I meant bodge job in terms of using active suspension instead of sorting the actual issue out, which some of them seem incapable of, given the comments further up. I know it’s against regs, but it might level (!) the playing field a bit and lead to closer racing, which would surely be a good thing?
Still penalising the teams who got it right though isn’t it ?
F1 is a meritocracy. The best (or at least those who interpret the rules more affectively) shouldn’t be punished for doing a better job.
If you want equalised teams and a level playing field, NASCAR should fulfill your desires.
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Yeah I know it’s not the f1 way of doing things, seems like it would be very much the Liberty way of doing things. I wouldn’t mind, I’m much more into seeing close racing than a purist f1 fan. With the best cars and drivers though, not a bunch of tractors driven by rednecks.
Active suspension wouldn’t exactly be an off-the-shelf solution, could take as long to develop suitable systems as simply sorting the cars properly. Also, iirc, it was one of the systems banned as cars were becoming lethally fast.
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I’m only summarising what I’ve picked up, so am v easily.corrected, but it’s not solely porpoising, it’s also the low/uber-firm crashy setups that some teams (flawed) designs require that they run to chase laptime.
It’s not, however, an inevitable nor inherent characteristic of the regulations, as several teams have shown. Some teams have just done a crap job.
The remedy is obvious, nearly universally agreed, yet unpalatable to the teams who it affects: Just raise the bloody car. Nobody gets hurt. But kiss your season goodbye.
FWIW, measuring is easy, enforcing is surely nigh on impossible. It all feels rather knee jerky to me
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Surely that’s a contradiction, if measuring is easy it’s also easy to measure who has contravened the measurements?
I do like how engineering and aerodynamic problems for multi £million F1 racing teams are solved on forums 
Sorry.
I was trying to suggest that setting a limit, or limits, be it the plank, ride height. G-Force or whatever is the “easy” part, but enforcing it through penalties (post race) with all the inevitable variables, queries and appeals will be the hard part, and a bloody nightmare for everyone.
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Don’t apologise, it was a windup, I really have no clue about the ins/outs of F1.
Forums are where the opinions of the elderly go to die unnoticed, so of all the many, many threads to post this drive-by inanity, you chose the one with two bona-fide experts posting regularly…?
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A lot of interesting comments regarding the porpoising situation.
Please see below some technical information and my view of the situation.
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Active ride could be used to reduce the severity of the problem dramatically, but has been illegal since 1993 and would require a lot of re-engineering, and would make the cars considerably faster and hence more dangerous and hence would require more rule changes to slow the cars down.
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A tuned mass damper could be used at the front of the rear of the car to reduce the severity of the bouncing. It would be feasible to do this pretty quickly if required. But this is adding more more mass to the already too heavy cars.
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Teams adapt their setup to make the car safe for the driver. Merc and their drivers have shown that this is very difficult for them to do as they all want to be as quick as possible and so will go for the more painful set up and to be fair, they are not able to predict the damage that will be done b the end of the race.
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Teams use flexible aero solutions to reduce the downforce as the car nears the ground. The extra downforce would result in an engineered shape change that then reduced the downforce for a constant speed.
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The FIA goes for its current solution. Whilst the teams often do need to be saved from themselves, it is disappointing that it has come to this. If a team damages a driver so that they cannot drive, everyone loses out.
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The seat is put on a mechanical isolation system to reduce what the driver feels from the road input / porpoising, but this will reduce the connection that the driver has with the vehicle and the track and hence is not something that I think that should be done. And does not deal with the problem that the tyre vertical forces will be varying just as dramatically and still leaves the car difficult to drive over bumps and kerbs etc.
Any combination of the above could be made to work, but my preference would be a combination of 2. and 4.
As an aside when we were developing the Chevrolet driver in the loop simulator in 2015 we added a crash helmet loader. Basically 2 actuators are attached to the crash helmet and are used to apply forces to the driver’s head to add extra realism to any manoeuvres that they were driving .
