Formula 1′s Leading Team Has a Big Secret • Hacker News Board

Re: Formula 1′s Leading Team Has a Big Secret

#251

Post by justin66 » Sat, Oct 12, 2013, 11:20 PM UTC

beat wrote: post #214

justin66 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the sort of thing you could bring back today, even without the cost concerns. The "let's do everything we can do to make this fast" cars competing in that series killed a lot of drivers.

Yeah. I used to watch Can Am when I was a little kid. Drivers got killed a lot. Those cars were insane - 1000 horsepower sometimes.

Something like the Porsche 917k30 was capable of close to 1500hp. (I can't imagine you'd actually run on race day with that setup) My dad and his friends commented on watching that car many times, and specifically the amount of noise that it made.

That car was illustrative of a few of the problems with the "let's just allow the teams to build the fastest cars they possibly can!" notion. Teams didn't pay as much attention to safety in general as they should have in the seventies, but more to the point: the performance differential between some of those cars - racing on the same crowded track - was just too extreme. There is no safe way to run when that extreme difference exists.

Re: Formula 1′s Leading Team Has a Big Secret

#252

Post by SeanLuke » Mon, Oct 14, 2013, 12:25 PM UTC

curveship wrote: post #236

SeanLuke wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - the UCI limits bicycles so that it's a race between cyclists, not bank accounts. The UCI has been hypocritical, inconsistent, and mendacious in its claims here. At the dawn of racing the UCI banned the recumbent Velocar not because it was so much faster (it was), but because the powerful (ahem) upright bicycle lobby demanded it. The there was the Moulton, which started winning lots of races on its 17" tires in th…

So much distorted history. Recumbent bicycles are older than the modern "safety" bicycle. They lost in the marketplace on their own merits long before the UCI even existed. They are faster in some scenarios, they are slower in others. They cost more, they weigh more, they break more, they're less agile. The '30s were not the "dawn of racing." The peak of bicycle racing (and technological progress) was 1880-1917. That…

I want to reply to another odd piece of your claim. Why are you comparing recumbents to safety bicycles? We're talking about uprights. And so far as I know, recumbent velocipedes are later than upright velocipedes, recumbent pedaled bikes are later than upright pedaled bikes (notably the boneshaker); and recumbent chained bikes are later than upright chained bikes.

And surely you realize that all of your claims (cost, weight, breaking, agility) can be more easily ascribed to the fact that uprights are a huge mass market with enormous R&D funding, and recumbents are a tiny little hobbyist thing. Okay, maybe not agility, that's probably inherent.

Re: Formula 1′s Leading Team Has a Big Secret

#253

Post by CrankyPants » Wed, Oct 16, 2013, 9:42 PM UTC

invaliddata wrote: post #249

CrankyPants wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know it'll sound like I'm just coming at the same thing from the other side, but the purpose of the mass damper was not to allow for more compliant suspension, but to stabilize the aero platform. And the way the regs were written at the time, "any specific part ofthe car influencing its aerodynamic performance must be rigidly secured to the entirely sprung part of the car (rigidly secured means not having any degre…

That was precisely the misunderstanding. The purpose of the device was to improve mechanical grip by allowing the tires to have a more uniform pressure with the ground, removing some of the influence of impulses applied to the tire/suspension and the attendant lateral oscillations that result. With such a rigid interpretation of the regulations, one could say the anti roll bar, spring, or damper would also be in viol…

It improved both mechanical and aero grip at the same time, but the primary purpose, as per Toyota's senior chassis engineer, was to be able to stabilize the aero platform, specifically around pitch. Which makes sense: same reason active suspension came into being, even at the expensive of grip. Aero gains are more productive, on balance, than mechanical grip gains, at least in Formula 1.

It was moveable ballast, plain and simple. In its early guise, was totally unconnected from the suspension. So that's a pretty easy distinction to make vs. springs/dampers/anti-roll bars.