Mercedes GP MGP W01

[feynman]

But 3 windtunnels?

Yeah, you are right, I may very well be mistaken about that three number, I just did a quick check and there are credible reports suggesting that Honda actually had five tunnels on the go. (Half a billion Euros of development money won't just spend itself, you need a fair few cars on the go at once to soak up that amount of gravy).

Did we not all agree that the Double Diffuser came from Super Aguri, and the Outwash front wing from Dome?

It is obvious that we all stand to be corrected here, but thus far, every car that has emerged from Brackley alone, before and after, has been pedestrian. A car in the middle that didn't solely come from Brackley won a championship. That is trying to tell someone something surely?

[mach11]

what is the status on the development of next year's car???

[raymondu999]

Nobody knows for sure mate, only people inside the team. Asking us will only get (at best) estimates from us

[marcush.]

still someone needs to orchestrate those 5 or 10 windtunnels and decide what to work on and what to leave.And how to value the results coming from the different facilities....
for sure this time of paralell development and input of ideas should have them get a very good idea of the pros and weaknesses of their own windtunnel...as they got comparison to a lot of other sources possibly with the same car at a very late stage at least...as the development converged surely towards BGP0o1 (Honda 109).
but of course you have to first have NEW and original ideas AND have to understand the shortcomings and strength of your own package .then you need to understand the concepts of at least the front runners bu tbetter yet understand why others did not perform or managed a turnaround when you did not.
Mercedes needs to be absolutely clear just why the Upgrades did not meet the promised results and furthermore how come that mechanical underdevelopment on those upgrades fwas obviously hurting performance.there was a lack of sound engineering to be witnessed and that is one point they have to adress .Even if the basic idea was good but you can only make use of 30% of it due to wrong material choice ..this is something serious but also easily to be corrected.

[lolzi]

Yeap Strad,

you are absolutely right about this.
It is/was also used in other race series.
I know, that it was used in the early 90`s on Gr.A rally cars, but not
too extrem. +/- 0,5" at the time in WRC

I think you will find an episod about it and some good details in the book "The Unfair Advantage" by Mark Donohue with Paul Van Valkenburgh.
It dates back to the 60´s,and Jim Hall also experimented with that.
Depending on what you want to do and your base tire, it can help to put more "rubber to work" in the corners, gaining an advantage when tire width is limited by the rules.
But with todays racing tires, it´s difficult to go to the extremes.

It´s done moderately to alter/change the cornering and/or vertical stiffness of the tire. With this you can fine tune the handling characteristic/balance of your car a little bit.

I think there is still some freedom in the rim width rules of F1 by the FIA. Marcus started a thread about it, and what people could do with it.

Unfortunately it does not help to solve a chassis stiffness issue, but it is another tool one could put to work.

Some of the tuning folks still do it to the extremes, if you google for "tyre stretch" in the picture search, you will find some extreme examples.

As far as I know, the rims are homologated. That is why there was some screaming about the Ferrari rims at some point.

[LotusF1]

They had at least 3 seperate wind tunnels spinning across the planet, and most of the juicy-goodness that made the BGP-01 special came from aero-engineers working outside of the Brackley setup.
.

The wind tunnel at Brackley was completed in July 2006. Its calibration took a very long time as you can probably tell from the earth car disasters..
But 3 windtunnels?

Superaguri didnt really add anything to the BGP 001 and the half scale aero tunnel Honda used before was used sparsley by Zander who was based at Brackley and largely regarded as the father of the double diffuser.

Cleverer people than I will know but Aero calibration erros can be sorted fairly quickly with the right software no?

Calibration and upgrade of aero tunnels can take from 6 weeks to a year, sependant on spec. Williams upgraded and re calibrated its tunnel this year on Rubens demand, that one was a quick one that took arround 10 weeks, just about where the Williams drop off post Barcelona came in and finished at Silverstone. In 2007 it took a year for renault to upgrade its tunnel, and the whole thing wasnot calibrated properly and was all down to a leading edge of a pannel creating disturbance in the air flow (as the pannel was all of 1mm too proud) making the figures wrong. Renault took the first 12 weeks of 2008 to calibrate the tunnel. And look at what came out of the tunnel towards the end of 2008, the 3rd best car that year at that point as BMW Sauber had halted the F1.08 for the F1.09 development.

If i were Mercedes, id take a short period of upgrade and re-calibration at the start of 2011, ideally when the cars are shipped off to Bahrain for Testing, about a week later the tunnel should be shut down for about 6 weeks, tested, upgraded and calibrated. It would mean that come Barcelona, they could have updated only tested using CFD, but come Istanbul they will have a full upgrade package.

I can see where Nick Wirth is coming from with CFD, but i think if you are running with a weighty CFD package, you should have arround 30% of the aero testing done in a tunnel just for figure proveing.

