http://www.autosport.com/news/report.php/id/117352
MERCEDES may not have all there own way this year
Analysis: Formula 1's 2015 nose rules change a headache for teams

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Analysis: Formula 1's 2015 nose rules change a headache for teams

By Jonathan Noble and Edd Straw Tuesday, January 13th 2015, 11:48 GMT







2015 F1 nose illustration

The push to rid Formula 1 of ugly noses in 2015 may have been done for simple aesthetics, but it has caused complications for design teams.

After a raft of criticisms about the look of last year's cars - which left fans and team bosses up in arms - the FIA moved to outlaw the extended nose tips for 2015.

A tweak to F1's technical regulations stipulating strict dimensional criteria to outlaw the extended noses nipped the problem in the bud, and no longer will F1 cars be compared to proboscis monkeys or anteaters.

But although the tweak to the noses may seem minor, the impact it has had on influencing design evolution for 2015 has been relatively big.

The reason for that is fairly simple: because the nose is the first part of the car to hit the air, it has an impact on how the airflow works over everything behind it.

Force India technical director Andy Green told AUTOSPORT: "Everything downstream from the front wing sets up everything else. So a change in that area makes a big difference to how you develop the car.

"The car is tuned around a certain set of circumstances at the front of the car.

"So it required a lot of aerodynamic reconfiguring to try to recover what was, to start with, quite a significant loss from where we were with the high nose.

"To go down to a very low nose took a lot of change. We're there now, but it took quite a while."

Green thinks that the tight wording of Article 15.4.3 of the technical regulations will ensure that most noses look the same, with a design similar to Ferrari's 2014 car likely, but the key will be how well each team can finetune its design for maximum aerodynamic benefit.

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