etusch wrote: ↑17 Jul 2020, 19:32
Hoffman900 wrote: ↑17 Jul 2020, 19:21
This talk of balance reminds me of what MotoGP and Superbike manufacturers went through years ago. You can engineer an ideal design on the computer screen / wind tunnel, but if the driver's aren't comfortable, pace will suffer. Sure they can rip off a quick lap here and there, but over the course of the race, they have to work harder which makes them more likely to make a mistake.
So much of what they work on in bikes is how to make the rider comfortable and different riders like slightly different things. I know they know this in F1, it even matters for amateur car racers, but I think sometimes the cart comes before the horse, and that comes from the top (technical director) in leading the design teams in that direction.
If you look at Mercedes, it's fast but it also (by way of watching in-car) looks like the easiest car to go fast in and do so consistently. The Racing Point and Mclaren cars do the same.
In motogp Ducati have confort of longer chassis as braking stability and better acceleration. They are not good as much as honda at turns and miles away from yamaha and suzuki at turns. I wonder how kind of benefits of longer chassis for mercedes?
A longer chassis will resonate and flex differently than a shorter one, in addition to the aero balance.
From an aero perspective:
It would be interesting to model at speed if the cars have any sort of bow in them that flattens or anything like that at speed. Civil / Structural engineers do it all the time with pre-tensioned concrete beams (bridge beams settle about 1" when you pour the deck on vs. unloaded, and that changes with span length). You might try to measure static vs dynamic wheelbases, but beams are pinned to the abutments and the pin distance doesn't change when loaded, so that would likely be pointless. The effect would be subtle as well.
From a mechanical perspective:
It would be interesting if the car chassis are compliant in certain directions and stiff in others. Bikes need to be because their suspension doesn't work as well at high lean angles and the frame / swingarm stiffness dominate the handling. Obviously cars don't do that... I certainly would have to chew on this a bit.
The chassis resonance would be apparent when going over rumble strips. I have talked with shaker rigs guys where they'll see the whole car go into resonance. Bikes too. Yikes!
