Quote:
Originally Posted by MKSixer
Red Bull Racing brings us, "The Bendy Wing". ILLEGAL.
Mercedes AMG Petronas Racing brings us, "The Squatty Stern". LEGAL.
Karen Horner and Darth Marko currently having coronaries.
James Allison earlier this season. "We won't reveal where we've spent our tokens but it will become apparent when you see it."
We see it.
 ( ) |
If you watched fp2 during the interview horner said they weren't worried about mercs suspension because they didn't think it was illegal.
And technically it's not illegal, because f1 cars are allowed to have suspension. This means if you smartly tune the damper settings it's progressive until it hits a certain load - the down force you would only see under high speeds that only occur during the straights, at which point the damper completely gives out and bottoms out allowing the rear to squat and stall the diffuser dropping off all the drag characteristics a high rake car would have. So essentially it's just how the damper is tuned not actually active suspension because nothing is active. This is actually insanely hard to do (tuning the dampers alone is hard as hell), and alot of suspension geometry needs to be taken into account when the car squats. So that's probably where they spent their development tokens - so smart... Not going to be easy to copy because the squat F's up suspension geometry alot, and it must be taken into consideration. I'm not sure if you can even implement it properly without alot of suspension changes and that needs a token. But we shall see, it's also gonna take alot of development time so aka sacrificing next year's car so let's see how many teams are gonna copy.
So what Mercedes is doing is in essense it's the reverse of what a street car spring does (if you have a good spring setup - I had this style of spring and damper on my frs so when it was lowered it would still have suspension compliance but it wouldn't compress enough to cause rub) where the street springs start super soft and get firmer as you go through it's travel. And this is stupid hard to achieve, especially if you have to calculate the exact loads that are needed.
Overall this is an engineers wet dream, like wow this is insanely clever and absolutely amazing. Me personally I'm geeking the heck out over this design. Like holy crap it's awesome, almost as awesome as das. So simple yet so ingenious.