Mercedes GP MGP W01

[marcush.]

Now that the weight distribution has been fixed, would Pirelli be forced to design around this??

Isnt there a chance for all cars ultimately having understeer or oversteer??

that could amount to an advantage for the Mercedes guys who, claimed to work around an unsolvable weight distribution problem...al year so thats a scenario they really are used to.

why should pirelli adapt their tyres to teams needs?
-the tyre has to be safe for competition use
-the tyre has to be round and fitting to a rim
if it does not fit to the cars characteristic ,it´´s not an issue for pirelli but for the teams to adapt .

[tok-tokkie]

It will be interesting next year when all the cars have the same weight distribution.
JET (& Brawn?) believe the W01's lack of race pace is due to the weight distribution being sub-optimal. There are 4 or 5 teams behind Merc in the manufacturer's points table. Torro Rosso has a decent engine as does Renault so that can't be the problem & Williams with the Cosworth is ahead of Merc so the other 3 behind Merc can't really say it is down to their engine. Do they have a worse weight distribution problem than Merc which puts them behind Merc? Or are their chassis or suspension or aero worse than Merc's? Which leads to the thought that Merc's lack compared to the leading 4 teams may be chassis, suspension or aero problems & nothing to do with weight distribution. So next year when they will not have a weight distribution problem we will see. I expect them to be about where they presently are.

[twoshots]

They certainly have more than a weight distribution issue, which I believe has now been fixed. I haven't seen it quoted from the team but I don't pay too much attention to the PR machine. Whether the issue is caused by the weight distribution 'fixes' I don't know. To my knowledge they have solved this issue for next years car.

Talk of weight distribution issues is probably flogging a dead horse.

[JohnsonsEvilTwin]

The Manadatory weight distribution will give Pirelli a target to aim for. It also gives teams peace of mind that their ideas or concepts wont evaporate to dust IF one team got a certain weight distribution figure spot on.

Yes Mercedes will benefit most, if their weight distribution problems are indeed true. But this is a double edged sword, because if they still cannot use the tyres or have imbalance in the chassis, there is nowhere to hide.

[F1_eng]

marcush, do/have you ever used a CAD package such as CATIA?

If you can't get an idea from your head in to Catia, then it is most definetely the skill lever of the user that's lacking. Often I find that you think of a concept that could appear strange, so it can be a bit trickier to visualize what it would be like, so I simply draw it exactly as in my head. This is often true in terms of the legality of a design, you know the geometry you want for a part but it might need to be tweeked to make it legal, this can only be done in the cad package.

I think most of you don't know how CFD gets used, it's capabilities and limitations.

I also think some people should read/understand some technical papers relating to ground effect aero, when concerned with flexing wings. I don't know it you saw McLaren's public comment quantifying the effect of a wing flexing to the extent of Red Bull, it's pretty significant. Add to this a couple more flexing parts and you have yourself potentially over a second a lap.
This is nothing new and not that clever, it's just Red Bull have taken blatant rule braking to a whole new level, I guess they have been driven to this by the pressure on them to deliver.

I have a feeling that the revised FIA deflection loads won't change things.

[JohnsonsEvilTwin]

Two shots and Tok Tokkie(Hoe gaan dit broer?)

At the risk of sounding reptitive, I have given various sources including drivers and team managers quotes.

[marcush.]

weight distribution is not a piece you could add to the car ,at least not these days anymore,as it looks like the teams have not much ballast to play with as it was in the past.
so if at all you have to move the weight by your gearbox(bellhousing)design,Design of suspension components ,design of fueltank and driver seat position (depending on your drivers physical size as well) as the major contributors for weight distribution .the actual placement of components will alter the CoG not very much as we can speak of mm of degree in freedom to position weight not meters.

as for the CAD ,especially catia ,I have to admit i´m not the hero there and have not seen many people very good at it and those who wer very good ,sad to say it ,had no creativity in terms of ideas to integrate solutions or coming up with original ideas.but it may be just that it´s Automotive I´m working in so certainly the aspect of passion is not apparent with most people there...

[747heavy]

Hi Marcus


What makes you think/believe that teams don´t have much ballast these days to play with?
Why would that be? It would really surprise me, but saying that I will freely admitt that I don´t know. Just can´t see what would have so dramaticlly changed from last year, where it seems that most teams had ballast to play with.
That is one of the reasons, that I´m still puzzeld, that Merc could not fix a possible weight distrinution problem, if there bias was too much front (as JET stated somewhere).
IMHO you could only achieve an significant forward bias by ballsting up the front.
This should be possible to correct, even with a homologated tube/chassis.

Frankly I don´t know, so thought I would ask the question.

[marcush.]

Hi Marcus


What makes you think/believe that teams don´t have much ballast these days to play with?
Why would that be? It would really surprise me, but saying that I will freely admitt that I don´t know. Just can´t see what would have so dramaticlly changed from last year, where it seems that most teams had ballast to play with.
That is one of the reasons, that I´m still puzzeld, that Merc could not fix a possible weight distrinution problem, if there bias was too much front (as JET stated somewhere).
IMHO you could only achieve an significant forward bias by ballsting up the front.
This should be possible to correct, even with a homologated tube/chassis.

Frankly I don´t know, so thought I would ask the question.

You basically answered the question already...

