As Haas F1 Team technical director Simone Resta said on Friday after the reveal of the first images of the VF-22: “Until now, everyone has been playing with models, whether it be scaled in the wind tunnel, virtual in the simulator, etc. Everything is in the virtual world, nothing is real yet.”
“The only thing that matters is the track performance with the drivers. We really need to see how the package will work in real life, how it will interact with the tyres, with the set-up etc.
“We will only be able to judge and improve once we can be a second behind another car in a fast corner to understand where we are compared to 2021.
Resta ‘s caution builds on other times when the FIA and F1 have made rule changes to improve the show, but ultimately backfired when they hit the real tarmac.
One of the most famous examples was the 2009 change, which was aimed at improving the aerodynamics of the cars to help them track each other more closely.
The FIA’s work to simulate airflow turbulence gave hope that the adjustments would work; but the teams ended up with that goal in their continued quest for performance.
The way aerodynamics developed at the time disrupted the slipstream in such a way that it made it difficult for the cars to chase each other.
As the FIA’s single-seater chief Nikolas Tombazis , who was working for Ferrari at the time, put it: “The rules were so full of loopholes that within a few weeks of working in the wind tunnel, we had completely canceled all good intentions that had been thought”.
In 2022, Formula 1 will face a much bigger rule change compared to that of 2009, however, there is a much higher level of confidence from those in charge as to how the targets set will be met.
That confidence is because F1 and the FIA have put much more work into crafting the new regulations compared to previous changes.
Perhaps most important of all, though, the sport was able to draw on technology far more advanced and far more powerful than any machine or item the teams could use on their own.
So instead of waiting for the help of the teams as was the case before, Formula 1 this time has always been one step ahead working on its own.
That was due to the partnership that F1 has with AWS , which allowed it to use its cloud technology to run CFD simulations which reduced the average simulation time enough to give F1 and the FIA a huge advantage in making the rules.
As Rob Smedley , F1’s principal engineer, told Motorsport.com: “It has revolutionized and transformed a bit the way the FIA could write the rules.”
What was critical for F1 and the FIA in their research was being able to do simulations with two cars side by side, because only then can the full impact of the air disturbance be analyzed to determine what was needed.
The complexity and processing power was beyond what any team could deliver in a realistic period of time, which is why the AWS solution proved to be such a game changer.
Smedley explained: “The technological barrier we had was that we needed to have a CFD simulation with two cars at the same time.”
“A CFD simulation with a car, if run under the aerodynamic testing constraints that the teams have, i.e. with a car at 50% scale, takes around five hours.”
“In that simulation about 100 million cells are generated. But when you do it with a 100% scale car, you get 200 or 250 million cells and it would take 14 hours.”
“If we wanted to use that technology, then a simulation of two cars with twice as many cells gets you to 550 million or 600 million, and that would take about four days.”
“When we first got down to business with the regulations, it took us four days to do a single iteration. That’s a barrier to research and development.”
F1 knew they needed to find another solution, which is why the AWS offering proved so beneficial in dramatically reducing the time it took to run simulations.
“I think the first iteration was running on their EC2 service, at 1,000 or 1,100 cores, and in the second iteration, we hit about 2,500 cores,” Smedley said.
“He cut that job down from four days to about six or eight hours.”
“We came back at the same time that teams take when working with a car at 50% scale, but we were doing full two-car simulations.”
“The progress in terms of technology was huge. That was made possible by our partnership with AWS . They gave us the key to make it work the way we wanted.”
“We had to do the simulations and iterations fast enough that we could keep up and write the rules the way we have.”
Can a repeat of F1 2009 be completely ruled out?
Smedley , who has worked for Ferrari and Williams, acknowledged that the way the teams read and study the regulations is not the same as the way the people create them.
From that base, he is aware that the teams will explore all the gray areas in the search for performance, and that could derail the good intentions of F1 . However, he does not think they will succeed.
“The concept and the aerodynamic architecture of what we are trying to create with a car that will have semi-ground effect and an updraft, is definitely the direction we needed to take if we wanted to reduce the drag that was detrimental to cars going behind others.
“So from a theoretical or scientific point of view, there is no question that the concept is fundamentally sound and correct.”
“The reality is that teams will look for every way to find their best performance, in any direction, and obviously it’s possible that they will find it, which certainly won’t help the car behind.
In the event that teams find a way to scuttle F1’s intentions with these new regulations, Smedley says the series will be able to respond.
“I think that’s the beauty of Formula 1. If we knew everything that’s going to happen right now and we sat down and figured it all out, for me and people like me, it would be pretty boring.
“It’s like Ross Brawn always says, we can’t expect it to be perfect from the start. But let’s focus on seeing if we’ve made a step forward.”
“And if we do, then we can take more steps in that direction, especially after a year of learning in 2022, that’s great. Let’s continue on this path, building a better F1,” he concluded.
