Please discuss here all your remarks and pose your questions about all racing series, except Formula One. Both technical and other questions about GP2, Touring cars, IRL, LMS, ...
Search 'roof flaps' for photos and opinions concerning efficiency.
Thanks! I'm glad someone out there has already gotten the ball rolling on emergency flaps!
Pup wrote:
RB7ate9 wrote:From the closed-cockpit thread, on the James Allen website someone commented about the use of air-brakes for both slowing the car and producing humongous downforce to prevent take-offs. This sounds like a very interesting idea, the only issue being how it could be activated.
Just hinge the front wings at the leading edge.
It's not about placement, it's about when it would be activated. "When it lifts off" is easy enough to say, but having it activated properly, perhaps without relying on human intervention, is my main concern.
Perhaps flap actuators connected to sensors in the suspension, where full extension (i.e. when 2+ wheels are off the ground) activates flaps instantly, and retracts upon suspension depression.
BS this car was unsafe from the get go, it prone to take flight and then rotate EVEN on it's own, Mario did a 360, 10 point landing at Indy, same with Dario at Michigan, not having the FIA help is moronic. IMS messes up and cover up's it's investigations, just shut them down and start over, i never ever saw a lola or reynard fly ever, and i worked the milwaukee mile and road america for 12 years on safety /ems teams, when the IRL came to milwaukee i refused to take part in that cluster f, sure enough a car went flying
from pitpass , what some have been saying for 12 yearsCompetition vs Entertainment
20/10/2011 Thompson Phillips
The last time I managed to finish a column for this website (Short Sighted or Short Circuit) it was a rant against the silly rumours that Formula 1 circuits would be moving to IndyCar*. Since then much has happened in IndyCar*, none of it good, culminating in the death of Dan Wheldon.
Wheldon's death is a personal tragedy for his family, friends and racing community, but let's be blunt. This wasn't an accident or a 'freak thing' like Henry Surtees. It was an inevitability. While Formula 1 has made leaps and bounds in safety (and I will grudgingly give full credit to Max Mosley), IndyCar* has done very little to negate the lift effect of their cars, a problem since the current Dallara chassis was introduced back in 2003. The safety record has been abysmal, with broken backs occurring nearly every May in the lead up to the Indianapolis 500.
IndyCar* has dodged many bullets over the years with their "Flying Crapwagons" (as first dubbed by Paul Tracy). Time and again the cars have gone airborne including 2003 when 63 year old Mario Andretti hit a piece of debris entering the backstretch at Indy. The Dallara he was testing flew up higher than the top of the catch fencing and back-flipped at least 3 times. Luckily for Mario the car came down right side up and he was unhurt, but the sheer height of the flip was an early indication of major trouble.
Safer barriers be damned, when an open wheel car is doing 220 mph and gets airborne into catch fencing, the end result is going to be spectacular and potentially gruesome. Just ask Kenny Brack. Or Ryan Briscoe. Or Mike Conway. Or Will Power, whose flight during the Las Vegas crash defies logic. Had any of those guys gone into the fencing cockpit first like Dan Wheldon, they would not have lived to race another day.
Not much has ever been done about the flight pattern of the IndyCar* Dallaras. One of the reasons is that the powers that be want to maintain the packs of wheel to wheel action at speeds over 200 mph. It's their claim to fame. It's the 'entertainment' value that Americans crave. It's Russian Roulette, all the more ironic given that the race was in Las Vegas and Wheldon had a roulette wheel motif on his helmet.
Am I a ninny who wants motor racing banned, or the cars slowed? Not necessarily. Slowing the cars down to say 185 mph to race on a high banked oval three abreast will still lead to the kind of disaster that happened in Las Vegas. What is needed is separation. The cars are underpowered with high downforce. They can't pull away from each other and the talent levels of the better drivers are somewhat negated. Everyone runs together in a giant pack, and one mistake collects at least several cars. It's one thing for NASCAR to have 15 cars tumbling end over end at almost 200 mph shedding pieces and parts and having the rednecks stand and applaud when the driver climbs out onto the top (or bottom) of the car and takes a bow. But it's another for an open cockpit car to take on the flight path of the space shuttle and careen into metal fence posts 15 feet in the air.
