F1 is spreading, achiving more money, arising in that places that have good drivers and shrinking beyond the people wich simply love it because it was a way to unknown levels of things like: security, performance, state of art and.

Excellent point!

FOTA and FIA seem to agree basically on the road relevance, that is unfortunately for me less engineering in some racing specific fields.

As such, a future measure proposed for 2011 regs by the teams is the homologation (freeze) of their chassis for 3 years.

Some people want it to be the fastest cars driven by the best drivers. Some people want to see lots of on track action while others want to see strategy. Some want to see cutting edge technology with the boundaries being pushed every race while others want to see road car relevant technologies. Some want to see less cost and more teams. Still others want to see the environmental agenda being furthered.

Even the manfacturers/teams and sponsors have their own priorities. Assuming that the FIA is competent to do it, how do you expect it to draft a coherent set of regulations that would address all those interests? The reality is that there is no simple answer since all these aspects are inter-related.

Every major (popular) racing series has been facing the issue recently. For example, NASCAR in the US has already decided what they will focus on (entertainment) while IndyCar is getting ready to do the same. At some point, FIA and FOM will have to figure out what the primary focus of F-1 should be. Then the solutions to the overtaking problem will be more apparent.

In normal touring sprint car race, with low grip, the drivers common problem is to avoid to much over-driving, above the adhesion limit and ending with “hot tyres”.

In formula 1, with high grip, the driver common problem is to push to the grip limit, and if he don´t make it the tyres don´t achieve the right working temperature range.

Let add that and quote Keith (that´s easier then my English)
“F1 has been stuck with the same problem for years: the cars have become so dependent on their wings to generate downforce and grip they become hyper-sensitive to disturbed air from cars in front of them, and cannot get close enough to each other through corners”

And when the back driver by same chance finally comes close, to overtake, he needs necessarily to go “off line” in the ungrippy area. Unfair.

These is obvious, OK. Also these obvious things becomes worse until now. I agree with you that for the first time in 2009 f1 regulations are going a little bit to the right way.

Hopefully the new regs will address some of the overtaking issues- if not, a great deal of fans are going to be turned off from the sport.

And having slick tires next year would make up for some of the loss of grip.

the solutions of next year should make a step forward.
More is needed, but this is not as simple as “ban wings”.”

I appreciate the engineering side. It’s one of the main things that lifts it above other series like IRL and A1GP and GP2. However pure engineering alone is a bit like just having a starter for dinner. I don’t think banning wings is required, but I do think the cars have gotten TOO complicated. They have become a bit too specialised – built for the idealised, theoretical, textbook situation of being the only car on track.

Which is fine for quali, but can make race day a tad unspectacular. Sometimes (just sometimes) I catch highlights of the Formula BMW support series and wish the F1 cars were having as much fun.

I agree with you that you need challenge. Either the challenge of pushing to the limit, or the challenge of driving on this limit.

I think we can broke down this to this one and only requirement:

-Having locally and timely variations of grip between two drivers.

After that we have some sub requirements that we can tweak:

This variations should be from driver skill only/due to variations in exterior parameters?

A lot of people will jump onto the first and then start to blame KERS, moveable wings etc..Only to talk about the period were refuel was banned which made..variations in lap time due to fuel comsumption, mass repartition and tyre wear etc..

It is always to remember a race is never a driver only issue.

That’s why it makes the proposals for more overtaking difficult.

@Robert:

i understand your point, i have not the same view than you of F1. I’m more sensible to the actual engineering/driving part rather than the racecraft.
That said i’m frustrated when i see someone stuck behind someone for 20 laps.

the solutions of next year should make a step forward.
More is needed, but this is not as simple as “ban wings”.

that’s a bit over-reacting in my opinion.”

Probably.

It’s only because I’m frustrated at what is the greatest sport in the world squandering its advantages and frittering away its lead. What makes it great is increasingly not being shown.

How many races like Valencia do we need to see before we shut the sport down as a washout? How many 0-0 games of football would people watch before giving up on it?

Early in the GP2 feature race overtaking wasn’t happening, it was only later when drivers started running into trouble. The GP2 commentators were noticeably dissapointed with the lack of overtaking. At some tracks such as Bahrain or Hockenheim, one small mistake and slightly running wide can ruin the line through a corner, ruin the exit speed onto a long straight and make the driver in front a sitting duck. Similarly a mistake at Eau Rouge can lead to a hugely significant difference in exit speed onto the long straight.

Overtaking can only occur if a faster driver is behinbd a slower driver and unless there is some mechanism for increasing the chances of that heppening, overtaking will be infrequent. Not allowing setup changes after the race, qualifying with race fuel, easy tracks to qualify at close to 100% effort, similar fuel strategies and tyres which do not noticeably lose performance all help ensure the driver in front is faster or at least equal in pace to the car behind.

Journeyer this is not a a debate about the driver adjustable wings. Writing them off based on the opinions on a blog is pointless as no one understands them as you have just illustrated.

Very true what you say.
There’s an additional thing on wet races. first of all it is important to understand that those races become a kind of low grip races. that is most of the driving is focused on not losing either rear or front or both.

