Where do I start?
NEW FORMULA, NEW LOOKS
Well, the cars have undergone aesthetically awkward changes from recent years: too-wide front wing and too-narrow, too-tall rear wing. In the absence of the barge boards and other aero that used to live under the front suspension, the raised noses look slightly goofy. Having to drop supports from the nose to the even-lower front wing plane is consistently ugly trait of all the vehicles.
Slicks are back! I've been looking forward to that for no other reason than that they just *make sense*. Having said that, of course Bridgestone isn't really interested in ultimate performance, so slicks or groove may be irrelevant. Watching the cars during the Australian GP *did* suggest that the new tires work at bigger slip angles - perhaps thanks to revised aero, there were a bunch of big crossed-up moments (Masa's tank-slapper in quali was amazing) that seemed somewhat slower than they would have been in the past.
REAR AERO
So I guess the point of the smaller and higher rear wing is probably to interact less with the front wing of an overtaking car. Likewise, perhaps the (controversy-surrounded) rear diffuser has been revised to compensate for loss of rear wing downforce. But based on the number of snap-spins during the weekend over mild curbs, I'm inclined to agree with (Varsha's?) assessment that they're generating so much underbody downforce, that we're back to the old days of ground-effects ride-height sensitivities. I thought we got rid of that because it was dangerous...
FRONT AERO
Movable aerodynamic devices? What the heck!? I guess this is somebody's brilliant solution to coming up with overtaking solutions. Like the drivers don't have enough to do, like pushing the KERS button. Seriously, you guys couldn't come up with something static to accomplish the same thing?
Also, you can only move the wing down and up once per lap? What the hell?
DRIVING INTO THE SUN
OK, so scheduling Australia for UK/Europe TV is good business. But there were a bunch of stupid accidents driving into the sun, perhaps even including both Vettl's and Kubica's post-shunt front-wingless wall-whacks. Button commented in post-race that being in front was really spooky because he couldn't see the apexes of the hairiest turns - David Hobbs' choice for most-important race factor during the grid.
KERS
OK, so I'm guessing most of you think this is a stupid idea. I thought so, too, when I first heard about it a couple of years ago. I kind of *see* why the FIA wants to incorporate it - some superficially "green" concept, which really could trickle down into the consumer marketplace, if these things aren't locked behind trade secretism.
So now KERS is here, and a surprising number of teams is choosing to incorporate it. Fine. But...
6.5 seconds a lap? Wha? More FIA monkey-business. I mean, OK, so it was interesting to see two bits of footage where Lewis Hamilton was pushing his KERS button strategically at different points in the lap, finally using the last few seconds approaching the S/F line. But why limit the capacity? If we're trying to inspire something from the teams, let *them* figure out the balance between battery and motor size and weight. It'd be a lot more interesting to see teams with 30 seconds of capacity vs. 4. Like the front-wing adjustment count restriction, I just don't like the apparent invasiveness of the FIA's rules.
60 kilowatts of battery sitting under the driver, in a tub of, uh, carbon-fiber. I wonder how conductive the composite is? The fibers, yes, but the resin matrix probably not. Still, shatter some bodywork around battery terminals, and you've got instant ignition source. We haven't seen much impact-related fire in a while in F1, but this kind of injects an element of hazard in a time when safety is often cited as being paramount. As with the increasing number of super-lethal batteries in consumer vehicles, emergency personnel will also be put at more risk.The last thing a driver needs post-accident is safety personnel waiting for someone who knows how to deal with a new procedure - and we've seen evidence in recent F1 years that the quality of safety staffers varies greatly.
SAFETY CAR?
Speaking of safety quality, what the heck happened in Australia with the safety car after Nakajima's accident? What's the point of a safety car if you don't deploy it until the dangerous problem for which it should be deployed has already been cleared?
REVERSALS OF FORTUNE
Quite bizzare how the performance of the teams shook out at Australia under the new formula. Almost an inversion of the field, and almost enough to be suspicious. McLaren and Ferrari had terrible performance, and previous backmarkers Force India, Toro Rosso and Red Bull were HOT. Toyota, ever wasting the most money for the least result, actually end up on the podium.
After typing this, I realize that this means this is going to be an interesting season. Assuming that Richard Branson isn't going to give Brawn GP a half-billion pounds sterling (which he might), the heavy-hitters will now *really* throw money into figuring out their problems. The cars might be uglier, but we have to agree that there *was* overtaking. I'm looking forward to see how this all shakes out...
2 comments:
Great observations, Ells. Based on some amount of on-air commentary and probably some amount of guesstimation on my part, it seems like Brawn (then Honda), Toyota, and Williams weren't invited to participate in drawing up the new series regs and weren't totally wedded to the idea that the new rules didn't allow you to put a big honking diffuser under the back of your car. So they did that.
I argued for some time (several times to Tom, I know, and perhaps to you as well) in favor of a big change in series rules because it has usually upset the pecking order and made F1 more interesting. Huge very well funded teams are great at optimizing every small detail once a formula is mature and everyone is running pretty much the same car. But smaller, less prominent teams can be just clever at coming up with big-picture concepts for entirely new cars.
And yeah, was Branson born under a lucky star or what? One of the Speed voices reported that Virgin got an estimated $10 million in in-focus on-screen advertising in Melbourne at a reported cost of $250,000.
Dunno if you ever watched that Sex Pistols "Classic Albums" episode, but Malcolm (no relation to Bruce) McLaren refers to Sir Richard as "that old hippie." "Never Mind the Bollocks" was released in the UK on Virgin Records, and Branson would up a party to an obscenity trial over the albums title. McLaren said that he'd wished they had put him in jail because it would have been entertaining to him. But of course being Sir Richard...
Oh yeah, on the technical side: From what I saw, every team was running a "zero-keel" front end. Instead of having some kind of structure under the raised nose to accept the inner mounts of the lower control arms, the wishbones attach directly to the sides of the nose, however high that might be. So they all have their control arms hanging down towards the front wheels like Baja racers with 14" of travel.
Doing that should lead to some amount of track change taking place under roll, but hanging a substructure (a "keel") under the nose that could take the suspension loads of 4g cornering was never a happy proposition anyway. Either it's heavy and disrupts the airflow, or it flexes and you get even worse handling penalties if you try to keep it lightweight. Anyway, F1 cars really don't roll much under cornering any more, and what little they get comes from mainly from tire deflection rather than suspension movement.
Besides the loss of barge boards, turning vanes, etc., I think that has a bit to do with them looking especially awkward in front.
I do rather like some of the sidepod shapes we're seeing, rounded and tapering from all possible sides, back to really low and narrow rear decks. But in concert with such higher nose profiles, they look kinda bass-ackwards going around the track like that.
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