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F1’s Chief Technical Officer Pat Symonds commented: “The wind tunnel testing we are doing is slightly different to what the teams might do. The teams concentrate solely on the forces on the car, through a variety of attitudes as they move the car around. While we naturally have an interest in what those forces are and particularly how those forces change as the car moves, we’re even more interested in what is happening to the turbulent air behind the car.”
He continued: “For that reason, although we are doing most of our development in CFD, and that CFD is using some pretty advanced techniques which aren’t commonly used by the teams, we want to back up the virtual simulations with a physical simulation. We also chose to use a 50% model rather than a 60% model and we chose to run that model quite a long way forward in the wind tunnel, so this gave us the opportunity to best inspect the wake of the car.”
The results of the testing show the fundamentals of the CFD are correct with only a few surprises, Tombazis says. He commented: “There have been no major surprises. So there is a 5-10% wake disruption, compared to the current levels of 50%, although it depends on the exact configuration you are testing and so on.”
Symonds adds the with the configurations they have got at the moment, ‘the results are exceptional.’
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