This is fundamental to understand it if we want to tackle overtakings problem.

F1 racing is not about going to the limit and keeping the car on track. The first goal of an F1 car (a modern one) is to push to the limit and in this area find grip.
This is a bit hard to explain but a F1 cars rarely slides all for wheels because a F1 car is rarely into the adhesion limit.

Thus the driver that overtakes is the one that find more grip than the other.

On a low grip situation, the limit in attained easily, and thus the driver needs to constantly travel between just below friction limit and above it.
Here the guy that overtakes is the one staying the most at the limit.
Hence it relies on mistakes from the other.

So not only the wet race morphs the track width with exterior parts being more grip but also the goal is totally different.

Now another thing is that F1 cars are set up to run on dry conditions. Even with full wet tyres their chassis is still set up for dry conditions.
The result is a leveling of the field. The superiority of some car is totally nullified because what caused their superiority only worked in dry conditions.

So again, once may not compare wet race with dry race.

Brar said it good, if you really want overtaking, then ban tyres also! As soon as you search for performance, you restrict the window of operation.

For example if tyre had larger temperature of operation you would see more overtaking because as it is now any temperature variation causes a big loss of grip.

….”And the rest of the track becames even more grippy, in relation to the “in line”, because the dust and marbles are washed off”

In the dry there is no option to the grippy “in line”.

In the wet the “in line” becames slippery because rubbered asphalt with water have less grip than the asphalt without glued rubber over it.
And the rest of the track becames even more grippy because the dust and marbles are washed off.

In a situation like this the driver that want to pass have all the lines in the track to pass, like Massa and Kubica in Japan 2007, when they even went in the “after the kerbs” asphalt without loosing grip.

The wings are an action problem that works with the tyres reaction, wich are the other face of the problem.

To say “Ban the wings” is almost the same thing as to say “Ban the gluying tyres” and use an almost “normal street rubber compound”. That could indeed be a better solution because the track will have something like the same grip in all points and hence more overtaking chances.

Indeed that will give to the overtaking driver the same grip as to the overtooked one. Nowadays the overtaking one must do it with less grip.

“Ogami – So you think there was something different about the Valencia race than, say, Bahrain or Magny-Cours? What was that?”

Yes, first of all, the wings set up is totally different.

Turbulence is largely due to the set up of the wings and underfloor.

The dominating parameter is the lift coefficient. Because increasing wing’s AOA multiplies lift coefficient by as much as 6 or 7 you have almost corresponding turbulence strength.

That means, while in canada you’re running with more downforce than in monaco with a lower wing set up(because you run at faster speed)you suffer significantly more at monaco from turbulences.

In valencia, just as in bahrain you have a lot of parameters than enter in line.

In valencia, being a street track on an harbour the offlines are full of dust, much more than in other tracks, and compared to those other tracks dust is not cleaned with wind gust as this is the case for open tracks.

In bahrain you have more problems because it is a track with a downforce efficiency requirement, you need high lift coefficient but at the same time less drag. That makes the appendices critical.

The next parameter are the lateral G’s required.
For a given set up, with the same cornering speed, a track that asks for more G’s will make the car losing more distance to the leading ones if in the wake.
The reason is that if you run at 250km/h with a given set up through a 2g’s turn you have a lot of spare grip. If you run at the same speed into a 4g’s turn you have far less thus any loss will have great effect.

A series that shows it is IRL. The cars basically are full of downforce and they lose also a lot in the wake, but as they are in baked turn which requires far less grip, even when losing that they have enough to take the turn and slipstream.

So there’s no permanent answer, no steady state. Cars are always under dynamic conditions and to tell you the truth many corners in F1 are not even taken at full speed, if the cars could accelerate faster they would take them even faster so they have spare grip.

@steven

“Everyone since the early 80s has known that F1’s overtaking problems are caused by aerodynamics. It is not an opinion it is an acknowledged fact”

Again, in the topic,that means nothing. This is not because aerodynamics pose some problems that this time the lack of overtaking was from them.

I don’t think a remark done in the 80’s has any relevance now with not only completely different aeros, but more completely different tracks, tyres, engines, regulations.

Following your logic, since the levels of downforce when gilles drived the first aero cars were much less than even a GP2 car, a GP2 car would have more problems..this is not true of course.

Aero do have some effects, and currently effects are bad, but that’s not because there are aerodynamics and wings, that a special case of turbulence.

And again that doesn’t prove anything about the lack of overtaking in valencia. Pushing your logic again, we could not explain why in the recent GPs we had overtakings.

“Ogami if you have a statement by anyone contrary to Gary Anderson’s let us know about it. But there is not one by anyone that is contrary to it.”

Don’t mess with facts. You’re jumping from “ban all wings” to a person that offer basically the same ideas than the OWG for 09 regs bar the drag increase, which has proved being not the solution.
(CART races with the handford device revealed to created even more turbulence).
Nowhere Anderson says wings should be banned.

