**FWMP, FWTV, FWEP, flaps, FWUF and the endplate foot** **by Eren İleri** **Originally [[https://publishing.wellgedacht.com/items/a-dying-monster|published]] in print, 2022, Well Gedacht Publishing** //In auto racing, engineers and designers are usually limited by rules and regulations given by a governing body and they have to find ways to make their cars faster working inside and around these regulations, creating more efficient designs while exploiting the set of rules. In international motor racing, these regulations are set by the World Motor Sport Council (WMSC), the highest body of the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA). Like other competitions, in Formula 1 the technical regulations dictate how a car can be designed, and the final design of the cars has to fulfill this set of rules in order to be allowed to race. These strict rules determine, among many other things, the aerodynamic properties of the race cars. Aerodynamics is the study of the motion of air, particularly its interaction with a solid object.// In 2009 there was a radical change in the aerodynamics regulations by the FIA. Prior to the 2009 season, the cars had complex aerodynamic devices all over them; various devices were attached to the car, such as flip-ups, wings, vents, boards, flaps and all manner of other aerodynamic contraptions.[^1] In 2009 most of those parts were banned and the regulations dictated a simpler looking car without these extreme aerodynamic solutions. Because of these changes, one part became much more important in car development after 2009: the front wing. //The front wing on an F1 car, which consists of airfoils placed at the front of the vehicle, is one of the most complex aerodynamic devices in its design. It sits below the car’s nose. It is essentially a wing, which works like an upside down airplane wing: it creates downforce, a downwards thrust generated by its aerodynamic characteristics. The purpose of downforce is to allow a car to travel faster through a corner by increasing the vertical force on the tires, thus creating greater grip. On Formula 1 cars, downforce is created by using airfoils, such as the front and rear wings, as well as other aerodynamic devices, for example bargeboards, Gurney flaps, winglets, etc. The downforce created by an aerodynamic device is expressed as a function of its lift coefficient:// **D is downforce in Newtons. W is wingspan in meters. H is the thickness of the section in meters. F is lift coefficient. ρ is air density in kg/m³. v is velocity in m/s.** The reason for the regulation changes in 2009 was to make racing more exciting for the television viewer. Since the modern era of live TV broadcasting in Formula 1, and especially after the mid-2000s, it is more or less widely understood that the sport—or F1’s product—is in some sort of crisis. The rule makers think that the races are boring to watch, and they put emphasis on “improving the show”.[^2] Manufacturers are spending excessive amounts of money to develop fast cars. Designers and engineers are working to manufacture the fastest and the most reliable engine, as well as the most efficient design to produce maximum downforce. To be fast, it is crucial for an F1 car that its aerodynamics work as intended. But, on the race track, the properties teams engineered to make their individual race car faster do not necessarily create circumstances for close and exciting racing. The sport’s organizers and regulators want the cars to be able to easily follow closely and pass each other, and, therefore, be competitive. They are in a constant conflict with technological developments and make rule changes in accordance with their sporting or—more importantly—financial agenda. //With the 2009 change, a car’s aerodynamic downforce was reduced, and artificial elements, such as movable front wing parts controlled by the driver, were introduced. Max Mosley, then the president of the FIA, was one of the leading proponents of these changes, which advanced his vision of “more overtaking”.[^3] Later in 2009, Mosley did not run for a fifth term as FIA president, because of the fallout from a scandal he was involved in earlier that year. The British newspaper The News of the World released video footage of Mosley engaged in acts with five consenting women in a scenario that the paper alleged involved Nazi role-playing, an allegation that, though dismissed in court as having “no genuine basis”, allegedly “ruined” Mosley’s reputation.[^4] In 2011, The News of the World announced its closure following scandals in which “employees of the newspaper were accused of engaging in phone-hacking, police bribery, and exercising improper influence in the pursuit of stories”.[^5]// From McLaren F1 Team’s “Aero upgrades, the F1 development story”: “the ‘balloon effect’ states that, by squeezing a balloon in one place, you don’t reduce its volume, you merely increase that inflation elsewhere. It’s the same with Formula 1 aerodynamics. When 2009’s technical regulations banned many of the flicks, flaps and wings that had proliferated, they didn’t curtail aero development, they just intensified the effort to maximize those few remaining areas left open to exploitation.”