Technical analysis

Mercedes’ attention to detail won again, while Ferrari struggled with its aero package. Giorgio Piola captured every development on every car as it appeared

After two years under the same ruleset, Formula 1 enjoyed a slight shake-up of the regulations in a bid to undo some of the wrongs that the 2017 changes provided. In pursuit of pure performance, the 2017 formula created a byproduct of turgid racing, which F1’s in-house research team sought to redress this year. The jury is out on whether the changes worked; some drivers felt that following a car ahead was a little easier, while others didn’t notice any real difference. Regardless, what it did do was create new areas of development for the teams to exploit, captured by technical illustrator Giorgio Piola throughout the year.

Mercedes

Having won everything under the sun since the dawn of the turbo-hybrid era, Mercedes’ latest ruse was seemingly to lure everyone into a false sense of security in testing, then explode into action once points and prizes appeared on the table.

It wasn’t quite like that, of course. To give the definitive W10 more time in the windtunnel, Mercedes began its pre-season test programme with a beta car, aimed at making sure all of the onboard systems worked as expected and the internal components were reliable. It wasn’t until week two that Mercedes emerged with a full representation of its 2019 package.

Mercedes smoothed out the transition to the cape section on the nose, and also added to the complexity of the bargeboards, along with installing tighter sidepods to improve airflow to the rear of the car. With those changes Mercedes finally had a more stable car and, although Ferrari was tipped for great things in 2019, it produced a flat performance at the Melbourne season opener as Valtteri Bottas cruised to victory.

From there, Mercedes continued its marginal-gains strategy that had yielded the previous five titles in a row. Even as early as the Chinese GP in April, Mercedes was ringing the changes with a new front wing assembly. Admittedly, it required a slight ad hoc fix as the new endplate design (1) had an exposed wing element corner – which had to be covered as the FIA was concerned it could potentially cause punctures.

Having started the year with an outboard-loaded front wing, Mercedes gradually began to change its concept to push more airflow outwards, inspired by the radical inboard-loaded wings used by the likes of Ferrari and Alfa Romeo.

The team also focused its efforts, like others, in the bargeboard area. With fewer tools at the front of the car to nudge airflow outwards, there was more onus on the bargeboards to produce that effect.

Mercedes’ set-up at the start of the season was something of an evolution over the previous year, taking a simple arrangement of vertical strakes mounted to the sidepod (2) to pick up airflow from the bargeboards and the tail of the tyre’s wake. With the conditioning supplied by those strakes – or turning vanes – the aerodynamics control how airflow moves around the sidepods and set up how it’s diverted around the rear wheels. Over the year, Mercedes’ strakes took on a different life. The team first began with adding a few curved, horizontal additions

to its Hockenheim package in July to take a more threedimensional approach to conditioning and reshaping the airflow. This linked up with some short ‘boomerangs’ on the bargeboard section. While the modifications improved performance, it also seemed to create a narrower window of peak performance.

But Mercedes was buoyed enough by the potential of the developments in the bargeboard area to keep pursuing that path, and it increased the reliance of the turning vane package on the horizontal pieces. That update was introduced for October’s Japanese GP (3), as Mercedes’ development path had stalled a little, with few parts brought in directly after the summer break.

Mercedes also introduced a new rear wing endplate (4) to its Hockenheim package, featuring a step-shaped cut-out, along with tiny fins at the trailing edge. It appeared that the idea was to take the tip vortices created by the endplate away from the wing earlier on, giving the airflow passing under the suction side of the wing more area to expand.

The fins were a tiny tweak, but maximising that low-pressure area behind the car increases the effective volume of the diffuser, resulting in more rear-end downforce.

One innovation that looks set to carry on into 2020 is Mercedes’ additional duct (5), nestled into the rear suspension geometry to improve tyre temperature management. The rear suspension upright features a small opening, which takes air just above the brake duct and sends it out through a slot on the upper wishbone suspension mounting.

