effect of racing without front/rear wing?

[Roninho]

Hi,

hopefully some tech-member could help me out here.

I was wondering what happens when one takes the front and rear wing from a formula car? So let's say one is going to race a f3000-car without the front and rear wing, what happens to the driveability of the car?

- Will there be less grip in corners? (and therefor lower corneringspeed?)
- What will the effect be on the driving style (will it look like racing in the rain or more sideways racing or understeer, etc. ?)
- Will topspeed be higher? (I assume the acceleration will be better, but the topspeed might be lower on a normal track due to lower cornering speed)
- Will it be easier to pass cars?

thnx,
Roninho

[pirenzo]

Without wings, you're depending solely on the grip between tyre and road to hold the road in corners.
If you took a F3000 car as you suggest and remove its wings, you'll go a lot slower around a lap. You'll corner slower, you'll accelerate slower, you'll decelerate slower. The only thing that will be improved is ultimate speed, but on a circuit with short straights the amount of speed you lose relative to the other winged cars on track at the exit of corners will never be gained back because of this (especially as you'll need to brake much earlier at the end of it too).

So on any normal racing track, you'd have really nothing to gain and everything to loose.

Unless the wings were inefficient, i.e. lots of drag and not much downforce. In this case for a circuit with very long straights and not many heavy braking/accelerating zones you could get away with no wings. If you look at photos of Monza for instance in the late 60s you'll see some cars with wings and others without.

There really aren't any of these circuits about anymore however, and an F3000 car certainly has plenty of downforce to drag.

[Chucky]

You'll still have some downforce. A lot of it is generated by the underfloor and rear diffuser. The problem is, you'll have very little at low speed and braking does become an issue.

[Smokes]

The aerodynamic balnce will go off a well as the center of pressure will be shifted to the center of pressure of the diffuser, so if the car diffuser creates most of the low pressure behind the rear axel for example, the dowforce will occurrr behind the rear axel making the front end go very light at speed.

The lap will go down not just to lack of grip but up will have to brake much earlier and be much more cautious when applying the throttle as the car is much more likly to break traction when throttle is applied.

Could compensate for this by using softer spring roll bars to generate more mechanical grip but the trade off would an easier car to drive but less precise and responsive to steering input.

[Roninho]

thnx for the response! Only thing i do not understand is why would a car without wings accelerate slower in stead of faster?

Another question: Would racing without the wings result in more interesting racing (althoug slower?)? It would probably lead to more driver errors, right?

[Locost47]

Whether you would accelerate more slowly with no wings depends on how great a factor aerodynamic downforce is on maintaining traction of the car.

For cars with a low power to weight ratio where traction is less of an issue, the benefits of the downforce will more likely be outweighted by the drag penalty.

For cars with very high power to weight ratios, their acceleration is limited by their ability to transfer the engine torque to the ground. Downforce helps with this and, for many cars of this type, there is such an excess of power available that the drag penalty isn't important until very high speeds.

I don't know if you've seen the clips on TV or seen the statistics but an F1 car does 0-60mph in about 3 seconds but is at 100mph barely a second later. At first they can only use a small fraction of their available power but as the speed builds, so does the downforce (proportional to the *square* of speed) and hence their traction, which allows them to use much more of the engine's potential output and so accelerate faster.

For an F1 car though the drag is very high and once there is sufficient downforce that traction is not an issue, they then have to concentrate on using all of their power to overwhelm the increasing drag. (Power requirements increase proportional to the *cube* of speed, so to go twice as fast you need eight times the power, and so on. )

I wouldn't like to say how it would affect wheel-to-wheel racing but i think you're more likely to get close racing in classes where any aerodynamic devices that are allowed are relatively insensitive to disturbances - things like spoilers, splitters and venturi channels (shallow but long ones). Using wings and having flat floors leading to sharply-inclined diffusers can give you a lot of downforce but at a big drag penalty and with the inability to race close together without losing huge amounts of grip. Not good.

[Lukin]

Originally Posted by pirenzo

Without wings, you're depending solely on the grip between tyre and road to hold the road in corners.

Your only ever relying on the grip between the tyre and road to give traction in corners. Unless I'm doing something *hugely* wrong!

Sarcasm was required with that one sorry mate!

Without wings you reduce the vertical load on the tyre in any given situation. You know the theoretical 'traction circle', which shows the tyres capabilities in terms of total grip, it's a function of the vertical load. If you look at a 3D graph for a F1 car the diameter grow as speed does (common sense).

So to image the performance of a car without wings, just half the diameter of the traction circle. It won't brake as well, wont accelerate as well, will generate lower cornering loads and will generally be slower.

As everyone has said though, reducing the drag increases the amount of power that can be used to accelerate, so top speeds will probably higher, assuming the increase in braking and exit drive zones isn't so big that they meet in the middle of the straight.

[ss_collins]

also the wings are nice for the sponsors but don't forget the floor! are we losing that too?

[Redracer77]

I lost my nose at the 3rd round of F4 at Snetterton this year and was going to go home and miss the 2nd race but ended up putting a zetec nose on the front and taking off the rear wing. I was expecting to be really fast down the rivett but in reality that was not the case as I couldn't get through the corner as quick as the others. The handling on cold tyres was quite good but the hotter they got the worse the car went. For the first 6 laps I stayed with the leaders till in the end the slow corners were nearly undrivable with under steer. The biggest difference was the reduced ability to brake. I qualified with wings with a 1m 12.0 and in the race without wings I only managed a 1m 14.5.

It was an interesting experience though!!!