The 2020 F1 Season
- Thread starter Tony Lockhart
- Start date
windhoek
The Phoolosopher
There be dragons!
I'm obviously missing a pop culture reference here. Or that's just the conventional view of Airdrie! Either way, do tell.
Eyebroughty
JohnC
Google is your friend
However here is a starter.......
Here be dragons" means dangerous or unexplored territories, in imitation of a medieval practice of putting illustrations of dragons, sea monsters and other mythological creatures on uncharted areas of maps where potential dangers were thought to exist.
windhoek
The Phoolosopher
Google is your friend
However here is a starter.......
Here be dragons" means dangerous or unexplored territories, in imitation of a medieval practice of putting illustrations of dragons, sea monsters and other mythological creatures on uncharted areas of maps where potential dangers were thought to exist.
Ah, now it makes sense. In fairness, I was driving through Buckfastshire so...
narabdela
who?
Hi Gareth,
Well spotted.
Very difficult to find any info on this. It seems like they are doing a very good job of keeping it pretty quiet.
Ian
Martian Sunrise
pfm Member
pulling your leg, I think...
cutting42
Arrived at B4 Hacker Ergo
Tony Lockhart
Avoiding Stress, at Every Opportunity
Yank
Bulbous Also Tapered
I gave it a chance once, I lasted about three minutes.
Martian Sunrise
pfm Member
Marmite
tea jenny
RIP Ron Tauranac. A good innings of 95, one of the the few remaining that was associated with F1 in the '60's.
Instrumental in Jack Brabham's third championship, numerous lower formulae titles as boss of Ralt, and the man under whom Ron Dennis and Gordon Murray started their careers.
https://www.motorsportmagazine.com/articles/single-seaters/f1/obituary-ron-tauranac-1925-2020
Instrumental in Jack Brabham's third championship, numerous lower formulae titles as boss of Ralt, and the man under whom Ron Dennis and Gordon Murray started their careers.
https://www.motorsportmagazine.com/articles/single-seaters/f1/obituary-ron-tauranac-1925-2020
davidjt
pfm Member
It's not just power, the mercs look sooo planted compared to every other car.
Interesting point made by Andrew Benson about the Racing Point cars: other teams are bitching (or protesting) about the 'copycat' issue, but no other team has followed Mercedes' aero path. They all had that option some time back and no-one took it up. Now that RP have gone that route the others don't look so clever, but should you penalise RP for a good decision? As always with modern F1 we don't get to know if it's really that simple, but from outside it certainly looks that way.
Interesting point made by Andrew Benson about the Racing Point cars: other teams are bitching (or protesting) about the 'copycat' issue, but no other team has followed Mercedes' aero path. They all had that option some time back and no-one took it up. Now that RP have gone that route the others don't look so clever, but should you penalise RP for a good decision? As always with modern F1 we don't get to know if it's really that simple, but from outside it certainly looks that way.
The only team that can really copy the Merc aero path is Racing Point (all other teams will have to make compromises that could be very costly from a performance perspective).
RP buy every part that they can from Merc and so know what shapes of the purchased parts to put in the tunnel early in their development process and are therefore some way down the road of being able to develop a car in the Merc way. In particular purchasing the gearbox and rear suspension tells them a lot about the upcoming aero. Couple that with the enormous number of photographs taken of the last years Merc racing car and extensive use of photogrammetry (to create CAD point clouds) on those images would allow them to create very accurate rapid prototype model car parts of the previous Merc car to be tested in the wind tunnel.
All that information should allow some clever aerodynamicists at RP to understand the Merc concept in detail and then effectively second guess where they were going for this years car.
It would appear that RP have done this very well. I would be surprised if they have broken any rules. They have just shown that within the rules you, it is possible to make a very competitive car, when the rules are stable, and you buy everything that you can from the best team on the grid.
It will be interesting to see how they cope with big rule changes like we will have for 2022, where RP will not have a car and concept to copy.
But strategically what they have done is very clever as it should enable them to finish 4th or better for a couple of seasons and generate extra income in the process to help them do a better job when there are big rule changes and they have to develop their own ideas.
windhoek
The Phoolosopher
Fabulous observations as always Ian. It sort of begs the question why other teams don't, or haven't done likewise with Ferrari and Renault (by Renault I mean Red Bull) cars. I remember Haas entered F1 as a fully paid-up customer of Ferrari and at the time, at just about any time, the Ferrari cars would have made a great starting template. Red Bull cars are pretty much always great from an aero perspective so Renault could have chosen to shape their car in a similar fashion seeing as it was obvious Red Bull's aero package is better (except on the rare occasions it isn't).
Perhaps this sort of thing happened in the past but was simply before my time. I don't know. But it seems strange to think no-one has thought of doing this before, assuming it was possible, of course.
Perhaps this sort of thing happened in the past but was simply before my time. I don't know. But it seems strange to think no-one has thought of doing this before, assuming it was possible, of course.