1990s AERO ADVANCEMENTS! The Story of Formula One's Raised Nosecones

[Music] longtime viewers of this channel will be aware of how sometimes what can happen is I could be doing a video on one particular topic make a throwaway comment about something else and then that something else will end up having its own dedicated video a bit later on because everything seems to intertwine in such a significant way at least sometimes it's a bit like those old six degrees of Eric Clapton things you might have seen in a guitar magazine if you read them or read them where it seems that if you can go from one person six jumps and then you end up at Eric Clapton because that gu is everywhere I guess this series version of that is well Roberto Moreno I know I know I know I know you're all excited because it's nearly 100K but it's not going to be a case of it's clicked over to 100K here's the video it will probably take a bit of time to do it it will be done just gonna have to be a bit patient with it I'll probably do it once the play button arrives but anyway with that piece of housekeeping out the way I mentioned in the TL video last time out how the team was the first to have one of these raised nose cones that became the default design of cars for about 10 years or so and it's actually interesting because the cars of the '90s are some of my favorite ever built looking back on them now that is they were Advanced enough to have a decent amount of grip but not too advanced like they are now for me they're that perfect middle ground and it wasn't an aesthetic choice either the teams weren't building them in the hope that a 33-year-old would look back on them and go oh yeah those cars were cool they actually did it because of science at the tail end of the 1980s into the first years of the 1990s the teams were running these sorts of nose counts I remember on Grand Prix manager you could select between these sorts of noses and then the raised style noses one was cheaper one was more expensive although there were other reasons for having these low nose cones because of the ban on ground effect Formula 1 teams were running their cars insanely low to the ground kicking up all manner of Sparks as they scraped along and the teams had been putting skid blocks on the cars to help protect the floors by running the cars low to the ground they were able to accelerate the air underneath towards the diffuser and get that much needed sucking more suck from the diffuser means less rear wing needed less rear wing means less drag less drag means more straight line speed so when tyell turned up to the 1990 samarina Grand Prix with an anedra front Wing it's very tricky to say that an anhedral front Wing the other team started looking at it and going what's this then I'll turn it into a German Shepherd then ow designed by Harvey pel this car was designed to try and take advantage of the laws of physics and aerodynamics to effectively get as much air as possible under the car and get that diffuser to do its magic if we look at a car from a few years prior to this like this mp44 the air is going to hit the front Wing first first get Disturbed then go under the car with the tial that hole in the middle means at least in theory the air is going to be less Disturbed and then be accelerated under the car thanks to the Boni principle what happens under this principle is that when there is an increase in the speed of a fluid in this case air there is a decrease in the pressure that low pressure pocket around the diffuser allows the car to be held to the ground the same principle is used today on the modern cars with the ventury tunnels as the tur had less dirty ebing fired under the car the theory was that everything underneath it would be a lot more effective it's probably why around the peak of ground effect in sort of 81 82 or so some cars weren't running front wings at all because of the need to get as much air through as possible McLaren and arrows both tried it at least those are two teams that I can name off the top of my head that have done it because I'm not going to go through pictures of every single car that did it I don't want to keep you all day but as we learned in the video on Ty's downfall they had the ideas but not the money to develop the other team saw an opportunity to copy and improve on it and the first of those teams was Benetton at the samarina Grand Prix of 1991 Benetton turned up with the allnew b191 that like the TL had got one of these raised portions to the nose that had a hole in the middle to get air going underneath the center line of the car it was the brainchild of Rory burn and John Barnard now we need to do a throwback to the previous video The Story Goes that Barnard working at Ferrari's Guilford Technical office the Ferrari GTO LOL had been working on the 1989 car and said to pwe who was his man on the ground in Italy that he needed some testing done in the Wind Tunnel somebody at Marinello whether that was Harvey or somebody else said it couldn't be done and every time Barnard needed something through the wind tunnel for whatever reason he wasn't allowed to do it so he got on a plane went to Marinello and found Pierro Ferrari and Harvey pwe testing a model that looked like what would become the T 019 so this b191 could have been John Barnard saying all right hold my beer watch this but it wasn't exactly a Lotus 7 9 style Revolution it's not like everybody in 1991 had turned up with one of these noses Benetton was the first to go with what we think of the standard front assembly it was still an experimental phase because Benetton went with a raised nose and a flat front Wing Jordan went low nose and anhedral front