The additional duct had been part of the Mercedes W10 since the start of the year, but in recent weeks one unknown team – believed to be Ferrari – has even sought clarification from the FIA that it is a legal design, which is usually the precursor to a design being adopted elsewhere on the grid.

For all of its big aero upgrades, Mercedes proved details do matter – and having clinched its sixth consecutive title, that approach shouldn’t be expected to change any time soon.

Ferrari

Thanks to Ferrari’s testing form, big things were expected of the team in 2019. But while this year’s SF90 was especially strong in a straight line, it was hindered by a relative lack of grip.

The low-drag properties of the car were clear to see in testing, with a novel front wing design and a concerted effort to replace the effect of blown axles – banned under the 2019 regulations. By creating channels into the front wheel drum (1), Ferrari could bring airflow out through the wheels and use that to minimise the wheel turbulence – but there were other issues overall.

Having been largely outclassed by Mercedes in the opening three rounds, Bahrain excepted, it was clear that Ferrari was struggling for balance in its aero package, and continued to watch Mercedes surge to victory after victory in an irrepressible display of dominance. With only minor upgrades at the start of the year, Ferrari had to arrest the slide.

A new aerodynamics package for June’s French GP featured a reimagined front wing concept (2) – not necessarily to enact an immediate turnaround in performance, but instead as an indicator to evaluate a new development course.

The endplate featured a small fin on a newly flattened footplate, aiming to issue more guidance outwards along the top at the expense of squashing the vortex produced underneath. The endplate also had a small rectangular cut-out, a common addition (or rather, subtraction) across the grid. That gives a little more space for the airflow in the top corner of the wing to spill outwards and combine with any vorticity produced.

It seemed to do the job and, while the team didn’t suddenly begin to factor into the hunt for race wins immediately, it set the tone for the remainder of the season. The team then arrived jumping on the boomerang ‘trend’ (3) for August’s Hungarian GP. These assisted the bargeboards with ‘downwashing’ the airflow emerging from the front of the car.

Ferrari’s twin boomerang looked to give the team more options for how it moderates the airflow from the front, where the top boomerang features a partial split at the centre to allow some of the air to bleed off. Again, the design was kept for the remainder of the season, but didn’t offer a sudden upturn in the overall performance of the SF90.

In low-drag spec, coupled with the strength of the Ferrari power unit, the team was always expected to be a tantalising prospect at Spa and Monza. But it was in Singapore in

September when Ferrari enjoyed something of a metamorphosis, introducing a plethora of new upgrades.

This included a new nosecone design (4), which featured a brand new pair of nostrils. Those nostrils fed airflow into a ‘cape’, a flowing bodywork appendage added to the nose to build up more front-end downforce and subsequently feed the bargeboards with some stronger flow structures.

Crucially, the nostrils worked to fix the balance at the front end, and the ease at which both drivers seemed to ride the kerbs suggested a well-balanced kinematic set-up. Ferrari had also got a floor design (5), which it had trialled in numerous practice sessions with very little reward, to finally click with the car.

This featured a series of fins along the edge of the floor, encouraging airflow to move through the slots at this point – pushing air outwards to keep the flow to the diffuser protected.

Although Ferrari left the year arguably in better shape than it had begun, it must use the lessons of 2019 if it is to have a more concerted shot at the title. Many of those will be of a technical nature, but there were also points left on the table through more general deficiencies. Frequent mistakes on-track and on the pitwall will need to be stamped out if Ferrari is to again become a title-winning operation.

Red Bull

Red Bull began its season modestly in terms of speed, but gathered pace with its upgrades over the season.

As early as Australia’s season opener, Red Bull threw a raft of new parts at its RB15 – although one had figured briefly in pre-season testing at Barcelona. This was an updated bargeboard assembly (1), where one of the sidepod turning vanes was reprofiled to draw a little more control over the wake shed by the front wheels.

The piece furthest forward was almost pentagonal, featuring a point at the top that induces a tip vortex, while further changes made use of the boomerang wing. The second vane was extended downwards to direct the tip vortex from the bottom element around the sidepods, as well as provide further chances to take the tyre wake from the front and stitch it together into something less detrimental to the aerodynamic balance.

