SiLo wrote: ↑27 Jul 2022, 14:28
Are the radius restrictions on the sidepods? Is it possible they could run something like the Ferrari/Alpine but even more extreme?
From my understanding of the rules, they could play on the edge of the rules and keep the best of both worlds. But, now every team knows how they did it so everyone would be able to examine this solution and implement it. Rear part of the sidepods needs to be wide, that much is clear. Ferrari somehow manage things on the knife edge there, but only because of cable-stay concession from the pre-season.
Merc can have a tiny inward angle of sidepod sidewall in the rear (RB has slightly outward or completely straight, but it's not a big difference) and would need to keep elongated inlets. This part is not ideal, but maybe it can be negated in some other way.
ringo wrote: ↑27 Jul 2022, 16:36
Change the speed of the car in your simulation and see for yourself.
Go from low speed and share that image.
And go to high speed and share that image of the streamlines.
Have you seen the cars drive in the rain?
The rooster tails behind the rear wings are basically downwash, Just in the opposite orientation.
What happens when they drive faster?
Let's try another way... We know front wing upwash affects the entire car. We know this is very important for flow management and overall pressure distribution. We know teams take great care of this and haven't had problems with this for decades already.
On the other hand, we know teams do 99% of CFD simulations at 50 m/s for a full size car. We know they directly compare this to a 60% scale wind tunnel model at the same speed. With similarity theory applied to aerodynamics, this scale difference is equivalent to the same speed difference if both models were full scale.
This means full scale car going 50m/s is directly comparable to full scale car going 30m/s. (Teams don't seem to care about what happens at higher speed also, wonder why...) So, no, upwash and downwash don't change in practice for the speed range of an F1 car. If there would have been any pracitcal use of aerodynamics bellow 30 m/s (108 km/h) then there might have been a problem with fixed geometry of an F1 car.
The biggest impact on up/downwash is lift coefficient for the same planform geometry. In theory, this changes slightly for a wing of same geometry at very low Reynolds number, i.e. very low air velocity. In practice, you don't care much what happens when car is going that slow.
To respectfully answer the rest of the plethora of questions - yes, I've seen race cars running in the rain. Live and on TV. Have you taken a good look at this phenomena when a car is accelerating on a straight? Do remember that water drops are heavy and affected by gravity compared to air. Maybe take a good look again and answer your own question.