2018 Car Launch Thread

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mario
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Joined: 31 Oct 2009, 17:13

Re: 2018 Car Launch Thread

Post by mario »

Wallio wrote:
Rob Dylan wrote:And on the note of sponsors, it didn't appear that the Ferrari chassis had many sponsors on it either. Both of them and the Haas came across as slightly plain to me.


Fun fact about Ferrari, none of the "sponsors" on the Ferrari actually sponsor Ferrari (well aside from Shell). Phillip Morris buys all the ad space on the car, and resells it at a profit. So Ferrari actually have 200-250mil in sponsorship despite the bare car. Hence why all the logos are crammed on the sidepods. Rumors online are that the airbox has been sold, and a logo will appear for Melbourne. I hope not, I like the plain car.

For Mclaren and Haas its a bit more worrying. Honda may or may not have paid Macca an exit fee, and Gene Haas is Oprah rich, but still, they need more money somewhere......

It's the way in which Marlboro has been able to get around the ban on tobacco sponsorship - they technically do not directly sponsor the car, but are officially classed as a middleman that handles Ferrari's sponsorship whilst just coincidentally having features on the car that are reminiscent of their brand (in this case, the pentagonal symbol on the back of the engine cover fin that could just remind somebody of their chevron logo).

I do agree that McLaren's car does look a little empty - now, the team might be able to weather a bit of a short term hit to their finances (Mumtalakat and Ojjeh will probably be making up some of the difference), and Zak Brown has hinted at the prospect of a few more deals being in the offing. Still, I agree that it's not a positive sign for their long term health - however, they did announce a deal with Petrobras just a few days ago that will be bringing money into the team this year, so the situation isn't perhaps quite as painful as it might first appear.

yannicksamlad wrote:Still no real sponsors for McLaren, so at least they could have written the driver's name in big letters ( HRT style ).

And more generally - the cars are so long! They have a wider track, but don't want to use the space inside. They want thin, to keep the flow all the way back to the gap between rear wheels, so they keep getting longer .
Wouldnt it be better to have shorter, edgier cars, less stable and easier to overtake? And with some mechanicals between the rear wheels?

Part of that is probably down to the fact that the 2017 regulation change did loosen the regulations on the rear section of the floor and the diffuser geometry (allowing the diffuser to have a larger taper angle and start at an earlier point on the floor).

Now, it seems that a number of teams want to maximise the potential of the floor, but are finding it difficult to prevent airflow separation from occurring if they try and increase the rake angle too aggressively over the increased area of the floor. Quite a few teams are therefore running the car with smaller rake angles, which has the downside of not generating quite as large an expansion ratio and therefore less of a pressure differential - so, to maximise the total downforce the floor area produces, they've increased the size of the floor to compensate.

As you say, the teams also want to maximise the airflow around the sidepods and the top of the floor, and in particular wanting to minimise the intake area of the sidepods. With that in mind, the teams are moving more of the components towards the centreline of the cars and creating very long and thin sidepods with very large exposed upper floor areas.

It also has a secondary benefit, which is reducing the pitch sensitivity of the cars - something that has become more pronounced with the FIA having cracked down quite heavily on the passive interlinked suspension systems that a lot of cars had been running over the past five or so years, particularly Mercedes and Red Bull.

As you say, there are areas where shortening the wheelbase would be advantageous, particularly by reducing the polar moment of inertia (thus making the car more "nimble"). I would guess that part of the reason we're not seeing it is that the aero benefits of the longer floor outweighs the mechanical benefits.

That said, according to Auto Motor und Sport, whilst most cars in 2017 tended to move towards longer wheelbases - Force India and Mercedes making some of the biggest changes, though Ferrari and Red Bull also lengthened their cars noticeably - there were a few exceptions. According to AMuS, there were three teams - Williams, Toro Rosso and Sauber - who actually went in the opposite direction and reduced the wheelbase of their 2017 cars when compared to their 2016 cars (between about 40 - 70mm, with Toro Rosso making the largest reduction in wheelbase).
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dinizintheoven
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Re: 2018 Car Launch Thread

Post by dinizintheoven »

dinizintheoven wrote:I'm still somewhat annoyed, given what we all know the halo looks like (and did so before Giedo van der Garde pointed it out to us) that no team so far has announced a sponsorship deal with Havaianas.


Well played, Force India. Well played!

Image

Apparently McLaren have done the same...
James Allen, on his favourite F1 engine of all time:
"...the Life W12, I can't describe the noise to you, but imagine filling your dustbin with nuts and bolts, and then throwing it down the stairs, it was something akin to that!"
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