Posts Tagged 2009 Season

2009 is promising to be a very interesting year in F1. Drastic new regulations mean that there will certainly be some surprises on the grid. Most notable of these changes are the new aerodynamic regulations. The purpose of these new regulations are to improve the chances of cars overtaking each other, as the air coming off the rear of the cars will now be much more “clean”, meaning a car behind will be able to follow much more closely. A very wide and low front wing and tall and narrow rear wing means the cars looks “unbalanced”. Some drivers have expressed concerns that the new front wings will have to be replaced much more often, as they are much more exposed and prone to damage. Also, the cars are notably missing all the small wings and winglets they used to sprout throughout the season. All these devices are now illegal, which means teams will have to (and have already) find ways around this to increase downforce.

The second major change in regulations is that teams may now optionally employ kinetic energy recovery systems (KERS) on their cars. This is part of Eclestone’s drive to make F1 more relavant to the real world. What these systems does in essence is to store some of the energy which is usually lost when braking, which can then be re-used to accelerate the car. Two types of KERS systems will be used by the teams. Almost all the teams will be using electrical KERS systems, which means that the energy captured while braking will be stored in either high-performance batteries, or so-called “supercapacitors”. These batteries are then combined with an electric motor, which can add a maximum of 60kW at any time for a couple of seconds when the driver pushes a button on the steering wheel. The other type of KERS system is completely mechanical. When the car brakes, the energy spins up a heavy flywheel. This flywheel will then continue rotating, until the driver chooses to deploy this stored energy by pushing a button on the steering wheel. The flywheel, which is normally spinning freely, will then be connected to the engine’s output driveshaft, which will give an instant boost in output power.

Whether KERS will actually make a noticble difference has yet to be seen. KERS  systems are heavy - around 30kg. This is 30kg extra that each car has to carry around a track, which will slow the car by a couple of tenths per lap. Thus, in order for KERS to be useful it will first of all have to make up this time, and only then will it be able to actually improve the lap-times. The extreme complexity of KERS compounds this problem. If KERS is in fact capable of making up a couple of tenths per lap, and the driver is able to optimally extract the power from KERS, there is still no guarantee that it won’t stop working. Most teams have made provision to completely disable KERS in their cars; however, if a team has to do this, the car will immediatly be slower due to it having to carry around the extra weight.

Other changes for the 2009 season include a driver-controlled flap on the car’s front wing. This means the driver can choose to either increase or decrease the downforce at the front of the car, easing overtaking and adding yet another factor to influence the race. Slicks are making a return in 2009. This will also help with overtaking, as cars will be able to corner at much higher speeds.

Considering all the changes in regulations, and the strictness of these regulations, it is remarkable that most teams have found creative and completely different solutions for designing the fastest car. The McLaren has a beautiful rounded-off shape, the Renault has a remarkably wide nose section, while the Adrian Newey designed Red Bull stretches the regulations to their limit with a very interesting nose section.