In an email I received after the last column, one reader stated "IndyCar realizes that racing is first about entertainment and second about engineering." Three others mentioned how much more 'exciting and entertaining' IndyCar* is.
Do you think Adrian Newey regards Formula 1 as entertainment? Frank Williams? Luca di Montezemolo? They all know the value of entertaining the fans, but all value the competition above all else. I'll gladly take the excitement of The 24 Hours of Le Mans, which is an exercise in engineering.
IndyCar's* current modus operandi is 'entertainment' in a Circus Maximus kind of way. Warriors, gladiators fighting it out to the death on an oval at 220 mph in wheel to wheel excitement. But is it a competition of skill or bravery?
There is a difference between entertainment and entertaining, but also between entertainment and competition. I want my racing to be entertaining, but I want the entertainment to come from the cold hard battle of competition, not gimmicks, contrived equality, or the bravado of foot to the floor, 100% throttle 100% of the time wheel banging with the prospect of 'The Big Crash'. Note what the ABC announcers said as the crash began. It wasn't "Trouble" or "Oh, no" it was "Here we go" as in "Here we go, we knew it was going to happen and it's what we were all waiting for."
Motor racing is dangerous. It doesn't need to be made more so by desperately clinging to a faulty vision. It would be very wrong to compare Dan Wheldon with Ayrton Senna, but that Imola weekend was a watershed moment for Formula 1, where the powers that be took a major step back and looked at many different aspects of the sport. Wheldon's death needs to be the same.
It's time for IndyCar* to admit they were wrong and revamp everything. Eliminate mile and a half ovals designed for NASCAR. Go back to the drawing boards for a new car, one that looks good, doesn't launch itself into orbit or fracture spines. Eliminate the contrived excitement of the pack mentality. Give the cars enough horsepower with less downforce so that throttle modulation and driving skill determine who makes it through the corners instead of planting your foot to the floor and praying you don't get caught up in someone else's mistake.
Honour Dan Wheldon's memory by doing something difficult, like making major changes, even if it means reducing or eliminating next year's schedule.
Taking the easy way out like naming the new car or a trophy after Wheldon will make his death as meaningless as Scott Brayton's, Tony Renna's or Paul Dana's.
(*For me the name IndyCar is synonymous with the great CART era. The current iteration will always be the IRL to me, hence the asterisk. Revisionist history be damned.)
I sincerely hope that someone from the Indy racing community (i.e. drivers, teams, families) come forward and demand a ton of investigation from as many people as possible into the accident. It'll determine the danger points for Indycar racing. Unfortunately for the Indycar organizers, they could very well be everything currently set with oval Indycar racing.
The speed, the numbers, the specifically LOW DOWNFORCE set ups for maximum speed on ovals, the catch-fencing, the cars themselves, it won't look very good.
Best case scenario: the Indycar Championship racing series goes through a bit of a crisis, financially, trying to enact as many safety improvements as possible, new investors step in, and the series is changed to become - at best - F1-lite, and at not-too-bad, American GP2ish.
it why i have little faith in Dallara,s new car it's just an evolution of the old one, big front wing, long pointed nose ie: recipe for further disaster, those wheel guards are not worth crap if the car takes off like a f-16 like the old one
It really is unfortunate that the new IRL car looks the way it does. I've frequently talked with others about how it just looks like their cars are stuck in a past age of aero packages. When they had the opportunity to make a radical change, they chose the safest evolution.
While I listed an American GP2 as some lesser option, I would actually be ok with the IRL switching to a decreased downforce GP2/2011 chassis. V8s, safety cells, splitters help against lift off, Dallara still makes money, American drivers get some taste of GP levels of grip and speeds. It could even open doors for more American drivers into F1! Who knows?! And besides, if one looks at the 2011 schedule, almost half of the season were left/right circuits, perfect for GP2 chassis.
Carlos wrote:It's not about placement, it's about when it would be activated. "When it lifts off" is easy enough to say, but having it activated properly, perhaps without relying on human intervention, is my main concern.
