What If Formula 1 Had No Rules?

What would happen if there were no

rules

in F1? How fast could the cars go? What would engineers change? Could drivers really survive F1 or motorsport without

rules

? It's something engineers dream about and the questions have been asked before, but there must be some rules. There must be a place for the driver to sit, there must be four wheels, the laws of physics must be followed and the cars must be optimized for a lap time on a Formula 1 circuit like Silverstone or Spark, so before entering In how we developed a non-rolling car and how fast it could go, let's take a minute to look at

what

's already been dreamed up, first in the Volkswagen IDR Pikes Peak, a 671-horsepower electric-powered monster that owns the fastest time on the legendary Pikes Peak Hill climb with 7 minutes and 57 minutes. seconds, yes the car is extremely fast, it has to be to have the record at Pike's Peak, but it is still a bit overweight at 1100kg and ultimately not 100% focused on aerodynamic performance as you describe here the head of the car's exterior design, which has a very aerodynamic look.

It has to look juicy, cute, sexy, uh, desirable and that's our job. You know, aerodynamics, of course, is an important thing, but the design is at the end. This is

what

matters. Then we have the Porsche 919 Evo, which is what happens when Porsche engineers take on an already very successful one. race car and then in the roll book, it has more downforce due to a flatter front nose, wider rear wing and larger diffuser and while we're talking Arrow, it was also able to move parts to generate more downforce aerodynamics and then removing drag that apparently generates 50% more force than the 919 race car.

Engineers also added lightness by eliminating around 40 kg by getting rid of non-essential parts such as headlights and on-board jacks. The car was also able to use more fuel and therefore had more power, reaching 1160 horsepower, but it still only had a small 2L V4 engine and I'm sure if that was changed there would be even more available power and then we have the brain children of Adrian Nei and probably the designs that we have to take more. seriously for this video where the Volkswagen had to look good and be completely corporate and the Porsche was an adaptation of an existing race car.

The Red Bulls Since speed on a racetrack is the North Star, the first of 6G. I mean, the car looks great in the first place, but uh. You know it's also very good to drive, but Nei, as an engineer, thought he could do better and decided to have Ed add a fan to the car to help grip in low and medium speed corners where not enough air flows. car to create the downforce itself, this is something AMZ Racing focused on with their car that broke the world record for N at 100 km per hour accelerating to 100 kph in less than a second, which I just did about a video in theory at At least the new car should be able to hit 310mph and hit 8G on the brakes, which is around 3G more than a modern F1 car, but one of the key things here is that the newer car only It weighs 545kg compared to the 800kg that F1 cars weigh today. and the thinness of F1 cars hasn't been since the early 90's, now of course this car was for the Gran Turismo game and I'm not sure how credible the numbers are, but the aerodynamic concept is what's important here and if that has happened they come from Nei, we should probably take note that what you may not know is that in real life a

formula

without rules existed in the past, it was called Canam and it produced some of the most impressive cars in the Can series -Am at RH Atlanta. featuring the fastest racing cars in the world with the largest racing engines in use anywhere Canam or the Canadian American Challenge Cup was a racing series from 1966 to 1975 the regulations were minimal to say the least engine sizes unlimited, including allowing turbos and superchargers and unrestricted virt aerodynamics is basically the closest any major racing series ever came to having no rules, as long as the cars had two seats, wheels enclosed by the bodywork, and met some safety standards from the 1970s, it was ready, as you can imagine, this allowed engineers to come up with some cool solutions and push racing car development further than ever before.

The Canam cars were some of the first racing cars to have turbocharged wings that actually worked with ground effect aerodynamics and Aerospace Mater materials like titanium, all of which are common in motorsports today, it really was a development platform for engineers and that's what I love, but unfortunately, as you can imagine, all this development led to increased costs and the eventual demise of the series; However, there was a period when Canam cars were often as fast, if not faster, than Formula 1 cars from At that time, with all this freedom, what kind of cars did Canam produce well?

The first mention is for the 1972 Porsche 917 30 KL. And this thing was an absolute monster, a 5.4 L flat2 1100 horsepower in RAC version and there's more, it actually produced 1580 horsepower in qualifying trim, just look at how much fun this car must have been, although the Porsche was restricted with regulators imposing a fuel consumption rule for 1974, however, as with the 919 Evo, Porsche later used the car to break some records and broke the lock. world track speed record at 221 mph at Talladega Speedway and reached 240 mph on the straights Mark donu set a new world record Mark in Alabama 22116 thousand per hour Canam can also be thanked for bringing ground effects to motorsports with the 2J hood now You've probably seen this strange looking car before, famous for having a huge fan at the back, but I'll let Sir Sterling Moss and designer Jim Hall explain the technical side.

