Ferrari still struggling with wind tunnel | Ferrari | Formula 1 news, live F1 | ESPN F1 Ferrari still struggling with wind tunnel How much influence is that having on the new car? Troubling.
The wind tunnel is an appealing piece of modern art designed by Italian Renzo Piano. The air just needs to do its part and not be so arbitrary.
You guys missed this part: Ferrari struggled on a couple of occasions to correlate their own wind tunnel data with on track results, so last year began using the Toyota wind tunnel in conjunction with their own. For the current 2013 F1 car, it was developed and tested entirely in the Toyota tunnel while their own tunnel began the rebuild work. Now, it seems that they are still having tunnel-track correlation issues, but with the Toyota tunnel! Maybe it's not the wind tunnel that's the problem? Could it be their CFD software is crap, or their model makers are not producing accurate 60% model parts for the wind tunnel?
McLaren is having the same problem, last season too when the car was that good. I might subscribe this month to read the interview, interesting problem to have.
This is what you get when you don't let teams test almost continuously. Testing the car and getting real world data is the only was to figure out why the wind tunnel is lying to the designers.
Something needs to be figured out, this is getting silly. At this point I feel like they're using the wind tunnel as a scapegoat.
Also agreed. First it was their own wind tunnel, now it's the Toyota wind tunnel to blame? Although - McLaren also relied on the Toyota wind tunnel when testing their 2013 design last winter, and they had even worse aero problems... which led some pundits to suspect it was/is a problem with the Pirelli supplied 60% scale model wind tunnel tires that didn't match to their full size product and caused some of these issues. Parts designed to work well at 60% with the wind tunnel model tires weren't getting the same effect in full scale on the track.
Having now read the Whitmarsh interview, McLaren isn't having a windtunnel problem. There is always some gap between the windtunnel model and track performance, fact of life is all he was saying. Theirs were fundamental mistakes in the way various development teams worked with each other when creating the current car starting around this time last season. Seems to be almost completely organizational process failures. Really strange for such a team.
Yup, a car designed under Paddy Lowe's direction... then Paddy Lowe left before the first race and it became known he'd designed a pile of crap! I wonder if Mercedes had second thoughts about hiring Lowe after seeing how well his latest effort performed...
I doubt it's a Pirelli problem. Most teams are on 60% now and not all are having trouble. I know McLaren has been using the Toyota tunnel for some time and that the commute itself can be tiresome. I can't recall how much longer they had planned to do so
