2010 cars

[bill shoe]

I think we can make a pretty clear guess what the 2010 cars will look like.


Front End-

* Nose tip will be high, wide, flat (like new Red Bull or BMW)

* Chassis underside will be rounded (U-shape) cross section like the underside of Red Bull. This in turn requires ridges along upper sides of monocoque to meet minimum dimension requirements. (These ridges are the tacked-on bulges on the nose that Brawn and Toyota have recently tested in practice to determine if they are ok for driver visibility.)

* Monocoque will be as high as possible (Red Bull style) and not merely moderately high (like Brawn or Ferrari). The low vs high war will end, high monocoque officially wins.

* Ballast pod hanging under front of monocoque.

* Severe anhedral droop in front suspension. Steering arm will be between wishbones (Red Bull style), not in-line with lower wishbones (Brawn style), and not in-line with upper wishbone (Ferrari style). Brawn type solution not possible for 2010 due to U-section on bottom of monocoque.


Rear End-

* Waist packaging (area of transmission and rear diff) will be critical to airflow.

* 2009 state-of-the-art in waist packaging is Red Bull (pullrod rear suspension and rear upper wishbones mounted on upper keel to reduce height and width of bodywork in waist area). All 2010 cars will have these features at a minimum to improve waist packaging.

* Waist packaging may get more extreme in 2010. Example- differentials and driveshafts moved several inches farther forward. The driveshafts will drive the rear wheel hubs thru geared hubs mounted inside the rear wheels. Geared hubs allow several inches offset between the driveshaft axis and the hub rotation axis. This means the driveshafts themselves may rotate backwards (and may be smaller diameter in the airflow depending on the gear ratio of the geared hubs).

*In 2009 there are one or two slots on each side of the underbody to feed Brawn-style diffusers. 2010 cars that are designed from scratch (with this interpretation of the rules understood) may have several slots and several mini-diffusers extending farther forward along the car.

*There will be more integration between the lower rear wing and the Brawn-style diffusers. They will be visibly integrated more than this year’s lower rear wings and Brawn-type diffusers.

* Rear impact structures will all have some upslope to them (like Red Bull or Brawn) and will not be roughly horizontal (Like Mclaren). Moving the diff forward via hub gears allows the rear impact absorber to go forward. The impact absorber may not extend as far back in the first place.

* Air exits at rear of engine cover will become standard, air exits at rear of sidepod will become smaller (or will disappear). Engine cover air exits will be fully designed and ducted, not just an opening at the back of the engine cover.


Refueling Ban-

* The cars will not have the tank capacity to do a full race flat-out. The best overall compromise will be a tank with 90 or 95% of a full-race flat-out capacity. This allows best packaging and quickest qualifying. Secondary benefit is lighter weight at the beginning of the race. Fuel economy driving will be necessary during the race to make the full distance.

* In 2009 drivers hate slightly slower cars in front during a stint. In 2010 drivers will want a slightly slower driver in front for one stint because they can draft and save the necessary fuel. There is possibility to have unofficial team orders for the second driver (Nelson Piquet, etc.) to run in front of main driver to save main driver fuel. Engines will be run very hard due to need to run them lean/hot/on-edge-of-detonation to save fuel.

* This undersize tank scenario may seem unlikely but when you start thinking about the game theory choices (difficulty of passing, etc.) it makes sense to optimize race results via qualifying performance and performance at the beginning of the race, not theoretical race pace over the entire race.


What other design trends will turn out to be the norm in 2010? Or do you disagree with some of the above?

[PNSD]

What are next weeks lottery numbers please? :p

Im afraid its very difficult even now to understand what next years cars will look like.

RedBull and Brawn have totally different cars and yet are the ones dominating. In fact no car this year is similar, each team have gone different routes, and for the most part I expect each team to simply develop from this year. I cant see every team turning up with a RedBull. We are half-way through the season and many have said in terms of aerodynamic performance there is still alot of time to find with these new cars, over the rest of the year I believe we will get a better picture of the direction the teams may chose to take. By now the 2010 cars must be in the windtunnel, so already their initial design stage has been completed, it would be very difficult to back track and make major changes.

[wrcsti]

What are next weeks lottery numbers please? :p

Im afraid its very difficult even now to understand what next years cars will look like.

Nonesense! If the DDD loophole is not patched the cars will be difusers with 4 wheels.

[Giblet]

A very well thought out and detailed post with reasons behind your reasoning, leaving very little to doubt.

What I don't like however, is undersized tanks. Drivers would have to be constantly told by their team to change engine mappings, and drivers will have very little opportunity to actually race drive.

If everyone is simply going to run out of gas every race unless they drive at 9/10ths, what is the point of hiring high end racing drivers when any testing chump can drive the car that way?

To put that in perspective, this years German fast lap was 1;33.365. In order to finish the race your fastest lap could never be faster than 1:24.029 at 90% tank size. The cars finish the race almost on empty as it is.

A lot of teams will do their own thing on how to package the rear better, and a lot will probably go pull rod.

[timbo]

What are next weeks lottery numbers please? :p

Im afraid its very difficult even now to understand what next years cars will look like.