[^6] The balloon effect is a term used usually related to the so-called “War on Drugs”. When you push down drug production in one region, the activity will simply move somewhere else. In a similar manner, when FIA banned complex aerodynamic devices on the cars, the engineers started to develop new methods, and it was the front wing which gave them the opportunity to add aerodynamic performance. //The front wing on 2009’s Formula 1 cars were lower than those of the previous year, at the lowest point reaching 75mm instead of 150mm. The wing was also wider than before; it spanned the whole width of the car. The central section of the front wing was an FIA restricted area. It has a flat design mandated by the governing body. The rest of the front wing was where designers could work relatively unrestricted until the subsequent—moderate—regulation change in 2019. Compared to contemporary designs, 2009 front wings were relatively simple. As mentioned, the central FIA-mandated part had to be kept as a horizontal piece, which actually produced lift instead of creating downforce, in order to reduce aero sensitivity.[^7] The other parts, left and right of the central section are more interesting. On both sides they consist of (but are not limited to) a main plane (FWMP), a turning vane (FWTV), an endplate (FWEP), a flap (or flaps), a cascade/upper (FWUF), and an endplate foot. This relatively restriction-free area of the front wing saw extreme development between 2009 and the major regulation change before the 2022 Formula 1 season. McLaren’s 2009 car, MP4-29, was the first car to have a four-element front wing design as a result of an aggressive design philosophy aimed at maximizing downforce.// Like most of the car, the front wing is made of carbon fiber reinforced polymer. It is an extremely strong, but also extremely light material. //From ING Bank’s promotional video, “ING F1, Carbon Fiber explained”: "Carbon fiber is a man-made fiber, comes on a roll, a very soft form of material. I suppose in dressmaking terms, it's probably like working with leather. We work in a clean-room environment. The whole room is pressurized. When we're making components, it's vital that we don't transfer oils and grease from your skin into the component, which weakens the strength of the carbon fiber. Depending on the component and what sort of strength we want, we use a different way. It is just fabric, but you can manipulate it any way we want. This one is an ultra, ultra lightweight, basically, material we use on a bodywork. It's so thin you can actually see through it. Chassis itself is made out of a very, very stiff form of carbon [fiber]. To give it strength to make it hard, it goes into an oven to be cooked."[^8]// ING Bank was the main sponsor of Renault F1 team between 2007 and 2009. It terminated its contract with the team after Renault F1 was involved in a race-fixing scandal, when their driver Nelson Piquet Jr. was ordered to crash deliberately to create a situation favoring their other driver, Fernando Alonso, eventually helping Alonso to win the 2009 Formula 1 SingTel Singapore Grand Prix. The event, dubbed “Crashgate”, was labeled by many as one of the worst competition-fixing incidents in the history of sporting manipulation and unethical behavior in sports. This happened a year after ING Bank received a €10 billion bailout from the Dutch government in the face of the fallout from the 2008 global financial crisis.[^9] Consequent to the race-fixing event, ING Renault F1 Team's managing director Flavio Briatore was banned from Formula One events and FIA-sanctioned events indefinitely, and Renault F1 Team received a suspended disqualification from the sport.[^10] During Renault S.A.'s launch of electric vehicles at the Frankfurt Motor Show, Renault CEO Carlos Ghosn's presentation was interrupted by reporters with questions about "Crashgate", causing fears of reputational damage inside the car company.[^11] Ghosn famously escaped from Japan to Lebanon later in 2019 inside a Yamaha double bass case after he was charged with financial wrongdoing and misappropriation of funds.[^12] In 2014, it was rumored by media outlets that ex-Renault F1 chef Briatore might make a comeback to Formula 1 as the head of a new popularity working group with the task of "improving the show" in the sport.[^13] In the summer of 2020, Briatore's Billionaire nightclub in Sardinia was accused of negligence in carrying out safety procedures, after an outbreak in which fifty-eight employees tested positive for Covid-19.[^14] Around the same time, the former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi and Briatore were seen together in Sardinia, in an Instagram post by Briatore, shortly before Berlusconi tested positive for Covid-19.