You confuse the reduction in downforce offered to bring back more balance in the grip curve (which is a good idea) to the reduction in downforce in a prospect of banning it.

Nobody in the technical section of FIA or F1 will tell you that aeros should be banned.
That they are decreased yes, banned no. If they’re banned, the cars will go far slower.

@Robert

“You’ll have to go some way to convince me that these drivers are admitting that they cannot overtake, and thus all dropping back by the same distance. Don’t believe it, sorry”

Well, i can’t convince you, but on repeated occasions drivers are stuck behind the others and even in a formula ford race you don’t run into the gear box of the other.

You simply know where you can overtake and where you can’t.

”
Or maybe it does mean the problem here was aerodynamics. Or maybe, most likely, it means that the problem was a number of contributory factors, one of which was aerodynamics.”

For sure, aerodynamics can have played a role, for example by having less spare grip while following they couldn’t go offline.

But you can’t tell “that’s aerodynamics fault” since offline wouldn’t have been so slippery you wouldn’t have needed that spare grip.

”
Look, you may well be right. But like I say I think aero is at least a big part of the problem, even if it’s not the only problem. There’s plenty dust in Bahrain as well, but it still managed a bit more passing than Valencia.”

In Bahrein i recall hearing drivers said they were stuck behind the other..but this time for an aerodynamics reasons: the lack of slipstream (due to requirement in aero efficiency) combined with turbulence slowed down the cars while following the other.

The culprits were again the same: offline (track is so wide that nobody takes different lines) and aeros, this time aeros being the most important factor.

”
Other race series have aero problems too, but nothing like as bad as Formula 1’s, because their cars are not ridiculously overengineered.”

That’s not true, IRL cars have the same problems (but the effects are less due to requirements on lateral G’s, see my answer to keith in this post), CART and nascar were prone to that also.
Nascar was a pioneer in turbulence research back in the 70’s, and CART showed that increasing drag was not a good solution with the handford device.
In F1 those effects are just a consequence of regulations.
Wings wouldn’t have been restricted in performance, vortex lift wouldn’t have been necessary.

”
We’ve got to the stage where, unless something is done, we might as well employ a rally style “time-attack” format for GrandPrix racing, as unleashing them all at the same time is very often a waste of time”

that’s a bit over-reacting in my opinion.

You’ll have to go some way to convince me that these drivers are admitting that they cannot overtake, and thus all dropping back by the same distance. Don’t believe it, sorry.

“Don’t confuse things. There’s a problem with aerodynamics, but that doesn’t mean the problem here were aerodynamics.”

Or maybe it does mean the problem here was aerodynamics. Or maybe, most likely, it means that the problem was a number of contributory factors, one of which was aerodynamics.

“Just to point you to my main point, you have no clue at all about what caused the problem. Aerodynamics may have their part but you don’t know this.”

Look, you may well be right. But like I say I think aero is at least a big part of the problem, even if it’s not the only problem. There’s plenty dust in Bahrain as well, but it still managed a bit more passing than Valencia.

Other race series have aero problems too, but nothing like as bad as Formula 1’s, because their cars are not ridiculously overengineered.

We’ve got to the stage where, unless something is done, we might as well employ a rally style “time-attack” format for GrandPrix racing, as unleashing them all at the same time is very often a waste of time.

There is a famous quote by Gilles Villeneuve when he said that the problem with modern F1 cars is that you cannot follow a car through a corner because the front wing loses so much grip. If you cannot get close to the car through the corner you cannot get close enough on the straight to overtake. My solution would be to rip the wings off and throw them away. Gilles Villeneuve died 26 years ago.

That is how long the problem has been known about. His answer to it was right then and it is right now. The wings which will be used next year are way more advanced and therefore more sensitive than anything that appeared on an early 80s Ferrari therefore they will have the same problem.

The reason F1 won’t ban wings is because sponsors like them.

Every circuit has a problem with offline grip because of marbles from the tyres. It doesn’t matter what you do with the surface of the track. Once it is covered in rubber it is gripless. As long as we have tyre stops we will have soft tyres. As long as we have soft tyres we will have marbles. The answer is painfully simple.

Ogami if you have a statement by anyone contrary to Gary Anderson’s let us know about it. But there is not one by anyone that is contrary to it.

I agree with Gilles that wings should be binned. However there is an answer that has the same effect as banning wings but giving the sponsors what they want. Have simple single element wings with the same profile along its width so that you have a simple chord and ban end plates. This would give the sponsors a nice smooth suface for their logo and we would have inefficient wings that wouldn’t ruin races. The other option is to use something that was introduced to F1 by Max’s team at the start of the 70s. The famous tea tray wing. Absolutely flat and perfect for sponsors.

Next year front wings will be taken off in more accidents than we have seen for years because they will be extended to be in front of the wheels. This is also a very complex area aerodynamically so teams will spend a fortune trying to optimise it ruining both Max’s cost saving and environmentally friendly plans. So not only will they ruin races aerodynamically they will ruin them because peopl will have to pit to replacement.

The sooner Max goes and we get someone with some intelligence writing rules and tech regs the better.