let's say 30°C average you have no misting in the road car but you still have big misting problem in the other one (the air at 30°C can take only 37% of water compared to the air at 50°C) and due to the fact that the inner humidity is already 100% the blowers don't work.

So the resume is that you have to either heat the windscreen to higher temperature than what the ambient temperature inside the car is. Or you need to bring less water inside (may not be possible), or you need to lower the humidity (not possible without A/C). Or you need to somehow cool down the temperature inside the car. If you have very high temperature drop between the inside and the outside, heating the screen enough might not be possible, so you need to let as much air from the outside to get in because the air from the outside even if it's wet, will still help because it's much colder but the amount of air you can let in is very limited by the vents. You can't drive on stage with opened windows because it's forbidden. After all you might end in a situation where nothing helps.

Yes, it all makes sense.

Everything but why the teams do not take it in consideration.
Just read an interview with Loeb, where he said, that having a mist problems in a 1 million eur car is nonsense.

[linni]

This forum is insane. 20 pages of demister chat and I'm just spending my Friday afternoon refreshing the page to see if anything got added. Well done lads.

Stan, the humidity is the only topic of Rally Japan. Not much else to discuss.

P.S. I hope the first ever WRC 2 car will be on podium at Sunday.

[denkimi]

Formaux is just a driving disaster. He got a new chance after binning it regulalry, and now he crashes on a first proper stage.

In his defence, both katsuta and sordo binned it on the same corner, so it most likely something he could not have avoided.

[ouvreur]

AFAIK no one has, at least in WRC1. It`s just not a windscreen, it has to contain some relays in a chain which is extra weight. Still stupid decision not to have one. It`s not the first case during the last couple of years.

Every single Rally1 and Rally2 car has a heated screen.

[flat_right]

A friend in need is a friend indeed.

[Mirek]

Yes, it all makes sense.

Everything but why the teams do not take it in consideration.
Just read an interview with Loeb, where he said, that having a mist problems in a 1 million eur car is nonsense.

We woud need to do some pretty complex math but heating the windscreen to 50+ °C at cold weather and high speeds definitely requires a lot of power because the windscreen is actively cooled from the outside with very high efficiency. I can't compute that myself but it's definitely several kilowatts. That doesn't mean only that you need a source to deliver such power but you also need to have thick enough wires in the glass. My very rough estimation is around 5 kW in situations like here in Japan. That is 10x more than what standard road car heated screens are capable of. You also need 3-4x thicker (and much better visible) wires.

I'm also not sure whether there wouldn't be a risk of cracking the glass from temperature shocks combined with mechanical shocks and vibrations.

For sure if it had a simple solution no team would have problems.

[dimviii]

ABITEBOUL CRITICAL OF NEUVILLE’S ‘RUSHED’ APPROACH
THIERRY NEUVILLE CRASHED OUT OF SECOND WHILE CHASING DOWN THE LEAD, WHICH HASN'T IMPRESSED HIS BOSS

https://dirtfish.com/rally/wrc/abite...shed-approach/