If they had still a lot to play with it should be no issue to transfer ballast ,they had origininally in the front(BGP was very front heavy it was rumoured) to move to the back .So given they changed wheelbase to improve their weight balance trouble with a shift of some two inches of the front tyres ....that is really not a big figure in terms of C0G longitudinally with 3000mm wb.and why do this if you got 30 kg (620 kg car weight -30kg ballast is 590kg ,thats potential to shift CoG
longitudinally by 5 %if you stay between the two axles(and find space to fit that little chunk of tungsten..so anything they did with the increas in wheelbase could not nearly have the same effect on Weightdistribution than shifting a decent amount of ballast.with Schumacher 8kg heavier than Rosberg putting him at an distinct disadvantage ,according to Brawn,we see that those 8 kg have to be a significant amount of the total ballast available to make things so much worse for him .
Recently a lot of degree in freedom in terms of materials has been removed:
Uprights need to be build in a specified material , Brakecalipers as well..a
width for the gearwheels was specified ,and more stringent crash tests have increased the tub and crashbox weight.
add to this the bigger tub +fueltank and the cars ballast potential is slimming down.
Compare the Merc to the REDbull and on first sight it is obvious that REDBULL are
a tad slimmer in about everything they build..

for sure Virgin ,HRT and Lotus have struggled to get their cars down to the allowed limit as was more than once stated by teammembers.

[Morteza]

W01 is a bulky car especially compared to RB6. The front of the car is is much wider than what Newey has designed.

Marcush, what I got from what you said is the car's weight distribution problem is affected by this 8kg more weight of Schumacher and that prevents him from getting better results, right?

[747heavy]

thanks Marcus, to

Sorry I don´t follow F1 that closely and don´t read the rules 3x a day
but what the minimum weight (dry) last year?

I did not know, that they banned some materials from 2009 to 2010 and that they limited upights and calipers. The larger fuel tank makes sense, yes, but this weight is more or less at CoG, and the same for everyone. I would have thought that getting rid off KERS would have free´d up some weight to account for the extra weight fom the fuel tank etc.
IMHO

Thanks again

[JohnsonsEvilTwin]

Look at aerial shots of the W01 compared to that of the Red Bull.

The Mercedes has one of the tightest, if not the tightest rear ends in the pitlane.
And as Morteza AMG noted the front of the Mercedes is MAHOOOSIVE(big )

The car was designed for a tyre that didnt come, I can see with the naked(untrained) eye that this car has far more forward biased mass compared to the RB6, which is raked more rearward, but also has a small behind.
[img]
http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=h ... 24&bih=546[/img]
[img]
http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=h ... 24&bih=546[/img]

[marcush.]

W01 is a bulky car especially compared to RB6. The front of the car is is much wider than what Newey has designed.

Marcush, what I got from what you said is the car's weight distribution problem is affected by this 8kg more weight of Schumacher and that prevents him from getting better results, right?

oh its Ross Brawns statement that those 8kgs hurt him in car setup and close certain doors that are open to rosberg.
Bearing in mind that the wheelbase change of around 2 inches gives a nearly equivalent change in COG positon (to the rear ),one can assume they do not have that much weight available to play with.
considering the fact that all 2009 cars were in desperate need of forward bias ,not much work in terms of weight savings at the front was done( this would have resultet in a lowering of CoG only not a change in Weigh distribution... so all the weight savings in 2009 were concentrated to be found in the rear...

Minimum weight 2007 600Kg
Minimum weight 2009 605KG
Minimum weight 2010 620kg

So some of these 15 kgs were eaten away by the fuel tank and the material restriction no question.
i was under the impression that F1 cars are a lot underweight ...say 100 kg or more.but if you put put htese numbers into the equation a Weight distribution problem is simply not imaginable .As you can come up with 50:50 or up to 23:67
if you find place to put the weight...so anyone who says he has issues to shift weight to the rear ,simply has no ballast available (at least no ballast he can remove,as the high nose configuration will have a coG height at the front that is
really not were you want it.

[747heavy]

Thanks again Marcus

I would not have thought that it is as much as 100kg, but was sure they would have
~50 kg (front running team, not HRT).
How much one would safe without KERS? and the front tyres should be a tad lighter as well.

I´m still surprised that it is such an issue to shift wait backwards, I could understand the opposite. But, it´s not the first time I´m surprised.
Maybe the MGP1 is a tad heavy as well then (less ballast available to play with) I dunno

[aral]

Look at aerial shots of the W01 compared to that of the Red Bull.

The Mercedes has one of the tightest, if not the tightest rear ends in the pitlane.
And as Morteza AMG noted the front of the Mercedes is MAHOOOSIVE(big )

The car was designed for a tyre that didnt come, I can see with the naked(untrained) eye that this car has far more forward biased mass compared to the RB6, which is raked more rearward, but also has a small behind.
[img]
http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=h ... 24&bih=546[/img]
[img]
http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=h ... 24&bih=546[/img]

I cannot understand your comment that the W01 was designed for a tyre that "never came". All teams were supplied with the tyre details in the middle of 2009, so ALL started their designs with the SAME info. It is just that Mercedes/Brawn did a poorer job with their design!

And as for the shapes, there is an old rule called the area rule, where shapes were created to compensate for appendages etc, so as to provide the optimum aerodynamic shape. Some of this can be created by flow of air, as well as body shape. You say that the W01 has a heavy nose, and use photos to prove it. However, what you are NOT showing, is the width of the front monocoque. The car was designed with a flatter and broader nose, to provide downforce, a little like last years "platypus"nose on the Red Bull. They were able to produce a sharper nose by increasing the length. So it CAN be altered legally. Finally, the aero balance can also be adjusted by angling the wing struts differently. So , there are many ways in which the car could be improved, it is just that the current designers seem to not to be up to the job required.