While Red Bull converted that into a podium early on, it became clear that the car was still lacking. Improvements by Honda had the engine side covered, but the team made a number of changes to the front end to find further performance. Pioneering a novel take on the front wing restrictions, where a maximum of five elements are permitted at a single cross-section, Red Bull trimmed back the top flap’s inboard section (2) to allow for a split in the middle element. This was something later copied by other teams to manage the tightness of the inboard vortex.

One of Red Bull’s more novel innovations was its ‘multi-link’ upper wishbone, a split top wishbone design at the front, where the leading suspension arm has the trailing arm tucked underneath it. The idea is to change cambers and rideheight with steering angle. As steering lock is applied, the car rolls outward and loads up the outside tyre, which has more contact patch to improve the grip at the front end, where the inside tyre generally finds a smaller area of contact with the road.

In a season when Red Bull won as many races as Ferrari, the ‘transition’ year with Honda proved encouraging. Next year will be the true test of how far the Red Bull-honda package has come.

…and the rest

After a miserable 2018, Mclaren began 2019 in earnest and looked vastly improved in the early rounds. The team’s upgrade package for May’s Spanish GP meant it was one of the first to transition to the anhedral front wing (1) pioneered by Ferrari and Alfa Romeo, which helped unlock more performance from the MCL34. A weak point was the car’s performance in the lower-speed corners, though that was largely straightened out over the course of the year.

Renault threw a multitude of upgrades at its RS19 package, but couldn’t usurp Mclaren in the pecking order. The French outfit’s most-anticipated French GP package failed to hit the marks, having brought a new bargeboard configuration and nose cape (2) to the car. A change in front wing, taking the Red Bull-pioneered splits in the third element (and adding to that further with another slot in the second mainplane element) yielded some improved form in the final few rounds.

Having enjoyed its joint-best season to date, Toro Rosso hardly rewrote the design book with its STR14 but ensured it was in the mix every weekend with a reliable car and an improved Honda package in the back. One of the team’s most interesting design solutions was its dedication to its inboardloaded front wing (3), even at Monza, where it trimmed the drag back but retained a portion of the wing at the inboard-most quarter where it filled more of the bounding box – seeking to retain some downforce for the Lesmo corners and chicanes.

After years of running its idiosyncratic nostril designs during its Force India days, Racing Point made the bold choice to get rid of them for its mid-season upgrade package. With this, the engineers aimed to dial in a little more stability into the front end, which was particularly difficult for the drivers on the RP19.

The team had previously experimented with smaller nostrils in the races succeeding June’s Canadian GP, but decided the overall package benefited from a more conventional nose (4).

Towards the end of the season, Alfa Romeo used practice in Brazil to carry out 2020 front wing experiments, but the new design (5) was carried forward into the race. It deposed the unusual conjoined-element front wing, which was an effort to squeeze more downforce. A longer-chord wing profile generally produces more downforce, but at the risk of greater flow separation – hence why teams tend to break the front wing into smaller parts. The final element on Alfa’s new front wing was given a healthy dose of camber to increase downforce output.

Haas had a number of well-documented aero issues, taking a wrong turn developmentally early on in the season and leaving Romain Grosjean to lead a movement to return to the Melbourne-specification of car midway through the year.

In July, Haas debuted a new rear wing endplate (6), with a novel approach to the strakes at the rear, but dropped them by November’s US GP following Grosjean’s hefty shunt as the newer spec struggled with higher-speed corners. The front wing is believed to have caused a number of problems for the team, and it has tested with a Ferrari-style design to combat that for 2020.

Having begun 2019 slowly, Williams gradually began to pursue developments. By July’s British GP, it had brought a few new bargeboard accoutrements (7) to add a little more performance to the aerodynamics package. The principal turning vanes had been reprofiled to produce a stronger transition of airflow around the sidepods, while the wing mirrors were also redesigned. The team added a boomerang to the main bargeboard area for the German GP in an attempt to close the hefty gap to the midfield runners.