24 replies to this topic

[ian senior]

These things have been the ruination of F1 to my mind. Does anyone know when they were first used in F1, who was the first, did this open the floodgates, or was it just a gradual process?

[uechtel]

BMW used wind tunnels already in the thirties (in cooperation with Professor Kamm of the TH Stuttgart), but only with small scale models.

[Holger Merten]

Originally posted by ian senior
Does anyone know when they were first used in F1, who was the first, did this open the floodgates, or was it just a gradual process?

Auto Union and Mercedes Benz used windtunnels in the 30s too. The first test I found for Auto Union in the windtunnel of Friedrichshafen was held in 1933 with a 1:1 scale modell....

Originally posted by ian senior
These things have been the ruination of F1 to my mind.

....and with those tests in the windtunnel came up one of the greatest eras in motorsport.

[Barry Lake]

Paul Jaray was using a wind tunnel in 1916, for aircraft, built Germany's biggest wind tunnel in 1917 and, in January 1922, he and Wolfgang Klemperer began their first wind tunnel tests on cars (road cars, that is, not racing cars).

I believe that the Wright Brothers used some form of a wind tunnel (or perhaps a "wind machine"?)
in the development of their early aircraft.

In early 1963, when Ford was trying to buy Ferrari, the latter had a rudimentary "wind tunnel", which was basically a big blower driven by a Ferrari engine. According to Franco Gozzi in his book "...Ferrari's Lieutenant", the contingent of Ford people who went to Maranello thought it was hilarious when Ferrari proudly showed it to them. There is a photo of the fan and shroud in the book.

[aldo]

"Wind tunnel" used in the very early days of aeronautics were used as well as "smoke tunnel" in which a flow of smoke was directed against the wing or the whole frame to have a visual perception of turbulences. Early wing profiles have been developed using such a device: Naca in the US and Goettingen University in Germany being at the forefront.

About car: Frank Lockhart developed the shape of his 1928 beach car in the USAAF wind tunnel (I guess it was in Dayton, Ohio). As customary in those years when fluidynamics was still an unsolved puzzle, they couldn't get actual figures measured from wind tunnel tests, and they weren't also unable to precisely "calibrate" the wind tunnel with real life experience, therefore they compared a known shape/car with the new one to compute percentage differences between the two. Frank, apparently, had a wrong model of his Muroc record Miller built, larger than real life, therefore the theoretical figures he got for the beach car were exaggerated. He was aiming for performances the car could never achieve.
Such an approach might explain the too many useless shapes and devices coming out from wind tunnel tests, yesterday and still today, despite the immense computing power available.

[dolomite]

Originally posted by Barry Lake
I believe that the Wright Brothers used some form of a wind tunnel (or perhaps a "wind machine"?)
in the development of their early aircraft.

Barry, the Wright brothers did indeed use a small wind tunnel to carry out lift and drag measurements on model aerofoil sections in order to try and develop the optimum wing profile for their aircraft.

[Barry Lake]

Thanks Dolomite.

I had read that it was a tunnel but, never having seen a photo or diagram, I was being cautious.

I imagine a large room with a fan at one end and exhaust vents at the other would qualify as a "tunnel". It might, in fact, work better than a too-small tunnel, which creates all sorts of problems.

[D-Type]

Slightly OT

One of our senior aerodynamic engineers explained the state of the art to me in these terms.

"You can design something aerodynamically by two methods either by Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) or by physical modelling (Wind tunnels).
"The client believes the Wind Tunnel results and doesn't trust the CFD results
"The engineer believes the CFD figures and doesn't trust the Wind Tunnel results
"So we do both"

In other words both approaches are valid.

They still sometimes get it wrong. When commissioning a new underground station they found that the airflow in a cross passage went the opposite way to the prediction!

Slightly less OT: Mercedes rather publicly demonstrated that they had got it wrong somewhere near Mulsanne village a year or two ago. Didn't they ?.

Even less OT: Frank Costin (or was it Mike?) used calculation rather than testing for the Vanwall and Lotus XI rather than a wind tunnel. But was this from choice or necessity?

[Holger Merten]

Duncan, I think you mean the aerodynamic problems of MB in 1999, when two of three MB were lifted in the Les Hunaudières at 340 km/h. Which shows, how important aerodynamic tests are.
Fortunately nobody was hurt.

