FIA vows to improve 2021 front wing aesthetics. Formula One will pursue a ‘ground effect’ solution.

The FIA is still working on the design of the front nose and wing of the chassis regulations for the 2021 Formula One season. This week, drawings of the proposed layout prescribed in the soon-to-be-announced 2021 technical regulations were published on the F1 and FIA websites.

To promote overtaking, the 2021 cars will produce a so-called ‘ground effect’ with the floor, while the front wing will be simple and notably wide. But FIA technical boss Nikolas Tombazis told fans not to worry about the appearance of the front of the car in the drawings: “There is further work going on with the front wing,” he said – “We are still not completely happy with it, both from an aero point of view and from an aesthetic point of view, so we are trying to make it better in both aspects.” – FIA technical boss Nikolas Tombazis explained.

In place of the complex front wings and bargeboards, Formula One will pursue a ‘ground effect’ solution that will see downforce generated underneath the car, as FIA Head of Single-Seater Technical Matters, Nikolas Tombazis, explains.

“There’s a diffuser going right under the car, with a Venturi-type channel running through it. The tunnels go right from the front to the back,” he says. “[With the 2021 car] typically, we will go from about a 50% loss of downforce for the following car at two car distances [in 2017] to about a 5-10% loss. So we have a massive reduction of the loss of downforce for the following car.”

The Venturi tunnels will feed air back to a much higher diffuser than on current cars, and allied to other conditioning elements, such as the front wheel arch, the wake generated by a leading car will be narrower and higher, allowing following cars to stay closer for longer in ‘cleaner’ air.

“The two strong vortices we are creating take a lot of the wheel wake up and over the car behind. As a result what the car behind sees is much cleaner flow,” says Tombazis.

One element still under discussion is the final specification of the front wing. “There is further work going on with the front wing,” says Tombazis. “We are still not completely happy with it, both from an aero point of view and from an aesthetic point of view, so we are trying to make it better in both aspects. There are good reasons why the current wing is very wide aerodynamically, but it is not the best aesthetic result, so there is work going on there.” – he concluded.