- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Hi everyone! Thank you all for participating! Another media source has posted an article with some more information on this topic. The actual relevant bit starts about halfway through.
Interested to see what they end up looking like. But more important will they work?
Hopefully something like this ends up working out. It will be great to see more racing in fully wet conditions.
Hopefully the weather is conducive for a full functionality test and not just an installation and aero shakedown. Right now it’s looking like next week will be a damp one there but we’ll see. Maybe they can get Ecclestone out there with a hose.
The article claims that the teams have worked on this implementation, so I expect that the cars won’t be hampered too much aerodynamically from the new parts. It also says that F1 worked on it as well, so I expect that it will be used for its intended purpose and not just as another aero component. Realistically, if this ultimately gets developed as a non-spec part then expect teams to have it do the minimum permitted amount of deflection and focus more on how they can benefit from manipulating aero around the tire.
What gives me pause, however, is that in articles about this proposed change from both last year and this year there is a reiterated notion that conditions arising that would necessitate the installation of the new components would be paired with a red flag. Hopefully they’ll change their tune on that and have it be something to be done on the fly.
Actually it would be interesting if it was something that was directly related to the wet weather tyres.
So they come already attached to the wheels as a spec part and not permanently attached to the car.
I would argue that the set up of the car is affected anyway when putting on wets due to the increase of ride height and such. And with the corner speeds being slower it likely wouldn’t cause that much of an issue.
I’d imagine having the guards would have some performance penalty and so that might get factored in when teams are deciding whether to switch between full wets and inters - we might see teams switching to inters sooner.
From an entertaining and strategy perspective this might be really interesting.
I imagine that it will be in the sporting regs that the two must be used at the same time and may not be used separately, although having the whole assembly as one piece may be tricky (I would love to see that done though). We’ll know next week what the FIA and Mercedes have in mind though.