wing and footwork went with something called the monopost nose which had the nose go to a point almost like an arrow head and then they fixed that to a flat front wing with a single column it's also a good point to consider here that in the period 1991 to9 93 teams were starting to get on board with things like active suspension traction control and other gizmos that might have been an alternative to the raising of the nose which might have been a reason for not going that route and sticking to what worked with them already until it was clear that this new design philosophy worked or not as may be the case it wouldn't be until about 1995 or so that most of the teams had flicked over to this raised noose design But Not only was it good for Arrow it was also good for the driver's seating position the mp44 was one of the first Formula 1 cars to use this clined seating position having the driver reclined was better for sensor of gravity purposes and as Formula 1 cars were starting to get more advanced through the '90s they came the point where the team started having the drivers reclined in their seats with the feet up something David kard often described as like slouching in a bathtub with your feet up by the Taps these nose designs better facilitated that seating position by 1996 all but one of the teams had migrated over to the high nose design and the noses themselves have become a little bit more bulbous on the monoco because that's where they were sticking the driver's feet some of this switch might have been because of the safety changes throughout 1994 higher ride heights meaning a bigger gap between the car and the track plus the introduction of the plank so having a higher nose meant more air going under the car to get back what they lost if that makes any sense by the start of 1996 only Ferrari was still using this conventional nose design to use the terms used in Grand Prix manager what a game you can get p position with a 40 by using the Do or Die driver instruction and be 4 seconds faster than Damon Hill's WI Willams broken game but I had fun with it at the end of 1995 it was almost a split between who was and wasn't using it the center line of the car was where they needed to exploit the air flow and they did simtech almost had a 2005 style setup with the front Wing higher to get the airflow going under the front Wing So did trr there was actually a safety aspect here too not only could you build them to disintegrate in the event of a crash they also stopped the cars being used like launch ramps I'm also going to leave a link in the description or a pinned comment to a site where this guy built models of Formula 1 cars in some sort of fluid Dynamic software and did all the necessary test to figure out which of these designs was best he used all the designs used in this time period low nose as used by the likes of McLaren and Williams in 1991 and he draw Wing like Jordan and tyal used horizontal front Wing like Benetton High nose and monoco when the drivers started sitting like they were in a bathtub with their feet on the Taps High nose and for spound flap which added a center flap to the front wing and the footwork and 40 style monopost design if you can decode all of the numbers in that post you're going to really enjoy looking through it but the long and short of it is as follows the drag coefficients between the low and high noses were minimal in their differences but the real difference is made elsewhere with high noses they produce less over-wing downforce but they help produce more underbody downforce and the low pressure generated is much higher than those old style noses add the full flat behind the main plane of the front wing and you'll see that downforce increases at the front but rear down Force decreases as the full span flap gets in the way of producing low pressure under the car with the author finalizing the results by saying that it's inferred that the amount of air flow in the area from the nose to the center of the front Wing influences the amount of air flow below the floor so by the end of the 1990s they were kind of going half and half with the design they'd have the main plane and then have the other flap behind it was pretty much full spam but they cut like a u-shape out so you had that little pocket there where the air could effectively go through and you get the best of both worlds if you follow me the best cars to look at for that kind of design are the Ferrari 310b from 1997 and also the MP 413 McLaren from 1998 as you can probably tell in the change of mic tone here I had a thought just after I finish recording I figured it would be best if I showed you on some models because some of you will be able to visualize what I'm talking about because you might be anx and love this sort of thing and some of you might be new to all of this and well might not speak English as a first language so I'm doing this to make sure that everybody is included here we have a selection of cars that I have on hand in a set of corser to show you the different types of the noses that we use pre and post Revolution if you want to call it that and I'll leave links for the cars in the description if you haven't got them in your game the mp44 on the far left is the low nose and flat front wing and also has a full flap on that front Wing if you follow me from what I was talking about earlier the green Jordan 191 which is only here to get Glenn Freeman's attention to be honest has a similar setup to how trell had theirs with quite a large secondary flat behind the Williams fw19 is what you remember those noses being by the late '90s while the McLaren is what I've just talked about a large secondary