The long interruption in April is giving teams and insiders a break for reflection before the long cycle of ten weekends on the track in the next three months. The work in the factory has certainly not stopped, considering that technically from Baku – and even more from Miami – we will enter the first real development phase of the 2023 Formula One cars. The first three races showed that Red Bull (the current world champion team) has an advanced understanding of the car and has the reins firmly in hand for the championship. The visible and almost ostentatious optimism of the top management of Milton Keynes during the winter pre-season testing session was well justified. At that moment the only unclear point was just how far behind Ferrari actually was.
The current reality is that, just to give a somewhat extreme example, Carlos Sainz would have to win four races in a row to return to an average more suited to the ambitions of a team like Ferrari, Charles Leclerc even six. Something that is realistically difficult to imagine.
Leaving aside the rankings, the next few months will still be interesting for the competition. Mercedes wants to reduce the gap to Red Bull and erase the shame of being slower than a customer team, Aston Martin. Scuderia Ferrari must recover points and above all morale, while veteran Fernando Alonso is looking for something more than the podium.
Red Bull: incredible speeds on the RB19 thanks to the beam wing stall?
The RB19 has the eyes of rival engineers on itself (even more so than the RB18 did) due to its unmatchable speeds. Mercedes uses less steep angles of attack but even with less heavy wings there is no comparison. The opposing technicians have long been convinced that there is a concept behind it and they are all asking the same question: how does the RB19 stall a rear wing element?
Meanwhile, it should be emphasized that being able to create the conditions to deliberately stall an aerodynamic element – operating within the regulation – is a matter of merit. In the past, there were cases in which the opposite happened, meaning that some older generation of cars ran into harmful stalls which suddenly affected the balance of the cars. Something not easy to solve, just as difficult to identify in the complexity of a Formula 1 single-seater design.
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Each wing has an angle of attack, i.e. the angle at which it generates a certain amount of drag and downforce. However, there is a critical point where the separation of the flows is generated, defined as the critical angle of attack. If the angle of attack increases beyond the critical angle at some point all downforce will be lost while drag will continue to increase until the so-called ‘stall’. It’s different in Formula 1. Thanks to certain elements on the back of the aerodynamic profiles, flow detachment is obtained, avoiding the increase in drag for a higher top speed. Then there is a significant loss of downforce, due to the lower delta pressure between the upper and lower part of the wing, which generates an indirect reduction of the porpoising trigger due to the % of load lost. This last factor is very useful in the lightening phase in the race, as well as in terms of greater mechanical elasticity since it allows to decrease the basic rigidity with multiple advantages, as explained by F1 expert Giuliano Duchessa for formu1a.uno.
The stall of the beam wing would seem very convenient since from calculations in the simulator, the maximum speed of the car could increase up to 8 kmh based on the steepness of the element. The trick is to get it in a non-random way and only at certain speeds. It should be noted that the steeper a wing, the easier it is to induce a stall, as the flows will separate more easily. It would obviously not be new; in the past teams have tried to use a wing stall to get maximum speed by reducing drag, we can think of passive DRD blowing to break up the flows behind the gurney flap, forcibly separating them. Or, by flexing the wings at a certain speed, the wings move by limiting the spaces of the smallest slots, thus reducing the power on the rear of the next flap leading to the consequent stall.
The FIA has acted both by tightening the load tests on the profiles and with the small separators between the slots, so as to prevent these attempts, however there are no important constraints for example around the design of the beam wing or in the normal structural flexion under very high loads. Moreover, it is known that the single pylon wing boasts a flexibility that makes it particularly efficient. It goes without saying that on this generation of Formula 1 cars being able to afford a very steep beam wing specification offers significant downforce values at all speeds. Being able to neutralize it, even partially, would offer important gains.
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