The rear suspension, which the Mercedes F1 is straight and “lowers the vehicle height,” is actually used by other teams. However, the intention is different from that of rivals.
Red Bull claims that at the F1 Turkish Grand Prix, Mercedes’ F1 car had a straight 20km / h boost. Even with DRS, the additional speed was around 10-12km / h, and Red Bull was confused.
After that, the rear view camera of the F1 Turkish Grand Prix revealed that the rear height of Mercedes suddenly dropped mechanically when downforce was applied to the car on a straight line.
As the speed of the car increases, the downforce from the rear wing increases with the square of the speed, the rear of the machine is pressed against the suspension and the rake angle on the floor decreases. The closer the machine is to the ground, the less drag the body will have and the faster the straight speed will be.
In the “high rake” machine represented by Red Bull, the machine is in a forward leaning posture, and when a straight and stable downforce is applied, the method of reducing drag by approaching a parallel posture by inertia has been used for a long time. Has been done.
Then, what is the difference between Red Bull and Mercedes in the mechanism of lowering the vehicle height of this rear?
The high rake adopted by Red Bull is a concept that makes the entire floor work like a diffuser and earns downforce by making the machine lean forward. The higher the rear vehicle height, the more it works. The drag became larger by that amount, and on circuits where we wanted to improve linear speed, we adopted a low-down force package with thin wings to balance it.
On the other hand, Mercedes’ low rake is to earn downforce on the floor with a long wheelbase that is flat against the road surface. Performance tends to improve at low ride heights. The drag due to the posture of the machine is small, and if anything, a large wing is required to gain downforce on the body surface.
At the F1 French Grand Prix in June, Red Bull Honda was able to run a lower wing than Mercedes, straight and fast, and even faster across the lap. At this stage, the RB16B looked like an all-round aerodynamic package.
At the time, Mercedes F1 team representative Toto Wolff observed, “If I ran such a low wing, I would have lost more lap time in the corner than I would get on a straight.”
However, Mercedes F1 introduced the final aerodynamic upgrade at the British Grand Prix. From there, the linear speed improved.
The method adopted by Mercedes is not to lower the rear wing to reduce drag, but to reduce the drag by lowering the rear vehicle height to block the downforce generated by the diffuser.
Therefore, unlike Red Bull and other teams that used a “bending rear wing” to reduce drag, it is possible to reduce drag and reduce linear speed even with a large rear wing. Moreover, it was more effective than DRS at the F1 Turkish GP.
While Red Bull Honda lowers the rear vehicle height by inertia, Mercedes sets a “stall point”, and when the downforce reaches what level, it will probably lower the rear vehicle height with a third damper etc. It is adjusted so that. This is very complex for engineering and requires a lot of very powerful simulation tools.
However, there is a weakness that the effect will not be exhibited if the speed difference between the corner where downforce is required and the straight is small. It was demonstrated at the Circuit of the Americas, which has many high-speed corners.
Christian Horner believes that some of the upcoming venues on the calendar are perfect for Mercedes ideas.
“It will have a bigger impact on some tracks,” said Christian Horner.
“Here (US) the effect has diminished, but in places like Jeddah, for example, it can be very powerful.”
Red Bull is intrigued by what Mercedes did with the suspension, but made it clear that he didn’t think the design violated F1 regulations.
“No, we don’t feel it’s illegal,” said Christian Horner.
“This has been used historically. I’ve seen them use it in the past.”
“But what we saw in Turkey was a pretty extreme version of it. I think that circuit made it possible.”
Category: F1 / Mercedes
