This week’s Austrian test got underway, at the Red Bull Ring, a track loved by many. While Force India showed up with its new racer, Williams introduced a very peculiar design, something which we haven’t seen since the Aerodynamic boom of 2008. Rain brought limited running, but this factor didn’t stop some interesting innovations being tested.
Force India
Force India showed up with its new B-spec car, and she’s a much an improved car overall, a sensible evolution.
Firstly you can see these slats in the front nose cone. This looks to be a way Force India will accelerate the flow down the side of the car. Low pressure will pull down the higher pressure flow, above the chassis tub height. With the lower aero elements such as the T-tray and rear tyre squire will benefit from more flow, so will produce more downforce.
When looking at the car, we can see this very neat and tidy new lines of the side impact structure’s outer bodywork, which are also more tightly compacted to the engine internals.
We can also see that they have similar side pot inlet to the Toro Rosso STR10, which sees a very neat side pod undercut as well as enlarged ducts to help cool the car.
The car also sees the same exhaust outlet design, as seen on the lotus E23. It’s a long design that see the tail pipe stick quite far out. This design is quite simple, but will accelerate the plume upwards more, so should gain more in rear wing main plane downforce.
With the increased engine cooling ducts, Force India have tighter bodywork surrounding, this will help the car aerodynamically. With a tighter more sculpted rear, the flow will be much neater as it goes to the rear wing. This tactic has been seen on the Lotus as well as the McLaren.
Overall the new VJMO8 is a very sensible car, and should see them move up the grid.
Williams
It can be very surprising when a team brings an update that no one has thought off. Williams did just that with a new rear wheel winglet.
When looking at the design, the first thought is, is it legal? And from what I see, it’s very tight with the FIA regulations. Rules state that not much can be brought in on the rear floor, which can be seen by this winglet.
The design is effectively a monkey seat (Y200 winglet) but situated on the rear floor. From what I can see, this will be used as flow management, as well as a way to produce some extra downforce. The way the air flow will hit this will shoot upwards through the slats inside it, and up over the rear wheel.
Flow structures that are less turbulent can then be used for rear wing and diffuser benefits, so the FW37 could be gaining a big performance.
An area which Williams struggle on the FW37 is downforce, controlling the rear tyre wake is a very good start, an area engineers try to control the most.
This winglet is not legal, but should defiantly see a design of this caliber quite soon after 2017 , although less aggressive.
McLaren
McLaren tried its new mainplanes on the top two tiers of the front wing. This is a lot more updated from there previous one. The new concept sees narrow mainplanes for reduced drag. McLaren could well be testing these for the Belgium and Italian GP’s. Furthermore the new mainplanes join the vortex core acceleration point, at the leading sections of the front wing, this looked to cause less front wing flow disturbance to the rear of the car.
Pictures Courtesy of Williams Racing and Sahara Force India
