I have wondered many times about the quality of F-1 fans. I mean, you talk to a Cricket fan, and he would be able to run you to the ground with his explanation of the cover drive, the role of the sweeper, the "Dilscoop" - although it pains me immensely to use that term - or on how to get Sachin out in the most statistically probable fashion (thank you, dad). Ask a Football fanatic - there really weren't any "fans" to being with, because they actually KILL for their teams, and sometimes their own team members - and they'll go into a brass tacks argument on why Poland was wrongly denied a goal against Russia early this month on a questionable offside decision. A Tennis connoisseur will be able to tell you why he believes that the rain actually didn't help Nadal with the French Open this year because he already possesses superhuman stamina and superb base play.
The common thread in all this is that the rules are simple and the skills are tangible. All it takes for a fan or fanatic - I'm not judging - is to place oneself in his idol's shoes and imagine that they got game to make the right call.
F-1 is slightly different though. After you've sifted through the glitz and glamour of saying you like a sport in which your favorite diva was seen at a page three gala hobnobbing it with other favorite divas and wondering why you weren't born rich enough to afford the five thousand dollar paddock entry cover, or after you've stopped seeing red everywhere (Ferrari, after all, is the most glamorous of all), and after the cool factor of boasting to your friends that the only way to see an F-1 race is on that brand new HD TV you got, there remains one little niggle: what do you really know about how it all works? I mean, how do the little bits fit together?
A disclaimer: By now, you're thinking to yourself - wait this has nothing to do with Tamil Movies. All of this is a rant against casual F-1 viewers. You're thinking either, hey wait a minute... I get what this guy is on about, or hah, screw this know it all, I have a HD TV! Well, the way I see it is this: F-1 is a complex sport - a blending of Science, Engineering and high performance high endurance Sportsmanship. I have seen too many people claiming to be fans who don't have the slightest clue that for every Schumi or Alonso or Vettel or Hamilton, there is a whole team starting with Brawn or Fry or Newey or Michael that is solving often seemingly insurmountable Engineering problems offscreen. Just like how a true cricket fan must know the intricacies of a reverse swinging ball or the difference between a dilscoop - aww that word again - and graceful a pick-up behind the keeper to enjoy the game, so too should a real F-1 fan know a little bit about what's going on to really get into it. Otherwise, you'll be left with an inane observation like "shiny red car... me like it win. Weeeee....."
But in order to get what's happening, a little scientific know-how is required, and the casual observer is not necessarily versed in this regard. I hope that with this series of articles, I can try to explain some of the basic science of the cars and thereby make it a richer experience for you next time. Remember, HD looks a lot better when you can see that pass from nowhere and say, "ahh, I know how it happened and thank god that I could see it crystal clear!"
Unfortunately, science is hardly accessible to the common man, couched as it is in Greek symbols and esoteric terms. Hopefully, with this series, I could introduce you to some of the truly fantastic things that make the F-1 car "go" by simplifying the science without loss of generality (a supercilious jargon phrase used to say that its ok to call a spade a spade, even when it has tassels on the handle).
Also, I'm setting up shop this time, so hopefully the coming articles won't be as long winded.
Back to the point.
Rather than the science being an intimidating put-offer, understanding this witchcraft will put you one up on your guests in an after race conversation. It will make you the exalted one in circles that invite people to see races on HD TVs. If you don't own a HD TV, your pure racing knowledge will get you invited to the homes of those who do. Ofcourse, the trick once you've got yourself invited over is not to make it sound like a boring Physics puzzle from IE Irodov and never get asked back ever again, but that's one instance where personal flair is called for if there ever was.
I'd like to take the science and distill its essence for anyone prepared to spend five minutes on its minutiae - practically rhymed, Jeeves. What? I'm Chaucer, who got language to the masses.
I'm starting off this series with DRS - no, not the Decision Review System, you Dhoni-hater-cum-BCCI-seditionist. This is the sinister sounding Drag Reduction System. Over the next few posts, I'll talk about tires and balance, the front wing and its distant cousin, the rear wing, bottom effects, and finally, the big daddy - aerodynamics. By the time I'm done with you, you'll be able to tell your hot date why Alonso won in Valencia and why Schumi was able to hold off Webber till the bitter end. Yeah! Like that's what she wanted to talk about. Exercise flair and use restraint as applicable.