This is the fan that helps suck the car down. What is this? plastic skirt good the skirts a seal to keep the vacuum under the car it is made of lexand so it will withstand a 200 mph impact this was innovative it had two fans adapted from a military tank powered by a two stroke engine and who likes them tanks and a two-stroke, the 2J competed in the 1970 season and was rated at least 2 seconds faster than the next car, but being quite complex it broke quite a bit and unfortunately the organizers banned it again, but the concept managed to make his way to Formula 1 with Bernie Echelon's Bram team and the Gordon Murray-designed bt46b, speaking of engineering genius, if you want to start your journey to becoming the next Edan Nei, you should visit sponsor shiny.org today shiny.org It is the best way to learn more about engineering that does not require years of schooling It is free and easy to understand It is the best way to learn mathematics, data science and computer science in a brilliant interactive way It is designed for busy people, you can learn anywhere in anytime on your phone, tablet, or computer and master big concepts in just 15 minutes a day, so its bite-sized lessons make it easy to create a daily habit.

There are over 100 courses with thousands of lessons and new content added monthly so you can stay up to date with the latest concepts. behind the world-changing technology, so if you want to try everything shiny has to offer for free for 30 days, visit shiny.org driver61 or click the link in the description, the first 200 of you will get a 20% discount on shiny annual premium subscription, so we have decided to undertake this project, but where do we focus our attention? There are five main areas to work on in aerodynamics, power, weight reduction, tires and suspension. Now there are a lot of improvements we can make, but for the scope of this video, I'm going to focus on the big arrow and maybe follow up with another video on what's possible with the engine and tires.

Now the overall goal is to create a car with more downforce and less drag. More downforce means braking later at higher cornering speeds. and better traction, less drag means we can go faster on the straight parts, so how should we approach this if the car looks like an F1 car or more like a prototype or should it just be a big vacuum cleaner like the 2J of before? It needs to have a lot of pointy parts like a 2008 F1 car, but does it have to be smooth and rounded like the Volkswagen IDR? Well I recently had Willm Toer on the Driver 61 podcast to help me understand more and first he explained a little bit about the arrow rules of f1, the aerodynamic rules are also quite restrictive, you have CAD files that you have to follow where you are allowed to perform bodywork in a given area, if you removed those dimensional restrictions you could add a fairly significant amount of organic downforce. to give it more aerodynamic power, so basically F1 forces designers to work within a set of predefined areas and they cannot go outside of them, therefore the basic shape of an F1 car is defined by the manufacturers and before To complain too much, there is an important reason why engineers want to make a fast car, of course, but the other thing they want to do is keep other cars behind them and if there were no regulations, they would do everything they could to create a fast car. huge hole in the air. behind your car, so the cars behind you have very little downforce and no one wants to watch racing where there is actually very little racing going on, but what would we focus on aerodynamically speaking in our car without rules?

Well of course we would need to work on the typical areas the front wing, side pods, floor and rear wing, but without rules there is so much more we can work on, we could use active arrow wings and arrow parts that they move, it doesn't even need to be open at the top like we have in F1, it doesn't even need to have open wheels and fans, we could use fans like the ones we see on the AMZ race car and the McMurry, but the important thing about Arrow is that everything must work together, there is no point in adding a load. of downforce to the front wing if it disrupts airflow through the rest of the car, so let's start at the front and work our way through the car before we get to the crazier additions and remember this is all hypothetical aerodynamics from around the world. .

We're still understanding and evolving the theory of aerodynamics, it's delightfully complicated, so the front wing would want to have enormous depth, something like what you'd find on the Empire Wraith just a little bit bigger, but you'd just want the wing to be more big. its edges and not so big in the middle, that way you don't make the air work too hard before going under the floor, we want all that air to move cleanly under the car through the diffuser, as that will create a lot of downforce , that's why we saw high noses develop in F1 starting with the 019 model and being more prominent on the circa 2010 car before the rules changed to lower the noses, but the main purpose of these high noses and the sections The basic intermediates of the front wing were to keep the air organized for better use under the floor, then for our car without wheels, the outside of the wing would look similar to the front wings we saw in F1 in 2018, but maybe not as complex and then we have the wheels with respect to the Arrow wheels.

