ringo wrote: ↑27 Mar 2025, 03:36
Farnborough wrote: ↑26 Mar 2025, 23:23
ringo wrote: ↑26 Mar 2025, 22:54
@Farnborough What you are describing is that the car is being designed to ride and completely ignore that the plank is there.
I do not think this is the case. If there is 20mm of travel in the suspension based on the highest predicted load on the wheels,
I do not think the engineers will knowingly allow the floor coming in contact with the track to be at 15mm for example when the plank can only wear by 1mm. That's literally intending on the car to slam onto the plank way before the suspension limits and grind away lap after lap.
I am a mechanical engineer, not an F-1 race suspension engineer, so I could be completely ignorant on this, but that approach just does not sound right.
The F-1 engineers are fully well capable to limit the compression of the suspension to within fractions of a mm, especially to avoid a DQ.
And they will do so even more now that they were disqualified in China.
I guess the question is, what benefit is there in riding the car on the plank until it eats away at 1.5mm or more?
10mm is the regulated thickness.
Why not engineer it to rub away 0.8m to bring you to 9.2mm thickness for aerodynamic benefit all that good stuff?
Rubbing of a 1.5mm chunk to arrive at 8.5mm just sounds like a blunder or misunderstanding of something going on on the car.
Thats, more or less, exactly what they intend. Quite the scale of those numbers intimately, well were not privy to that.
The controversy recently about floor wear was specifically about those wear measurements points and how the teams were allowing those reference points that will be measured to flex up into the floor, and so avoiding wear by displacement in "retraction" as they were effectively shunted up into the chassis. That being supported by notionally "flexible" mounting substrate between plank and carbon tub structures etc.
Control purely by suspension as you suggest will ultimately impact the tyre structure to promote bouncing (tyres being essentially an undamped spring) ahem, "porpoising" as known as.
Hitting the floor onto the ground, with elasticity in tbat support structure (as much as they can get away with) effectively IS the bump stop, also bypasses putting load into the tyre at a peak frequency that can cause it to bounce.
Their setup, as I've noted, is "gaming" this whole method in exploitation, which they got wrong this time. Just look at how much plank substrate is ejected out the rear into diffuser expansion plume, this seen in some ambient light condition.
Oh, me too an engineer in origin. Loosely in scale from singular micron (measured in birefringent interferance) up to approx 5 mtrs
Do you have evidence of this? Not for the sake of argument, but so as to not mislead the forum. There were many theories on the forum that got debunked, but the damage was done. One being the anti-dive concept of the control arms.
I am not following the point on the tyre structure and bouncing because of suspension . Tyres have damping in them, one of the best dampers in nature, that would be the air/nitrogen inside. Part of the reason the tyres get hot is the damping effect. What also happens when the car hits the plank is the suspension momentarily offloads. I suspect that's probably contributing to the porpoising too.
Point taken on the gaming. They are definitely gaming the system, but Ferrari must be using a whacka mole hammer with this game to get both cars DQed so badly.
If the question is "have I specific knowledge within Ferrari’s team" then I can answer with confidence "no"
Your observation of "best dampers in nature" for rubber based construction .... would need to be quantified by situational and structural use. Without which it can't be used in this context. All material (notionally) has damping properties, else perpetual motion would be easy to create. The tyre here is the prime driver of lifting the car if excited within its resonance to produce the characteristic "porpoising" but ultimately initiated by the aero map, to then get out of control.
The ability to damp or ramp up spring support in stopping the chassis hitting the floor has to be enacted through that tyres structure. If that spring /damping resistance curve crosses and exceeds the latent one in tyre carcass, once compressed it will return that energy by recovering its original dimension. This is the primary conundrum within these regulations. All of the teams are effectively using the plank to arrest that final few mm of movement as it hits the ground, that to avoid the tyre metrics in "uncontrolled" bounce. The planks are worn unilaterally to as lose much as they dare AND pass the test. The amount of material removed can clearly be seen at different points on the track as it exits the diffuser outflow in dust.
If both of us were to apply "conventional " thinking in suspension terms, then that won't come near what is happening here. The floor strike is absolutely part of their setup and operational design. The front has built in flex on "T tray" that supported by a suspension leg incorporating Belleville spring stack. The characteristics of that Belleville arrangement are to provide support only upto a certain load (passes deflection load test) but then gives "digressive " rate in falling away once past that critical point. The floor moves upward in other words. A crude dynamic change in that spring support "system " to fully utilise the rules.
That's not possible at rear of plank, well not directly. But careful thinking could make tenable something similar in Belleville on rear heave spring / damper provision. A somewhat remote from direct application to "yeald" at the last 1/3 of suspension travel in trying to avoid that tyre load spike input.
I've noted further back about McL development of the original heave damper from capacitor principle, now outlawed by not being able to have "stored" energy element in suspension. But that same thinking COULD produce a similar result that would pass rules limits now. More a hybrid conventional spring in series with Belleville to give an opposite accumulative curve to tyre as it hits peak load.
It's allowing an open thought process into these areas that solves problems. Some have very clearly arrived at competent answer. Ferrari still appear to be looking for this.