Perhaps flap actuators connected to sensors in the suspension, where full extension (i.e. when 2+ wheels are off the ground) activates flaps instantly, and retracts upon suspension depression.
No activation - just hinge it. There could be a tension latch that prevents the wing from moving accidentally during low speed braking; but for he most part, the forces acting on it would keep it in place. And if the front end rises, the wing would naturally swing up so not to catch the air.
There are many factors that had a contributory effect on this unfortunate tragedy, not least chassis engineering design that is suggested to be 12yrs old! Some thought should also turn to the very purpose of the event. In reply to Mario Andretti on Twitter:
MarioAndretti Mario Andretti
Dan Wheldon did not take mad risk because he was over-motivated by $5 mil prize. To imply he drove different due to $$, you offend his honor
My thoughts were:
sAx247 Ron sAx
@
@MarioAndretti Not so much over-motivation of the driver, but Indy-car management looking for $5M TV spectacle offering 40-car grid chase.
Clearly the 'congestion' of 40-cars lapping a 1-mile oval, provided little opportunity to avoid carnage.
cossie wrote:In an email I received after the last column, one reader stated "IndyCar realizes that racing is first about entertainment and second about engineering." Three others mentioned how much more 'exciting and entertaining' IndyCar* is.
This is the crux of the problem. Indycar is not engineering led, and there is a point to racing formulas being engineering led. It gives them a.....point. Regardless of new cars coming in next year you can rest assured that those cars will stagnate and not be improved for twelve years because no one wants to spend any money. Frankly, those delta cars look like a massive joke. That's what you get when you have a standardised racing formula in isolation.
As for entertainment.....not many people seem to be watching, not stateside an not here. I've seen figures that said that only around 19,000 people were watching Las Vegas on Sky 3.
Pup wrote:No activation - just hinge it. There could be a tension latch that prevents the wing from moving accidentally during low speed braking; but for he most part, the forces acting on it would keep it in place. And if the front end rises, the wing would naturally swing up so not to catch the air.
Nice idea. Do you think that it would help that much? Is the front wing contribution to the lift when the car is flying that significant? In my opinion the surface of the underbody is much greater than the front wing only, especially in the ground effect car which indycar is AFAIK.
Maybe not only the much greater speeds than in F1 are the reason for indycar to get airborne so easily but the ground effect itself. There's no ground effect at all when the car is in the air...
Carlos wrote:It's not about placement, it's about when it would be activated. "When it lifts off" is easy enough to say, but having it activated properly, perhaps without relying on human intervention, is my main concern.
Perhaps flap actuators connected to sensors in the suspension, where full extension (i.e. when 2+ wheels are off the ground) activates flaps instantly, and retracts upon suspension depression.
No activation - just hinge it. There could be a tension latch that prevents the wing from moving accidentally during low speed braking; but for he most part, the forces acting on it would keep it in place. And if the front end rises, the wing would naturally swing up so not to catch the air.
RB7ate9 wrote:Ah. I see now. An elegantly simple idea.
Thanks. However...
"For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple--and wrong."
--H.L. Mencken
piast9 wrote:Do you think that it would help that much? Is the front wing contribution to the lift when the car is flying that significant? In my opinion the surface of the underbody is much greater than the front wing only, especially in the ground effect car which indycar is AFAIK.
Good point. Usually in those accidents, the front wing is destroyed yet the car flips anyway.
There are a lot of facets of what happened and what can be done. One aspect that I want to stress on is catchfence. It seems like every time a car goes into catchfence something ugly happens (Jeff Krosnoff, Tony Renna, Mark Conway -- luckily survived). Basically what happens is that it strikes a rigid pole with very limited area -- a modern analogue of hitting a tree in 60's.
Something must be done about that.
I like the idea of the hinged front wing even given it's limited effect.
But, back in the day when Gil de Ferran ran a 241 mph lap at Fontana, they were running a positive angle of attack on the front wing to force more mass through the tunnels creating a net increase in downforce.
I don't know the relation to front wing area to tunnels on the new Dallara.
