F1 2022 AERO REGULATIONS
Shape Shifters The shape of Formula 1 has changed for 2022 in a bid to improve the action on track by altering how cars interact in close proximity By Stewart Mitchell
F
ormula 1 has made a revolutionary change for the 2022 season with one of the most extensive chassis regulation edits ever seen in the sport. The new cars flipped the rules on their head by introducing previously banned design and aerodynamic techniques such as ground effect and cutting back on once heavy development elements such as the sidepods. The 2022 design relies less on a surfacetype aerodynamic regime, whereby much of the generated downforce is by elements seen above the car, compared to 2021. The car’s downforce predominantly comes from tunnels under the car’s floor that interact with the track surface. This technique is known as the ground effect and is a far less sensitive aerodynamic regime than a surface-type one, producing less turbulence and a smaller wake. The philosophy behind these regulations is to allow closer racing, with the potential for more overtakes by reducing the ‘dirty air’ rejected by a leading car. The previous design saw cars lose 35 per cent of their downforce when running just 20m behind a car in front, measured from the lead car’s nose to the following car’s nose. As the trailing car closed in, the loss raised to as much as 47 per cent at around 10m distance behind. The 2022 car, which puts a heavy onus on the ground effect, reduces those figures to four per cent at 20m, rising to 18 per cent at 10m. The journey toward the 2022 aerodynamic regulations started in 2017 when Liberty Media took over Formula 1. The new owner’s primary focus was to up the entertainment spectacle of Formula 1, and this rhetoric eventually filtered down to the technical regulations, which govern much of the ontrack behaviour of the cars in competition.
4 Formula 1 2022 • Racecar Engineering
Following the Liberty Media takeover, Formula 1’s in-house technical team started to look at the then current state of the sport aerodynamically, notably in car-following scenarios, which it had not addressed before. It was not a priority, nor was it in the scope for teams to investigate car-to-car interaction in this way as they were only ever searching for performance on their own cars. Formula 1 has a small technical team, with just five personnel in the aerodynamics department, along with a few other engineers on other projects such as power units, vehicle simulation and the like. Of those five in the aerodynamics group, there are three aerodynamicists and two designers, all with Formula 1 experience. All came from teams in the series. This is a tiny fraction of even the least well-funded Formula 1 team’s aerodynamics department, so they certainly had their work cut out.
Technical resource However, although the department is small, it has enormous computational resource, collaborating with Formula 1’s technical partners, such as AWS, and can far exceed what teams can use. Formula 1’s technical department also has a wind tunnel at its disposal, although it should be noted that most of the work it undertook in this programme was computational. This is because the investigations were predominantly looking at two-car interactions, and there’s no wind tunnel big enough to run two F1 cars at a sensible distance from eachother. In the F1 technical team’s investigations, it became clear early on that there were considerable numbers at play in terms of performance delta from nominal to that
Following the Liberty Media takeover [in 2017], Formula 1’s inhouse technical team started to look at the then current state of the sport aerodynamically, notably in car-following scenarios