flap but with that huge cut out behind the center point to maximize the air flow under the car although by this point barge boards and other Arrow deflectors had started making their appearances on the cars by this point Adrian new moments basically so so when I said High nose full flap imagine the Benetton or the fw19 that you've just seen with the setup that the McLaren has here the flap runs entirely behind the main plane of the front Wing I can't find any pictures of anyone that actually ran that setup they all ran with this bit of a cut out but the MP 413s is by far the most extreme I'm just assuming that the guy that ran all those tests did it to make sure that every type of wing design is covered so into the turn of the Millennium car noses started getting variation to them as the FIA improved crash testing in bits and pieces like that Charlie Whiting was also starting to mandate some changes to them just to be safe noses started to lower around 2001 because Whiting was trying to avoid fatalities in the event of a T-bone accident where a high nose could catch the top of a side pod launched the car up and into the driver's head it's interesting to see stuff like that I looked at one of those every F1 Constructor winner posters that shows how the cars were evolving sort of 1994 to 2008 that must have been the most stable regulations ever you can see how the cars evolved in 2009 though the high noses returned but they did present their safety issues Mark Weber in 2010 at Valencia is the prime example and this led to a rule change for 2012 that means that the designers well they kind of took the piss a little bit again extra info time because I can show you a bit more accurately here here's the 2009 Williams next to a Red Bull the noses in 2009 was sort of an in between like they were sort of 20 2 to 2004 something like that but then in 2010 they became higher up and as we saw with Weber at Valencia it wouldn't be the case of a car being hit being launched into the air it would be the car hitting the other car that would be launched into the air as the high nose catches the rear crash structure of the car in front and then that sort of just lifts everything up and and over because of accidents like Weber at Valencia and also what happened to the Michael Abu Dhabi that same year the FIA told the teams that for 2012 all cars had to have no es that were 550 mm from the reference plane a decrease in the 625 mm that were seen in 2011 the design has worked out that the best way around this and to keep the downforce that those High noses would have given them is to design the so-called platypus noses that a lot of people cried about because they were ugly the FIA would allow a modesty panel that smoothed off that transition for 2013 but because of the shunt at the Belgian G PRI of 2012 which resulted in groan nearly taking Alonzo's head off the FIA had to change things for 2 14 550 mm became 185 mm where the designers took the piss again they wanted as much air flow under the car as possible so they started designing these noses that were cut off as they crossed the main plane of the front wing and then stuck what we now know as the dildo noses on the end so they complied with the rules and people cried that they were ugly again three races into the season and one of these low- noosed cars launched another one into the air like it was around on robot wars although malard was barreling into that corner at a rate of knots so it's hard to ascertain whether it was actually the low noose that was to blame for the accident but like I said these cars are probably my favorites analog enough but with still enough power and downforce to have well decent performance and I guess the color schemes were fun too with the Williams being a firm favorite and the West McLaren being a big part of my childhood ah Nostalgia but it's also one of those pieces of innovation that goes under the radar a bit you think of '90s innovation and it's the fw14b and the fw15 that spring to mind although a video on sers McLaren from 1993 is also a topic for the future because that car was more advanced than people think but I guess one thing you can say about these noses from the '90s is that they were function and form it's not often you get to say that is it so then a look at how tyell kickstarted something pretty interesting in the early 1990s if this has been something you've enjoyed and learned something through then do like the video so I know I've done a good job and at the same time please the algorithm and for more stuff from this channel subscribe and get that Bell on so I finally click over 100k and we have ourselves a party or something massive thanks as ever to the kind folk at patreon for the continued support and if you want to help support me at a more personal level there is a link to patreon in the description along with links to Discord socials and Affiliates Japanese gr pretty much now on sale at the F1 store so until next time I've been a m have a great day wherever you are and [Music] goodbye [Music]

Channel: Aidan Millward

Views: 35,631

Keywords: tyrrell, peter brook, aerodynamics, adrian newey, damon hill, 1996 formula one season, red bull, sebastian vettel, max verstappen, ground effect, 2012 formula one season, romain grosjean crash, spa 2012, 2012 belgian grand prix, podcast, bring back v10s podcast, 1995 formula one season, benetton, michael schumacher, adien millward, aiden millward, matt gallagher, story time, storytime, discussion, debate, science, physics, engineering, racing, motorsport, the race, autosport

Id: SY0e2CePMGw

Length: 15min 13sec (913 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 05 2024