snajam wrote: ↑14 Feb 2023, 00:13
I find it rather unfair to Alpine that their sidepod is/was referred to a rb/ferrari concept. They launched with spec similar to rb and made it aggressive in their own direction in which the undercut became naturally like RB. The valley and ramp down was their own direction
Any side pod with a shoulder doesn't copy the ferrari concept. The ferrari has no downwash to the diff, to the naked eye, a spillover bowl or a high pressure area. No team apart from haas has intended to do the same in the past 2 years.
This is an RB/Alpine mix conceptually, but far more aggressive and cleanly executed than the last year's Alpine.
In comparison the mcl and Williams look like quite blatant, vanilla copies of the rb18, exactly what the amr22b was.
I also think that the launch car has an old floor.
Why should that be unfair? It is quite normal to name the most successful team when others adopt the same solution. Alpines ramp-down solution at the beginning of 2022 was there, yes, but Red Bulls was more aggressive, if i remember correctly. And Alpine later copied it, if memory serves, but maybe i am wrong in that regard. But anyway - Alpine didn't have a "canyon" or "bathtub" either. Until they copied Ferrari. It doesn't matter whether Ferrari has downwash to the diff or not. The fact is that at the beginning of 2022, no one had the idea of wasting a second on a solution that avoided spill-over until they saw it on the Ferrari.... So it's a fact that this canyon/bathtub was invented by Ferrari (if you want to be precise, this idea came from Rory Byrne, who first used it on the Benetton B194 and later on the Ferrari F399, and who advised Ferrari on the design of the F1-75 - so it is more than clear where this "concept" comes from
and to attribute the "modern variant" Ferrari also completely correct) and Alpine copied it during 2022 and merged it with Red Bull's more extreme ramp-down solution. So there is nothing "unfair" about it. Ferrari("Canyon")and Red Bull(extreme "ramp-down") invented it and Alpine copied it in 2022(even though they admittedly already started with a ramp-down solution). But ultimately it is fair and square to speak of Ferrari and Red Bull as the originators.