[^15] //There was general displeasure around the F1 paddock about the 2009 regulation changes. Alonso, then driving for Renault team, said this about the driver-controlled front wing element: “I never touch it! So far, nine races, I never use it. It's not useful at all. KERS, the aerodynamics, they are two new regulations that didn't work this year."[^16]// The driver-controlled front wing part was not successful and was banned in 2011, after another driver-controlled movable rear wing device was introduced. But the front wing was becoming an even more important area of aerodynamics development, growing increasingly complex in subsequent years. After the regulation changes in 2009, the front wing had 3 or 4 elements, basic planes, and flaps; it looked quite simple. Between 2009 and 2018, with the aim of gaining lap time advantage, the teams started to introduce much more extreme designs. They started to update front wings almost every race, and, especially after 2012, the front wings started to look extremely complex, having 7-8 elements, and various vanes and cascades to direct the airflow throughout the car to make other aerodynamic devices at the rear work more efficiently.[^17] //Starting with the 2014 season, UK-based Mercedes AMG Petronas F1 Team became dominant, having the fastest car under the new engine regulations. This was, in part, due to its superior “power unit”, the current Formula 1 powertrain which consists of an internal combustion engine and an electrical engine with its batteries and energy recovery systems. After Mercedes AMG Petronas F1’s dominant performance in the 2014 season, and in the subsequent years, spectators, TV viewers, the media, and competitors inside the sport started to become more vocal about how boring some races were, since it was almost possible to know the winner before the race had started. For the drivers it became increasingly difficult to follow and pass each other because of the sensitive aerodynamics of the front wing. When two cars are aligned in a close group, the car behind is exposed to turbulent air coming from the car in front. The “dirty” air makes the aerodynamics of the front wing of the following car work less efficiently, and, therefore, reduces the car’s speed around corners. Ironically, this phenomenon was almost precisely the problem FIA wanted to eliminate by changing the regulations in 2009. Their rule changes manifested as a balloon effect, not resolving the core issue caused by the pre-2009 aerodynamics, merely migrating, or concentrating, it in a particular area.// In 2011, Matthew James, a teenager who was born without a left hand, wrote a letter to the then-head of the Formula 1 team Mercedes GP Petronas, Ross Brawn, asking for help to purchase an expensive bionic hand, an i-Limb Pulse prosthesis device. The i-Limb Hand is an advanced device invented by a former NHS employee, David Gow, and it is currently manufactured by Össur, an Icelandic prosthetics and orthopedics equipment company which was named as a "technology pioneer" by the World Economic Forum in 2006.[^18] The device allows its user to control the prosthetic hand through myoelectric muscle signals from the user's body. In his letter, James suggested that, if Mercedes GP Petronas F1 Team is willing to help him to purchase the prosthetic arm he wished for, the team could place their logos onto it, as they would do on a racing car.[^19] The team agreed, and James received his individually-tailored bionic hand, with a small Mercedes logo on the wrist. Unlike Formula 1 racing cars and many prosthetic legs though, an i-Limb Hand is not made out of carbon fiber, because the material's electrical conductivity properties can interfere with myoelectric prostheses. //Sauber Group, which is the company behind Alfa Romeo F1 Team Orlen, co-developed a racing wheelchair called OT FOXX for the Swiss athletes competing at the 2021 Paralympic Games in Tokyo.[^20] Each wheelchair is custom-designed for the athlete with the help of a computer simulation to determine the optimal sitting position. The wheelchair's lightweight chassis is fully made of carbon fiber.// **[^1]: Kim, C. (2017, February 19). 5 Technical Innovations in F1 from the Past Decade. Red Bull. https://web.archive.org/web/20220213122016/https://www.redbull.com/us-en/5-technical-f1-innovations [^2]: Benson, A. (2015, May 15). Refuelling to return from 2017. BBC Sport. https://web.archive.org/web/20220213173857/https://www.bbc.com/sport/formula1/32751118 [^3]: Tremayne, D. (2005, September 3). Mosley driven to encourage more overtaking. The Independent. https://web.archive.org/web/20220318104348/https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/motor-racing/mosley-driven-to-encourage-more-overtaking-309878.html [^4]: Max Mosley is the youngest son of Oswald Mosley, a British fascist politician and the former leader of the British Union of Fascists. Holmwood, L., & Fitzsimmons, C. (2017, May 31). Max Mosley wins £60,000 in