Whilst we were purchasing this from a supplier, we did our own research and testing using an instrumented test dummy to ensure that they system was safe. With the system having a series of safety cutouts, the final safety measure was a mechanical fuse which would cut out well before the point that any damage could be done, even if all the software and electrical cutouts had failed.
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In thicko terms, does this mean bendy wings?
It could do, but it could be any part of the car that would affect the flow to give the desired result. This would of course require a very good understanding of the flowfield, which is where some teams have very clearly shown themselves to be deficient…
Basically you engineer aspects of the car to change shape with load, to affect the airflow in a way that helps you meet your development targets. Typically you would engineer this with co simulation of Computational Fluid Dynamics (predicts aero loads) and Finite Element Analysis (the effect of the load on the shape, which then feeds back into different aero loads).
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The problem with this approach is that since only a limited number of flow cases can be considered in a reasonable time with the mesh detail needed to get good data under the car and the load changes quite quickly with time what you think the shape is at any time from FEA is wrong. Not sure how far out and with the car riding bumps and the occasional kerb the floor shape and front wing shape and their position relative to the road is way out a lot of the time.
Making a wind tunnel model with “to-scale” flexibility is also impractical for fixed speed testing.
Quasi static data for a very dynamic situation is, at best, questionable IME.
There is a lot of it about though!
Everybody has had a go at this and I am sceptical whether it has worked for anybody - it certainly was still inadequate in “my day”.
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Frank, this area of simulation has improved dramatically in the last 10+ years, but how well the current teams are using these tools and approaches, I do not know.
I agree that quasi static data for a very dynamic simulation is questionable, hence why I mentioned co-simulation, as that has become more effective and usable.
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I have checked with an expert and he said that technically it has been possible for many years, but the difficulty continues to be the accuracy of CFD. There are ways around this, but few people who work in CFD in F1 have the mathematical background to develop such processes. Also there is a FIA managed limit on CFD usage and so the teams are likely to focus on direct performance as opposed to the required Research and Development of such a technique.
So in summary it is possible, but unlikely to have been developed for use in F1.
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I really did go into the wrong field of work!
I was studying fluid dynamics, CFD and hull design back in 1995. Different application, but very similar principles.
The only team with two cars in the top 6?
Haas F1 !
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I had deduced that from the CFD limitation in the rules and the amount of work involved in iterating to a reasonable analysis of the deflected shape. I am not sure how many repeats would be necessary for acceptable accuracy but obviously the first pressure profile applied to the FEA will not give an accurate deflected shape and my guess is that quite a few iterations would be needed for each ride height combination.
Back in the day the rule limitation meant an analysis of the underside with sufficient mesh to get anywhere near at low ride heights was pretty limiting without doing this as well.
A gargantuan job.
Impossible on a wind tunnel model too.
In the end increasing downforce using aeroelasticity almost never works and is usually unstable.
OTOH exploiting aeroelasticity for changing balance and reducing drag can be really useful.
I suspect the biggest benefit of the large Ferrari sidepod will be plenty of space for a light very stiff floor support whereas the Mercedes concept looks like high stiffness was not a consideration at the concept stage.
Given the youngest senior engineer out there with even a modicum of experience in shaped floors is Adrian, and he is 64, looks like the young guys just don’t know enough yet.
It is still a massive 
situation IMO.
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Yes, the wind tunnel usage rules whereby deflected / flexible shapes are not allowed to be tested means that it is not a lot of use to fix this. A lot of indirect experimentation, on car measurements and simulation (data driven) with use of experience looks to be the best way forwards.
Yes, I have experience of the use of aero elasticity to change balance and or reduce drag and never used it to try to increase downforce, which makes sense as when the loads are high enough to change the shape, you probably want to reduce downforce, not increase it.
FEA use is not limited and with increased processing power, algorithmic and software improvements and increased resource, should be an area where once the engineers understand the interactions better, can design physical solutions with required stiffnesses quickly.
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