[Eric McLoughlin]

Chapman obviously dispensed with their services when designing the Seven.

The Wrights designed and built their own tunnels, basically because they were not convinced of the effectiveness of the wing cross sections they had been copying from Lillienthal's work.

In 1928 the USAAF did not exist. At that time it would still have been referred to as the United States Army Air Corps (USAAC).

[D-Type]

Holger,

That's the one. It is a tribute to modern design that nobody was hurt.

BTW if anyone had been, I wouldn't have joked about it.

On the subject of aerodynamics. Does anybody know whether they managed to work out how a bumblebee flies yet?



Edit - typos

[dolomite]

Originally posted by D-Type
Holger,
On the subject of aerodynamics. Does anybody know whether they managed to work out how a bumblebee flies yet?

But of course....

http://www.news.corn...ect_flight.html

[ian senior]

Originally posted by D-Type
Slightly OT


Even less OT: Frank Costin (or was it Mike?) used calculation rather than testing for the Vanwall and Lotus XI rather than a wind tunnel. But was this from choice or necessity?

Dennis Ortenberger's book "Flying On Four Wheels" gives the full SP on Frank Costin's approach to the design of aerodynamic bodies. Everything was done by calculation, using the time-honoured slide rule. Wind tunnels were never used at all, and Frank could never actually visualise what the car would look like until it was built.

[RTH]

Ian , - you are right the refinement of negative lift has been the ruination of racing. - but don't blame the wind tunnels - the blame for the current position is entirely at the door of a weak, timid,and ineffective FIA in not keeping the technical rules under control.

[D-Type]

Originally posted by RTH
Ian , - you are right the refinement of negative lift has been the ruination of racing. - but don't blame the wind tunnels - the blame for the current position is entirely at the door of a weak, timid,and ineffective FIA in not keeping the technical rules under control.

Hear! Hear!

I think it was Tony Brooks who said that we need an excess of power over grip to bring driver skill back into the equation. We have now reached the stage where a driver cannot approach another car without his own becoming unstable. Didn't CART / IRL restrict wing size and make other aerodynamic rules to address this particular point?

[Holger Merten]

Originally posted by D-Type
Holger,


BTW if anyone had been, I wouldn't have joked about it.

Oh no!

Originally posted by D-Type
Does anybody know whether they managed to work out how a bumblebee flies yet?

We learned it at school, did you too?;)

[RTH]

Originally posted by D-Type

Hear! Hear!

I think it was Tony Brooks who said that we need an excess of power over grip to bring driver skill back into the equation. We have now reached the stage where a driver cannot approach another car without his own becoming unstable. Didn't CART / IRL restrict wing size and make other aerodynamic rules to address this particular point?

How right he was, very sadly it appears we will have to wait for a car to take a bend at 160mph - be launched over a slower runner and fly in to a grandstand, before finally, after all these years of nearly everyone saying downforce has done nothing but harm to the sport for all the blindingly obvious reasons, that public opinion will force the FIA and FOM to make rule alterations that will really change these current cars, a fraction of the cornering grip would make them vastly more spectacular to watch - and at the same time a great deal safer for all concerned.

What a sad and wholely unnecessary state of affairs.

[RDV]

posted by RTH
it appears we will have to wait for a car to take a bend at 160mph - be launched over a slower runner and fly in to a grandstand, before finally, after all these years of nearly everyone saying downforce has done nothing but harm to the sport for all the blindingly obvious reasons, that public opinion will force the FIA and FOM to make rule alterations that will really change these current cars,

...Pierre Levegh's Mercedes at Lemans in 55 did not have wings or ground effect, but still managed to fly quite well.

Pandoras box is well and truly open , no matter what regs you have, apart from a uncovered spaceframe, engineers will work to produce downforce....

[RX-7]

Originally posted by RTH


How right he was, very sadly it appears we will have to wait for a car to take a bend at 160mph - be launched over a slower runner and fly in to a grandstand, before finally, after all these years of nearly everyone saying downforce has done nothing but harm to the sport for all the blindingly obvious reasons, that public opinion will force the FIA and FOM to make rule alterations that will really change these current cars, a fraction of the cornering grip would make them vastly more spectacular to watch - and at the same time a great deal safer for all concerned.

What a sad and wholely unnecessary state of affairs.