privacy case. The Guardian. https://web.archive.org/web/20220219053627/https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2008/jul/24/mosley.privacy [^5]: Phone hacking: Full list of charges. (2012, July 24). The Guardian. https://web.archive.org/web/20210612230734/https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/jul/24/phone-hacking-charges [^6]: Aero upgrades: The F1 development story. (2016, May 11). McLaren Racing. https://web.archive.org/web/20220213123635/https://www.mclaren.com/racing/car/aero-upgrades-the-f1-development-story-1258774/ [^7]: Beamer, J. (2009, March 16). F1 2009 technology: Front wing. RaceFans. https://web.archive.org/web/20220213123908/https://www.racefans.net/2009/03/16/f1-2009-technology-front-wing/ [^8]: ING F1: Carbon fibre explained. (n.d.). Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/ING-F1-Carbon-Fibre-explained [^09]: Jolly, D. (2008, October 19). ING receives €10 billion from Dutch government. The New York Times. https://web.archive.org/web/20220213174754/https://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/19/business/worldbusiness/19iht-ing.4.17084433.html [^10]: Renault handed suspended F1 ban. (2009, September 21). BBC. https://web.archive.org/web/20220318140050/http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/motorsport/formula_one/8266090.stm [^11]: Sage, A. (2010, April 2). Renault fearful of dent to global brand. The Times. https://web.archive.org/web/20220213181604/https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/renault-fearful-of-dent-to-global-brand-g6tlrwqwdnd [^12]: Gilbert, B. (2020, January 14). After former Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn fled Japan by hiding inside a musical instrument case, Yamaha is warning people to not do that. Business Insider. https://web.archive.org/web/20220206171411/https://www.businessinsider.com/carlos-ghosn-escape-yamaha-double-bass-warns-people-japan-2020-1?r=US&IR=T [^13]: Smith, L. (2014, July 27). Briatore set to work on ‘improving the show’ in F1. NBC Sports. https://web.archive.org/web/20220213174325/https://motorsports.nbcsports.com/2014/07/27/briatore-set-to-work-on-improving-the-show-in-f1/ [^14]: Giuffrida, A. (2021, June 25). Sardinia’s Billionaire nightclub accused of negligence over Covid outbreak. The Guardian. https://web.archive.org/web/20210629131213/https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/24/sardinias-billionaire-nightclub-accused-of-negligence-over-covid-outbreak [^15]: ORF.at. (2020, September 2). Nach Flavio Briatore: Auch Berlusconi CoV-positiv. news.ORF.at. https://web.archive.org/web/20200903002851/https://orf.at/stories/3179831/ [^16]: Motor1.com Team. (2009, July 25). Alonso says adjustable front wing useless. Motor1.Com. https://web.archive.org/web/20220213125432/https://www.motor1.com/news/16663/alonso-says-adjustable-front-wing-useless/ [^17]: In 2019, another regulation change introduced simpler front wing designs, restricting some of the aerodynamic devices on the front wing and creating a relatively less sophisticated front wing. This change in regulations caused slightly slower lap times for the cars, but the teams managed to gain back the loss in lap time over the next two years with aerodynamics developments in other areas. According to the drivers, simpler front wing designs did not contribute to less aerodynamic dependency on the front wing, and, consequently, did not help achieve closer racing. See: https://web.archive.org/web/20201107233219/https://www.racefans.net/2019/07/22/hamilton-2019-front-wing-change-made-no-difference-to-turbulence/ Originally planned for the 2021 season, but postponed because of the coronavirus pandemic, in 2022 technical regulations changed significantly, with the aim of eliminating the "dirty air" caused by the car in front when two cars are following each other closely, therefore, allowing for closer and more exciting racing, where it is harder for the spectators to know which driver and car combination is going to win. The design philosophy under the new technical regulations emphasize aerodynamic devices under the car instead of the wings on the car. See: https://web.archive.org/web/20220209013419/https://www.formula1.com/en/latest/article.10-things-you-need-to-know-about-the-all-new-2022-f1-car.4OLg8DrXyzHzdoGrbqp6ye.html [^18]: The new edge of technology. (2006, January 26). World Economic Forum. https://web.archive.org/web/20120503101927/https://www.weforum.org/sessions/summary/new-edge-technology [^19]: Golijan, R. (2011, August 15). Teen writes letter, gets free bionic hand. TODAY.Com. https://web.archive.org/web/20220213170500/https://www.today.com/money/teen-writes-letter-gets-free-bionic-hand-121440 [^20]: Sauber Group and Orthotec unveil the first fully Swiss racing wheelchair. (2021, June 22). Sauber Group. https://web.archive.org/web/20220213171821/https://www.sauber-group.com/engineering/news/sauber-group-and-orthotec-unveil-the-first-fully-swiss-racing-wheelchair/**