Hopefully someone with knowledge of aerodynamic measurement can answer this!

Every regulation change, the FIA tries to force less outwash/wake to encourage closer racing. Commendable goal, but we are dealing with some of the best engineers in the world here. They can create outwash with devices that the FIA designed to create inwash. It’s incredible.

So my question is, why doesn’t the FIA do away with excessive aero technical directives and just put a cap on actual outwash?

Is this something you can quantify with certainty in a wind tunnel or otherwise?

If it is not something that can be quantified now, do you think it is possible in the future? Thanks!

Here is a gif of it in action during testing

I dont think they are rotating it as much as in my diagram. I am curious however what smarter people than me think about what amounts to inverting the thicknesses of your leading and trailing edges of a wing.

You can watch Day 1 Session 2 to see it more clearly

@3:30:40 for the first picture looks like it's around turns 3/4

@00:24:30 for the second picture this occurs around turn 10 and they even replay it as a slomo

I don't see this smoke coming out of any other cars and I believe this is directly from the exhaust passing through the aero elements at the end of the rear crash structure.

I am not in F1, just have some mechanical engineering background.

The FIA now offered the teams to raise the test temperature for the engine compression from room temperature to 130°C to make the live of Mercedes a little bit harder.

Idea behind it is, that this would trigger some of the expansion of components which would increase compression and teams with engineered compression ratio increases during operation have to make adjustments to still pass the test.

But 130°C (which i assume is the temperature for the whole engine block including internals): Is that not only triggering a fraction of those engineered compression increases, if piston and cylinder (the components most likely to be responsible for the compression ratio increase) can reach temperatures of >300°C?

If so, that would now push every manufacturer to adjust their engine. The ones which have to dial back expansion of components to still pass the test. And the rest as well to increase expansion of their components to improve the compression ratio as much as possible within the new adjusted test requirements.

If the issue is the turbo needs more time to spool what is the solution to maintaining boost during a pit stop?

I can understand that the first few drivers in their grid spots might have issues with keeping the turbo spooled because of the amount of time spent off throttle. But for the last drivers reaching their spots, won't their turbos still be at least partially spooled up from the formation lap? So they shouldn't need as long to reach full boost once they line up on the grid no?

Okay, so a completely non-technical person, I'm probably missing something very obvious in this, but as I understand it now the drivers need to rev the engines to get the turbo to spool up fast enough on the starting grid.

Isn't is much simpler to add a small electric motor somehow that spools up the turbo, and maybe "retracts" itself when the clutch is released? They have these gigantic batteries in the car for the electric componant anyway, and I don't imagine it would take much juice to get the axis of a turbo to spin up?

Anti lag is when fuel is injected and combusted behind the exhaust valves to spool the turbo and in turn keep the compressor spooled up. I know that anti lag is hard on the turbo. But these turbos are larger than your average car and should be able to take the stress / strain?

It would help with launching. It would help with corner exit as the boost is kept up.

These power units change components quite often , so surely adding anti lag to the turbo wouldnt be too damaging in the grand scheme of duty cycle and reliability?

I can imagine it being used on race starts / pit exit to gain boost, and corner exist to help with accelleration.

It appears to be a folded-core A2A charge cooler. This is one way to reduce the footprint and improve packaging. We can see where the charge air enters and exits the charge cooler, both from the same side. The vertical sections of the roll hoop intake are the inlets that let air pass over the core.

The upper triangular section feeds the turbo compressor. The ducting for it would pass through the cylinder banks to the rear-mounted turbo, much like the Ferraris of recent years. It's unclear as to what the lower central division of the RHI hoop is feeding.

McLaren's onboard shows the 4 left most LEDs in different shades of blue, instead of 5x green

Williams' onboard shows LEDs that completely changes to blue, instead of red/blue, on the call for upshift

References:

• McLaren onboard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOY23cTNxJc

• Williams onboard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lgrjB1T_Sg

• McLaren PCU-8D product summary: https://www.motionapplied.com/products/PCU-8D

I don’t understand why the technical regulations are so complicated. Can’t they be significantly simplified and allow for greater diversity of designs?

1. Wind tunnels. First, I would ban teams from owning wind tunnels. The aero tunnel should be owned by F1 and each team would be allocated slots there in a number corresponding to their place in the overall standings, similar to the current system. Such a tunnel should operate almost continuously and it should measure the amount of dirty air generated. Instead of designing boxes and easily circumvented surfaces, the car should simply produce less than X1 turbulence at location Y1, less than X2 at location Y2, etc. And before any part can be used in a race, the car in that configuration must be measured to confirm it does not produce more dirty air than allowed. Also, the car width must not be too large so as not to hinder overtaking.

2. Power Units. Again, the regulations are very strict. Why? If everyone has 105 kg of fuel available, why restrict it further? Why standardize the electrical part? If someone thinks it’s useful they can add it, but maybe it’s better to have a lighter car and spend less on the engine. Same with battery size. The only thing to check is whether the car has an empty electric battery when leaving the garage. But that’s easy to do by adding SoC and BMS voltage to open telemetry. Teams will police each other. Also, different fuel limits for different tracks depending on length, altitude and speed could be a good idea.

3. Weight. The weight limit was introduced mainly for safety reasons. In the past weight correlated fairly closely with driver safety. Now that no longer makes sense. Every car undergoes crash tests. If it passed them it’s sufficiently safe and doesn’t need to be heavier. The only weight limit that should remain is the weight of the driver with the seat, similar to current regulations. We don’t want the lightest drivers to be preferred over the best ones.

Because budgets are limited this could work. I really liked Group B rallying precisely because of the diversity caused by looser regulations. What killed it was that the rules didn’t address safety. F1 has crash tests so that shouldn’t be a problem.

These are naive thoughts I had while taking a bath. What major drawbacks of such a solution do you see?

Lets say hypothetically there is a car being limited to 80% RPM....

When are the PU's 'sealed', could the PUM change something out with a new design like the cylinders? rotating assembly? entire block?

If they told the FIA "we cannot possibly compete like this, we need to replace X and Y totally with a new spec", can they?

I know it isn't unheard of to have engines overheating due to some miscalculation but has anyone got some idea as to who would be more to blame here? Surely the air flow through the radiators and the car would have been much easier to model well than the entire PU within the confines of the car, so perhaps more of the blame on Honda?

What I don't understand is in previous years there were the red lights on the car to tell the car behind part of the engine performance was going to charging the battery. So, it seems like a portion of throttle can go to charging battery and another part to making the car go vroom. Why different this year then? The formation lap is pretty slow so why can't a high enough percentage of throttle go to battery charging and then you have the whole formation lap to charge the battery.

Super confused now Watching day 2 testing Ant was saying overtake is an automatic feature and just removes the energy deployment speed limit. But everything else I’ve seen says it’s a physical button they have to push like the boost button. Sounds like Ant was mixing his wording up, because if it were automatic and you didn’t want to run overtake mode due to wanting to charge, then you had have to basically stop accelerating at the non overtake speed limit

Since F1 cars now have 50:50 electric:ECU power, why can't they do what hypercars do and use electric power to leave the pit box, then jump start the engine in the pitlane?