With the new floor and diffuser of the ground effect generation of cars offering very different design challenges compared to the past, the learning curve is still pretty steep.
Alongside the sidepods, these two areas offer the most design freedom and this is the primary reason as to why we’re seeing such variation up and down the grid.
However, as time moves on, it’s understandable that we’ll start to see some convergence, especially if teams stumble upon ‘shortcuts’ to make their current arrangements more potent before being able to develop more maturer solutions.
We’ve also seen instances where teams have bought new parts but have quickly abandoned them, either realising that they don’t offer the same level of real world performance that they possessed when tested in a simulated environment, or having found more potent solutions that don’t require them.
One such example of this would be Red Bull’s attempts to follow in Ferrari’s footsteps, as it applied a cutout in the edge of the floor just ahead of the rear tyre and added an extension that jutted out from beneath the floor at the British Grand Prix.
The solution was used once again at the Austrian Grand Prix. However, this was unceremoniously dropped at the French Grand Prix when the team made changes upstream that likely cancelled out the need for this cutout and extension.
Red Bull had been the only team to have combined two fences in the outermost portion of the floor in the opening part of the season, a situation that was only changed when Aston Martin unveiled its reworking of the overall Red Bull concept. However, at the French Grand Prix the team applied the more classic approach of a singular outer fence and three internal baffle fences.
Ferrari F1-75 floor development
Photo by: Giorgio Piola
Meanwhile, we’ve seen Ferrari yo-yo back and forth on its floor design, first opting to follow a similar route to McLaren, which opted for an L-Shaped floor edge wing design that caught everyone’s attention during pre-season testing [1].
It followed this up by making a switch to the ‘ice skate’ solution that Red Bull had implemented on the RB18’s floor and has since found its way onto other cars, including the Alpine A522.
This quite dramatically different interpretation of the edge wing is mounted to the underside of the floor and not only helps to define the passage of airflow in that region, it also serves to limit the floor’s travel vertically when we consider there’s…
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