Simply put, DRS is a system that gives a driver hot on the tail of someone in front a speed advantage offering him an overtaking opportunity provided he is within a second behind the leading car in certain parts of the track. This is very different from another kind of advantage which a trailing car has that's called a tow. But that topic is for another day when we talk about wings. And in F-1, tow comes with its own can of worms.
Before I tell you about DRS, there's a couple of voodoo terms that are good to know: dynamic and kinematic. If you're looking at how things work, you're also probably wondering what drives them. A dynamic thing is something you define with both its function and the driving force for that function. So, a dynamic knife is a knife that cuts the cabbage because you pressed down with it. A kinematic thing one the other hand just does what its doing, but we don't talk about the driving force. The force is still there, but we don't really care what it is. A kinematic knife is a knife that cuts the cabbage, period. With a kinematic knife, you have no way of knowing how deep the cut is going to be, what size the pieces are going to be, and what the knife will be doing once its done cutting the cabbage. But with a dynamic knife, you can tell how deep its going to cut because you know how much pressure you're applying. You can tell that the knife is going to be put away, because you also know what your action is going to be after you've cut your cabbage.
A neat example is a car on cruise control. If that car is doing sixty five on the freeway, you don't have to worry about the accelerator pedal for a while, and the car is going to continue to do sixty five. So, the speed of the car is kinematic. On the other hand, if you've just taken the ramp onto US 101, then you have to start flooring it. The speed of the car is no longer a kinematic entity. Now, you're accelerating at a rate determined by how hard you floor it. In order to determine the speed of the car now, you also need to know how much gas you're giving it, so this is now a dynamic thing.
The reason this is important is because the DRS is a dynamic thing. That will become clear soon enough.
Let's look at it word by word.
Drag. Its been a long drive back home and your bladder is suddenly full from all that coffee you drank along the way. You've stopped by a discrete hedge and you're tacking into the wind. Lo and behold, you're legs are getting wet. Why? Because the wind is blowing against you. You can't turn around... other motorists are tooling along. Maybe there's a cop. So, how can you compensate? You can lift it up a bit. This action has two advantages: one, fertilizing fluid would fly farther and not fall on your feet, and two, you would feel less air pressure on it. In technical parlance, the wind has just imparted DRAG on the stream of pee. It has dragged it down. It has exerted pressure on it. What you did when you lifted it up was to change the arc of the pee and make it look flatter to the air. So, the air exerted less pressure on it, and it flew further.
Drag has a nemesis, its evil twin, lift. Lift is harder to explain. Now you've come back home, but its a hot day. So you stand in front of your pedestal fan tilted up to your face. Your hair is blowing up. Why? Because the air is flowing upwards from the fan. The ceiling fan a few feet behind you is also in full swing. Now, your hair starts to curl upwards and forwards. Its doing this because its experiencing a different pushing forces at its roots and its tips. This difference is LIFT.
Its tomorrow, and you're on an airplane to Tegucigalpa because your boss hates you. Your airplane lifts off at 200KpH. An F-1 car stays on the ground even at 300KpH. What's the difference. A plane takes off because there is a way to make the air beneath it exert more upward force on it than the air above it. This is the shape of the airplane wings. Also, its more likely to take off if the wings don't have too much air pressure in front of them. So, what you want is your wing to have less drag on it, and generate upward lift. It would have look like a piece of paper curved downwards. Also, you don't want it to have much of a profile when facing the air, so you make its front as curved as possible. Its back has to be like a knife edge pointing down to suck the air above it and push it back up against its underside in the back. An F-1 wing one the other hand has to keep the car planted to the ground. So, it has to do everything an airplane wing does, but oppositely. So it looks like an upside down airplane wing.