There is one other example in F1 where the CFD facility actually had to be re-calibrated to date, and that was belived to be at Toyota as the 2007 car was a dog and out came in 2008 a car that with a little luck could have won a race or two with the right driver.

Maybes mercedes should check the calibration on both Tunnel and CFD facilities.

LOL...funniest post ever. Dont wanna seem arrogant, but you just wrote a load of BS. You think mercedes should reclaibrate CFD and WT? Based on what data? Do you guys dream this stuff up at night? seriously im starting to think so...

[raymondu999]

Errm... they have truckloads of track data since March this year, from all FPs and races?

[segedunum]

Did we not all agree that the Double Diffuser came from Super Aguri, and the Outwash front wing from Dome?

That's about the size of it. The fact that they fell backwards during 2009 with a two-element wing, and are still having major trouble with it, kind of points to that.

[marcush.]

what do we REALLY know ?
We know they lack ultimate grip ..if that lack of grip is a function of lack of downforce or a mechanical issue of under or overworking the tyres is not set in stone.
All we have heard from official side (Brawn)is the statement that the front tyres do flatline ...are saturated and will not provide any more grip ...wich indicates they could possibly not use any more front end aeroload so it seems out of question they would spend time on developing front wing designs if they have already more than they could use....

[segedunum]

They can't get any more grip out of the front tyres and yet their front is still washing out in corners with understeer? Something is rotten.

[marcush.]

They can't get any more grip out of the front tyres and yet their front is still washing out in corners with understeer? Something is rotten.

This is a function of the tyre load sensivity..adding (vertical)load will not be equal to increasing grip ...at some point you can add load and there is no gain at all .
That is NORMAL tyre behaviour.
so if your tyre is saturated with the loads you offer to it already an increase in downforce will not raise grip levels.The physics are not rotten ..the W01 is.

If this is a stiffness issue(car not able to be loaded with forces and bending under loads) or a weight distribution problem car front tyres already loaded too much by static front weight bias we can not decide finally from outside. It even might be a CoG height issue that causes too much load transfer to the outside wheel and overloads that tyre..
but for us it does not matter at all the W01 has reached a ceiling of potential early on and effort vs result is not comaparable to their cmpetitors.

It´s far too easy to say Brawn/Mercedes are idiots.i´m pretty sure they have learned an awful lot from mistakes they made in 2009 towards 2010 now and have paid ahuge price for these mistakes ,loosing creditabilty and extra pressure to perform in 2011 that is.

for a car with a fundamental severe flaw the thing does perform ok ..it just is not quick enough to win on the good days..

Compare this with all the other front runners..Hamilton stating he has the best mcLaren ever under his ass in 2010,the RBR 6 absolutely the pinnacle of F1cars ever,Renault with a new found will to win and astonishing development speed ,Ferrari having pulled out all plugs very early last year to have a competitive contender ...I feel merc is not doing disastrous. Below expectations yes ..

[JohnsonsEvilTwin]

Marcush

I agree, Brawn has said many times they got the CoG wrong in relation to tyres. Their disadvantage "frozen in" for 2010.

[segedunum]

I think we're all familiar with the limit of adhesion, but I still don't know what the point is here. No other team got this wrong in that fashion. Say what you like, but this points to something more fundamentally rotten - and it isn't just the W01.

[marcush.]

look ...it is not like they are nowhere .F1 is now at a point where a lotus in its first F1 year is 3.5 seconds behind the outstanding Redbull RBR6 but in reality all cars of established teams are within 2 seconds of each other.

On a 84seconds lap ,two seconds are the equivalent of 2.3% and Mercedes with its qualy perfomance a bit more than 1% back ...in race trim in the hands of Rosberg
the gap reduces to .5%

who are we to say they suck missing the Jackpot by half a percent...do you judge yourself as hard and severe as that?

[segedunum]

They just all sound like bizarre excuses for what is a pretty fundamental and unforgiveable problem. Blaming the homologation of the chassis on why they cannot correct this screwup is another bizarre excuse. However, I'm rather convinced this is an aerodynamic rather than a mechanical issue of any kind they can't solve because they've done everything under the sun in that department and it's had no effect. The mandatory weight distribution that Ross Brawn has tried to shoe-horn in doesn't inspire confidence either. They're going to need mandatory aerodynamics at this rate. To me it simply sounds as if they just don't have enough front-end downforce.

As others have said in this thread, it's an extremely bizarre and basic issue to have with a car, and all the things they have tried to do on the mechanical front such as changing the wheel base or bias in any way they can simply hasn't made it better.

Given that they had a very dominant and winning car, certainly at the start of last year, and teams like Red Bull have evolved their car into this year with the same technical regulations, I would have expected them to make a far, far better showing rather than losing a good two or three seconds or more to the teams they were competing with. Mercedes probably did too.