Nonesense! If the DDD loophole is not patched the cars will be difusers with 4 wheels.

My thoughts too...

[WhiteBlue]

With refuelling ban there is no point to keep race fuel qually. They will go back to low fuel qualifying as of old. I will like that. It is so late in the year that there will be hardly any significant changes to what was already announced. Cars will very much look like an optimization of this years for a longer wheel base to accomodate the larger fuel load.

[Roland Ehnström]

What I don't like however, is undersized tanks. Drivers would have to be constantly told by their team to change engine mappings, and drivers will have very little opportunity to actually race drive.

This is a concern, but I think it will vary from track to track, as some tracks consume more fuel than others. I don't have any specific data on this, but surely fuel consumption would be especially high on stop-go tracks with many slow corners leading on to medium-length straights, like Bahrein, while it certianly won't be an issue at Monaco (the Monaco GP is also shorter in distance). They will probably scale the fuel tank so that it is marginal at tracks like Bahrein, unless they simply build different chassis for different tracks (perhaps a we will se a "Monaco edition" which also features shorter wheelbase).

[CMSMJ1]

I appreciate the time and effort gone into the original post but think, wihtout malice, that it is just pie in the sky.

Moving the diff forwards? not with fuel tank over twice as large they won't..

Pullrods all round? Why? the longer cars will have plenty of aero surface to extract DF with.. the taper to the rear can be either very flat, or very narrow..

[tomazy]

What are next weeks lottery numbers please? :p

Im afraid its very difficult even now to understand what next years cars will look like.

Nonesense! If the DDD loophole is not patched the cars will be difusers with 4 wheels.

My thoughts too...

I just dont think the same as you two do. In my mind, the difuzors last year and previus years was much more agresive than DD are this year. Becouse the rules abouth difusers were changet, a lot of DF was lost. Becouse of that, some weary clever disigners at Brown, Williams and Toyota found a loophole in the regulations to get back SOME of the downforce lost but difuser is still not as eficient than in previus years.

[The FOZ]

What are next weeks lottery numbers please? :p

Im afraid its very difficult even now to understand what next years cars will look like.

Nonesense! If the DDD loophole is not patched the cars will be difusers with 4 wheels.

To an extent...diffuser effect comes, to my understanding, at the expense of a truly aerodynamic "slippery" design. Downforce at the cost of top speed, in other words.

There's going to be an ideal balance. Being able to rip any corner at 180 km/h is going to be useless if the car tops out at 240 on the straights!

More to the point. Undersized tanks, driving to conserve fuel, would be like speed walking in the olympics. An utter farce.

But then again, I'll be throwing stuff at my screen if I see cars running out of gas on the final lap. FAR worse than races won or lost on refuelling strategy, IMO.

[DaveKillens]

Based on my watching too many fuel mileage types of races, I cannot recommend them. If I was an evil person bent on inflicting punishment, pain, and suffering upon another person, I would force them to watch a fuel mileage race.
That's how bad they are, and many will discover this unpleasant truth next year.

[timbo]

To an extent...diffuser effect comes, to my understanding, at the expense of a truly aerodynamic "slippery" design. Downforce at the cost of top speed, in other words.

Actually the top speed is not very much affected by diffuser.
E.g. on Ferrari F1-2000 underfloor contributed around 41% of DF and only 11% of drag.
So there would be optimum, but the limitation would be only allowed dimensions and rear end packaging.

And compare this


and this


Nuff said.

At least to me...

[Richard]

I think we can make a pretty clear guess what the 2010 cars will look like.

....

That seems to say every car will be a Red Bull?? I think not.

There will still be high/low nose cars, along with narrow/wide nose variants.

Same for high/low sidepods, some flat sided, some sculptured.

Then there will be low flat wide tails versus tall narrow tails - ie that McL cathedral sized diffuser needs the rear mechanics pushed up.

Some cars will look like they were styled with melting wax in the wind tunnel (RB?), others will use continue to use flat sheets of plywood (Renault?)

If Chapman was still in the sport, we'd also have an all wheel drive car, with 6 wheels? (Max would say this is now legal)

[Richard]

Based on my watching too many fuel mileage types of races, I cannot recommend them. If I was an evil person bent on inflicting punishment, pain, and suffering upon another person, I would force them to watch a fuel mileage race.
That's how bad they are, and many will discover this unpleasant truth next year.

Forgive my naivity, what was it like the last time we had no refuelling at pit stops?

[ISLAMATRON]

Based on my watching too many fuel mileage types of races, I cannot recommend them. If I was an evil person bent on inflicting punishment, pain, and suffering upon another person, I would force them to watch a fuel mileage race.
That's how bad they are, and many will discover this unpleasant truth next year.

Forgive my naivity, what was it like the last time we had no refuelling at pit stops?

1984 to 1993

What I think some of the posters are neglecting is that in the past the amount of fuel allowed by the teams was regulated, 240L in 1984 and lower as the years progressed and even less for the turbo engines... but this time around I see no mention of a defined fuel cell volume and so while some teams may choose to go with a smaller tank and a more fuel conservative approach others might just load up and dump in the fuel.