Reduction. Just what it sounds like. To make your car go faster than your rival's, all other things equal, you need to be able to reduce the pressure of the wind in front of it. As you've probably noticed by now with all those hours if F-1 footage, an F-1 car is by no stretch of the imagination a sleek looker. It has bits and pieces sticking out, big fat uncovered tires, and a new nose job for 2012 straight from the Fiat Multipla design team. What all this does is presents to the wind a clunky profile that increases the drag on it. The only things that can go some way to reducing all this drag, are the wings. Now, the only way the wings can help reduce the drag is their profile to the wind becomes flatter.
System. A system is anything that gets a job done. In this case, its a transducer. What is a transducer, you might ask. I'll tell you. A light bulb tuns on when you switch it on. Electrical impulses travel through the tungsten filament which is heated and starts to glow. So, the electricity was converted to light by the release of high energy particles from the filament. So, in this case the transducer was the filament. A transducer is a device that converts one form of an input into another form of an output. In F-1, when the driver pushes the DRS button which probably activates a hydraulic piston or motor mechanism (which of the two options each team chose is a secret guarded unto death itself!) that flattens the wing by rotating it more horizontally. In this case, the transducer is either the motor or the piston. This thereby reduces the drag and makes the car go faster. But more importantly, being a dynamic system, the wing actually ACCELERATES the car while its being flattened, thereby giving the driver the extra punch over the guy in front. So, while he is going faster than the guy in front, he also able to increase his speed further, overshoot the competitor and make it stick. It has it Achilles heel though. It also reduces the downward lift that kept the car planted on the ground and makes it slide around a bit more (more on this when we talk about tires and balance).
The lawmakers of F-1 have decreed that the driver may flatten his rear wing provided he trails the leading car within a second behind it. Why this one second rule? And why not keep the wing flat permanently if its giving the car so much speed? That we'll see when we come to the wings. As to a question I can answer now, why choose only certain parts of the track where DRS can be used? This is where the F-1 gurus were clever. Most F-1 circuits have dull spots where the race is usually processional. So, by putting the DRS zones here, they're likely to have more on-track action. The existing overtaking spots can then be left to sieve the men from the boys because driver skills becomes very evident in those places anyway.
That's it. That's what DRS is. So, why did Alonso Win and why did Schumi come third? Apart from the totally predictable retirements of Vettel, Grosjean, Hamilton and Maldonado (a big thank you guys, for putting my idol back on the podium), after the safety car period, Alonso was beautifully positioned behind Grosjean, close enough to be able to use his DRS and whiz past. Schumi, on the other hand, was able to keep Webber more than a second behind him through the DRS zones, and thereby retain his place over an ever more irritable Webber.
F-1 is slightly different though. After you've sifted through the glitz and glamour of saying you like a sport in which your favorite diva was seen at a page three gala hobnobbing it with other favorite divas and wondering why you weren't born rich enough to afford the five thousand dollar paddock entry cover, or after you've stopped seeing red everywhere (Ferrari, after all, is the most glamorous of all), and after the cool factor of boasting to your friends that the only way to see an F-1 race is on that brand new HD TV you got, there remains one little niggle: what do you really know about how it all works? I mean, how do the little bits fit together?
But in order to get what's happening, a little scientific know-how is required, and the casual observer is not necessarily versed in this regard. I hope that with this series of articles, I can try to explain some of the basic science of the cars and thereby make it a richer experience for you next time. Remember, HD looks a lot better when you can see that pass from nowhere and say, "ahh, I know how it happened and thank god that I could see it crystal clear!"
Unfortunately, science is hardly accessible to the common man, couched as it is in Greek symbols and esoteric terms. Hopefully, with this series, I could introduce you to some of the truly fantastic things that make the F-1 car "go" by simplifying the science without loss of generality (a supercilious jargon phrase used to say that its ok to call a spade a spade, even when it has tassels on the handle).
Also, I'm setting up shop this time, so hopefully the coming articles won't be as long winded.
Back to the point.
