Formula One Reveals 2021 Concept Car to the Fans

The 2021 season is coming ever closer and Formula One and the FIA are working hard to overhaul everything. In order to do that, they did an unprecedented amount of development using CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics). All that was left was to give it a test run in the wind tunnel.

Ahead of the German Grand Prix, the Sauber wind tunnel was used to run a model of the latest 2021 Formula One car. This secret test came on the back of a maiden run in January, where a 2018 model was used and a second run in March, using a 2021 iteration with 13-inch wheels. Fortunately, for the sake of fairplay, Alfa Romeo Racing gained no advantage, as an independent group supervised the test.

From a physical standpoint, elements like the sidepod and the rear wing will largely remain the same. However, the front wing is expected to evolve as development continues on it.

“The wind tunnel testing we are doing is slightly different to what the teams might do,” said F1’s Chief Technical Officer Pat Symonds to the official F1 website. “The teams concentrate solely on the forces on the car, through a variety of attitudes as they move the car around. While we naturally have an interest in what those forces are and particularly how those forces change as the car moves, we’re even more interested in what is happening to the turbulent air behind the car.”

“For that reason, although we are doing most of our development in CFD, and that CFD is using some pretty advanced techniques which aren’t commonly used by the teams, we want to back up the virtual simulations with a physical simulation. We also chose to use a 50% model rather than a 60% model and we chose to run that model quite a long way forward in the wind tunnel, so this gave us the opportunity to best inspect the wake of the car.”

Traditionally speaking, the 100% scale Formula One cars are forbidden from being used in a wind tunnel. The reason behind this was the huge cost of producing the model itself. As a result, most teams have elected to use 60% models.

“It takes up less room in the tunnel and therefore it allows us to look, in terms of car lengths, further behind,” Symonds continued. “If you imagine you have a full size car in there, you could only look at a tenth of a car when it is behind so 50% is a good compromise in that we can still get a good level of detail on the model but we still have distance behind. It’s true teams have tended to go more to 60% these days. There are advantages to that, in modelling, but modern manufacturing techniques, particularly additive manufacturing and stuff like that allows you to make very accurate 50% models these days.”

One of the chief targets of the 2021 rules is to see more overtaking and make the sport moe exciting and lucrative. So, in order to achieve this, there is a need to find a way to allow cars to follow each other more closely.