Yes! bring back proper mechanical grip!I am sick of aero packages and 50 million dollar wind tunnels. One would think their elimination could be a great way of reducing costs.

[RTH]

Originally posted by RDV


...Pierre Levegh's Mercedes at Lemans in 55 did not have wings or ground effect, but still managed to fly quite well.

Pandoras box is well and truly open , no matter what regs you have, apart from a uncovered spaceframe, engineers will work to produce downforce....

Yes you are quite right, but it is the wing form, the aerofoil sections on the car that produce 80% of the one and a half tonnes + of aero force that push the tyres in to the tarmac at top speed.

In 1955 the crowd were very close to the track and completely unprotected by any debris steel mesh fencing and the next year massive changes in spectator protection were made.

I believe we have just been very lucky in the last 10 years with the way in which crashes have happened, but the potential now for very violent incident has never been higher.

Yes , they will produce some measure of downforce from bodyform alone but in comparison it will be at such a relatively low level that would be quite acceptable - more a question of counteracting a cars natural desire to lift at high speed.

[Bonde]

It seems to me that the current problems of high cornering speeds and difficult overtaking are very much due to high levels of downforce (i.e. efficient negative lift design) combined with acute sensitivity to wake turbulence and pitch/heave. Stepped bottoms have helped a bit, but effectively banning diffusers, i.e. ground effects, and imposing draggy wings might help, but getting rid of negative lift devices altogether is, I believe, not going to improve safety. Remember that 'aerofoils' were first used to eliminate positive lift and thereby improve high speed stability rather than to provide extra grip - though this aspect obviously caught on very quickly indeed!

Having said that, more effort should be put in to reducing downforce - significantly - without making the cars aerodynamically unstable or prone to lift at any attitude; a small plan area helps in the latter case (but reduces volume for impact absorbing structure), whereas 'solid' flat bottoms promote lift when the car is in an unusual attitude - like in a drift.

It appears no solution is simple, but with the money in F1 these days an affordable and practicable solution should be possible - if the teams could agree. Any such move in F1 would - hopefully - filter down to the lesser formulae; it usually does. (For aesthetic reasons alone, raised noses should have been banned long ago, IMHO. In my book, the last pretty F1 cars were Anderson's Jordan 191 and perhaps Barnard's 1994 Ferrari in its original form - it's been downhill ever since)

I don't recall (maybe my memory is selective) drivers of the seventies pre-ground effects era complaining neary as much about running in another car's wake as they do today - those big, draggy wings must've provided quite a useful amount of negative lift. It appears to me that a lot of wings pre-ca.1973 were run in the stalled condition, judging by thier profiles versus angle of incidence - I guess this would have made them relatively insensitive to wake turbulence?

I also often wonder how the many different nose aero treatments seen in the seventies behaved relative to one another when run in close traffic. Does anyone know how, say, a 'bluff' Murray Brabham nose compared to a 312T 'blade' or a Hesketh combination of the two?

[Buford]

I used to work for Caltech (California Institute of Technology). They had a wind tunnel called the Galcit Wind tunnel which I was told had been used by professional racing teams in the 1960s.

[TonyCotton]

The current edition of a newsletter of the Boulton Paul Association (an organisation dedicated to Boulton Paul aircraft and the company's history) has a piece with pictures about Boulton Paul performing tests on Campbell's Sunbeam engined Bluebird in the 1920's using 1/10 scale models in their Norwich wind tunnel. Apparently they came up with 3 alternative bodies, but in the end he settled on an extended tail.

[2F-001]

Notwithstanding Frank Costin reportedly eschewing the wind-tunnel in favour of calculation and intuition, there is a photograph in the DSJ/Posthumous book showing a Vanwall in a wind-tunnel. I don't recall if the text relates the date or circumstances.

[Rainer Nyberg]

Originally posted by Bonde
It seems to me that the current problems of high cornering speeds and difficult overtaking are very much due to high levels of downforce (i.e. efficient negative lift design) combined with acute sensitivity to wake turbulence and pitch/heave. Stepped bottoms have helped a bit, but effectively banning diffusers, i.e. ground effects, and imposing draggy wings might help, but getting rid of negative lift devices altogether is, I believe, not going to improve safety.

Doesn't diffusers and ground effects venturis in fact make cars LESS sensitive to wake turbulence?
Champ Car style venturies seems to lessen the sensivity of wake turbulence and improve overtaking action.