DiogoBrand wrote: ↑28 Feb 2019, 07:20
About the rear wing:
There seems to be clear indication of flow separation, but to me that either means they're getting it to stall down the straight to decrease drag, or it's what NoDivergence said, when you can actually get more downforce with a given AoA, even though you're getting flow separation.
There are two things that don't let me believe it's unintentional:
1 - A team with as much expertise in aerodynamics as Mercedes, or any F1 team for that matter, really wouldn't get that ridiculous amount of separation if they didn't want to.
2 - If they were losing so much downforce from that as some people here seem to think, the car wouldn't survive the first high speed corner without the rear of the car overtaking the front.
I think you got the wrong impression. Nobody, literally nobody, accused Mercedes of being naïve and bringing unknowingly a rear wing where they are suddenly confronted with a huge amount of separation. The statement simply was that it was too much separation. I'll try to be a bit more gentle in my opinion today and leave it in the middle if it effectively is too much.
My opinion is rather that they trying stuff out and try to see just with how much they can get away with. We shouldn't forget that this is an extremely hard working wing, irrespective if they got it spot on or not, and the limited cfd resources might not get it predicted precise enough with just how much separation they can get away with. That's what they are doing now: testing. Coating the wing in flow viz and get indications in which direction they have to head to. If you compare the flow with last year, you will see there is much more separation going on, with in the middle a vortex bubble and near the trailing edge turbulent flow separation, with inbetween a turbulent boundary layer. Like Vanja said, from every flow viz pictures we have seen from Mercedes throughout the years, this is the most separation we have ever seen on their wings (I'm not saying they never ran wings before with so much separation, only that this is the most by far they have ever shown).
Again, that's not critizism towards Mercedes. For me it's just an indication they are looking to push the wing to its absolute peak downforce and that simply requires experimentation on track. Because someone says "hey look at this picture. in my opinion this shows too much separation" does not mean said person claims Mercedes got it wrong. Do note there are further complications with a wing being that much on the edge, as it will be much more sensitive to yaw, head and tail winds and even following a car in the turbulent wake. We did see the wing have very asymmetrical patterns on the 2 halfs of the rear wing, indicating yaw is having a rather big impact.
I'm sure Mercedes will further adjust the wing and finetune it. Let's grasp this as an opportunity to talk aerodynamics instead of being at eachothers troats who is right or wrong, or bringing doubt. Rather let's keep it simple: we all look at that wing and bring constructive arguments and counter arguments, like NoDivergence did.
