ADRIAN NEWEY
On the right track? Thoughts on Formula 1’s new era from Red Bull Racing’s chief technical officer, Adrian Newey By Dieter Rencken
T
he consensus throughout the Formula 1 paddock is that the 2022 technical regulations have seen the most significant changes to any rule set in the sport’s history. Mid-way through the season some teams are on top of the handling characteristics of their cars while others are still looking to achieve it, and have turned to regulators for help. The journey into the new era of the sport was a bumpy one in every sense of the word, as teams faced a plethora of technical challenges throughout the testing weeks, primarily revolving around so-called porpoising – a bouncing phenomenon caused by the car’s inability to control its platform, stemming from extreme swings in downforce generated by the ground-effect aerodynamics. These issues first surfaced in testing at the start of the season, and there is no doubt that the solution is hard to find. Racecar Engineering (RE) had the opportunity to sit down with Red Bull Racing’s chief technical officer, Adrian Newey, and ask his views on this latest era of Formula 1. RE: First of all, can you explain the porpoising challenges? Newey: ‘It’s a classic control theory problem. When you have a set of aerodynamic regulations that allow ground effect, the closer the car gets to the ground, the more downforce it gives. If those vortices or structures, or whatever it might be, that give you that downforce starts to stall or separate,
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you lose downforce, the car springs back up and then the cycle repeats itself. ‘It’s nothing new. I believe the venturi cars of the late ’70s and ’80s had it. Certainly, plenty of Group C cars and so forth have struggled with it, including the current crop of LMP2s, so it’s a well-known phenomenon. But while there’s nothing new to it, it’s perhaps unknown to many of the younger generation of Formula 1 aerodynamicists.’ RE: So, if it’s not new, why is it so difficult to manage, or even simulate? Newey: ‘The first problem is wind tunnel models, generally speaking, are rigidly held. And, if you hold the model of the car rigid, you won’t see the problem. ‘People in the past have tried to do transient movements of wind tunnel models, but that becomes a whole art form in itself. Just as you have Reynolds number for the scaling of speed and scale, you have another thing called Froude number, which governs the frequency vs scale vs speed (the ratio of the flow inertia to the external field) that you have to move the model at to replicate what goes on on track. ‘If you have a car on the track bouncing along at five or six hertz, you have to go to a much higher frequency on the scale model, which creates dynamic problems. If you had a full-size model, you’d actually be able to replicate that, or at least replicate it far better than you can at the moment. But you would have to find some way of suspending the car
non-rigidly to do it. That would ultimately, or could ultimately, resolve the issue.’ RE: How difficult is it to actually solve the porpoising problem then? Newey: ‘First of all, you have to understand the problem properly, which is not that easy in itself. Then after that, it’s about trying to come up with solutions that reduce the problem without losing downforce. ‘You’re in that classic performance vs comfort trade if you like.’ RE: Is this porpoising occuring at a different point of the car to the ones from the 1970s and ’80s? Newey: ‘I was still at university in those times, so I can’t completely answer the question. But I think the phenomenon of flow structures breaking down will be exactly the same. Where they break down on those cars didn’t
