Tombazis: FIA Alone on F1 Outwash Limits

Ground effect F1s are leaving the scene to make way for agile ones. Now that this regulation is retiring, the riders have begun to talk about how much they have suffered from back pain due to the strong jolts of porpoising or the effect of bouncing, the bounce caused by the skate when it scrapes on the asphalt.

Nikolas Tombazis, on the other hand, took the topic of the cars introduced in 2022 from another angle, highlighting the weakness of the FIA, as a legislator, in changing the rules during racing if there are no reasons dictated by safety.

The technicians of the International Federation would have intervened before the end of the regulatory cycle to limit the cars from having to compete in “dirty air”, losing a lot of aerodynamic load by being in the slipstream of another car.

If the technical manager of the FIA ​​single-seater area can be satisfied with the work carried out in terms of Budget Cap which has brought all the teams to unquestionable financial sustainability, the Greek engineer cannot be equally happy with the results achieved at an aerodynamic level.
“The regulations that started in 2022 had a goal of allowing the cars to race more closely. And the positive results were seen until 2023, then the tune changed because there were, not exactly loopholes, but there were definitely some areas of the regulations that were a little too open to interpretation. And that allowed the teams to adopt solutions that created a negative side effect.”

Ferrari SF-25: here is the out wash effect of the front wing

Photo by: Franco Nugnes

The teams understood that it was possible to increase the performance of the machines by increasing the out wash effect of the front wing, cleaning the wake of the front wheel which reduced the losses that could dirty the flow destined for the Venturi channels, but generating turbulence that ended up in those following behind.
“The main area of ​​research was the shape of the front wing side bulkhead. Originally the endplate was designed to be a device with a strong in-wash effect. Gradually, however, developments that transformed the design of how the wing profiles joined the side bulkhead led to a change in concept because the standards were not strict enough and we saw an increasingly strong out-wash effect appearing.”

It’s interesting to understand what the change was during construction…
“The 2021 single-seaters, when they were ten meters behind another car, lost 50% of the front load. With the rules introduced in 2022 we managed to limit the loss to around 20%, obtaining a positive result, but after 2023 there was a worsening which also brought us to 35% less downforce”.

McLaren MCL39, detail of the front basket

Photo by: Roberto Chinchero

The result was that overtaking gradually became more and more difficult even with the DRS open. Obviously the teams’ aerodynamicists didn’t just work on the side bulkheads…
“The other area where the teams developed a lot was the front corners and in particular the internal components of the front wheel. And I would say the trailing edges of the floor were also in that category. Those were the main areas of slipstream deterioration compared to the intent of the regulations.”

Red Bull RB21: The trailing edge of the bottom pavement with the vortex generators

It is therefore legitimate to ask why the FIA ​​has not intervened by proposing changes to the technical regulations for 2024 or 2025. And Tombazis offers an interesting explanation which is not so much technical as political…
“These aerodynamic aspects that I mentioned were not a recent surprise. It was the same two years ago. Why don’t we have the regulations? Well, we tried, but we didn’t have enough support from the teams.”

“Governance is needed to change the technical rules during a regulatory cycle and therefore the support of the majority of the teams was needed to achieve certain changes. But only we tried to do something.”

Tombazis believes that dirty air will be a less significant element with the single-seaters arriving in 2026: “As for slipstream management, obviously we believe it will improve, but we’ll talk about it in two years’ time and I hope I can tell you that we’ll all be smiling, because things will have gone better.”

Cadillac: the wing of the model for the gallery offers out wash effect solutions

We hope so, but judging by an image that shows a model of the front wing that went into the Cadillac wind tunnel it won’t be like this: the photograph, in fact, showed us that flow diverters have been tested on the pavement outside the side bulkhead which have the function of seeking the out wash effect. And here we go again before we even begin…

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– The Motorsport.com team