Rather than the science being an intimidating put-offer, understanding this witchcraft will put you one up on your guests in an after race conversation. It will make you the exalted one in circles that invite people to see races on HD TVs. If you don't own a HD TV, your pure racing knowledge will get you invited to the homes of those who do. Ofcourse, the trick once you've got yourself invited over is not to make it sound like a boring Physics puzzle from IE Irodov and never get asked back ever again, but that's one instance where personal flair is called for if there ever was.
I'd like to take the science and distill its essence for anyone prepared to spend five minutes on its minutiae - practically rhymed, Jeeves. What? I'm Chaucer, who got language to the masses.
Simply put, DRS is a system that gives a driver hot on the tail of someone in front a speed advantage offering him an overtaking opportunity provided he is within a second behind the leading car in certain parts of the track. This is very different from another kind of advantage which a trailing car has that's called a tow. But that topic is for another day when we talk about wings. And in F-1, tow comes with its own can of worms.
A neat example is a car on cruise control. If that car is doing sixty five on the freeway, you don't have to worry about the accelerator pedal for a while, and the car is going to continue to do sixty five. So, the speed of the car is kinematic. On the other hand, if you've just taken the ramp onto US 101, then you have to start flooring it. The speed of the car is no longer a kinematic entity. Now, you're accelerating at a rate determined by how hard you floor it. In order to determine the speed of the car now, you also need to know how much gas you're giving it, so this is now a dynamic thing.
The reason this is important is because the DRS is a dynamic thing. That will become clear soon enough.
Let's look at it word by word.
Drag. Its been a long drive back home and your bladder is suddenly full from all that coffee you drank along the way. You've stopped by a discrete hedge and you're tacking into the wind. Lo and behold, you're legs are getting wet. Why? Because the wind is blowing against you. You can't turn around... other motorists are tooling along. Maybe there's a cop. So, how can you compensate? You can lift it up a bit. This action has two advantages: one, fertilizing fluid would fly farther and not fall on your feet, and two, you would feel less air pressure on it. In technical parlance, the wind has just imparted DRAG on the stream of pee. It has dragged it down. It has exerted pressure on it. What you did when you lifted it up was to change the arc of the pee and make it look flatter to the air. So, the air exerted less pressure on it, and it flew further.
Drag has a nemesis, its evil twin, lift. Lift is harder to explain. Now you've come back home, but its a hot day. So you stand in front of your pedestal fan tilted up to your face. Your hair is blowing up. Why? Because the air is flowing upwards from the fan. The ceiling fan a few feet behind you is also in full swing. Now, your hair starts to curl upwards and forwards. Its doing this because its experiencing a different pushing forces at its roots and its tips. This difference is LIFT.
System. A system is anything that gets a job done. In this case, its a transducer. What is a transducer, you might ask. I'll tell you. A light bulb tuns on when you switch it on. Electrical impulses travel through the tungsten filament which is heated and starts to glow. So, the electricity was converted to light by the release of high energy particles from the filament. So, in this case the transducer was the filament. A transducer is a device that converts one form of an input into another form of an output. In F-1, when the driver pushes the DRS button which probably activates a hydraulic piston or motor mechanism (which of the two options each team chose is a secret guarded unto death itself!) that flattens the wing by rotating it more horizontally. In this case, the transducer is either the motor or the piston. This thereby reduces the drag and makes the car go faster. But more importantly, being a dynamic system, the wing actually ACCELERATES the car while its being flattened, thereby giving the driver the extra punch over the guy in front. So, while he is going faster than the guy in front, he also able to increase his speed further, overshoot the competitor and make it stick. It has it Achilles heel though. It also reduces the downward lift that kept the car planted on the ground and makes it slide around a bit more (more on this when we talk about tires and balance).
That's it. That's what DRS is. So, why did Alonso Win and why did Schumi come third? Apart from the totally predictable retirements of Vettel, Grosjean, Hamilton and Maldonado (a big thank you guys, for putting my idol back on the podium), after the safety car period, Alonso was beautifully positioned behind Grosjean, close enough to be able to use his DRS and whiz past. Schumi, on the other hand, was able to keep Webber more than a second behind him through the DRS zones, and thereby retain his place over an ever more irritable Webber.