It is a pain that elements that disrupt the air flow around the car are exposed, unlike the smooth and controllable surface on the car body, the wheels and tires generate complex turbulent air flows that can reduce the overall aerodynamic efficiency, so it is better if we simply cover them with fairings. front of the wheels fairings behind the wheels the wheels would not really be exposed as with the new 2014 , so William suggests a non-rotating wheel cover so that some air can go over the brake disc and the pads cool and then exit to a specific location where the air can then be used by the rest of the car, until the floor and this is where things are located. become simpler and also a little more complicated if there were no rules, the shape of the floor would be quite simple if we just focus on getting the best aerodynamic shape, which is a simple and smooth shape, but we can only have that simple shape if the height The car's handling is always perfect and theToday's F1 cars change ride height by dropping at the front when braking, ducking at the rear when accelerating, rolling into corners and generally lowering as downforce increases and that's why we see a flat design. more complicated in F1 because the engineers have to deal with all this movement, but we have no rules, so we are simply going to opt for an active suspension that keeps the car in the perfect attitude at all times and even more, we will also have generators Vortex in the front. from the floor, as they can help us get a little more D-Force by adding energy to the air.

By winding Vortex, you get higher velocity air and where you accelerated the air locally, the pressures in that high speed section are a little bit lower and you can use that to get a little more downforce in the air. Oh, and I almost forgot, of course, we would wear skirts. Skirts do the best job of sealing the sides of the floor, although they can never do it. perfectly, with less air leaks, there is less pressure under the rear of the floor and therefore more downforce and grip and finally, let's talk about the rear connection before moving on to the active arrow, the fans and the closed cockpit, first you will want the The rear spoiler should be as wide as possible.

Wider than current F1 rules allow, this is because the wider it is, the less angle you need to run to get the same amount of downforce and that means less drag like on the X 20104. It is multi-element and would it have the same shape throughout its width? This part is really interesting. If you look at the x24 you will see that the outer parts of the wing are more angled than the center part and this again is because all the Arrows need to work together, just think. above the air, it moves over the top of the car and then hits the rear wing before connecting again with the air coming from under the floor, that means it would be better to use the middle part of the wing to reduce the pressure behind the floor and make make the floor even more powerful, so of course we already use wings and floors in F1, but how about we don't really explore rules?

We'd opt for an enclosed cockpit first, as it provides a smoother surface and better control over airflow down the rest of the car. It also provides a stronger structure, meaning the engineers would actually just make it lighter and end up having the same strength, then we would have active Arrow moving wings, of course this means you could add Wing in the braking and cornering zones and eliminate it in the Strait, I would also add a mobile device. in the diffuser that would open at high speeds so it could have less drag and improve top speed, but one of the main benefits of the active arrow is that the tires would be more likely to survive going that fast, we haven't talked about the engine. but imagine that a car without rules can travel four or even 500 km per hour, the tires will be a weak point, especially with a large downforce that crushes them against the ground and much less the speed that destroys them, at least with active Las Arrows on the floor and wings could reduce the load at high speed and give the tires some rest.

So what about the fans? Honestly, if there are no limits, fans are the cheat code because natural aerodynamics only works when the car has moving air. It is such a natural arrow that it does not work from a standing star and is much less effective in slower turns. If you suck the car into the ground with a motorized fan, you don't need to move to create downforce like the 2J hustler from before. Now Willam tells me that in theory with a fan you can create 10 tonnes of force for every square meter of surface but of course that's just in theory, you still need to find a fan powerful enough to do that and there would be leaks so that we could I'm not even close to a vacuum, so getting to, say, 30% of a vacuum, I would say that should be possible and if we were using fans the layout of the entire car would probably change.

With fans, you can set the suction exactly. wherever you want and you could change the handling balance of the car very quickly, for example if you turn into a corner and have some understeer you could just turn on the fan at the front; However, as the speed of the car increases, I would probably rely more on the floor and wings, the reason being that the fans could simply run out of capacity, they probably wouldn't be able to remove enough air to create enough suction while the car is moving quickly. and this is where we would have to do more research, but it's safe to say that if there were no rules, fans would be used in some way.

In fact, there are currently several

formula

student teams using fans on their cars, so it will be interesting to see how they develop, so "We have ordered our car, but would it work well on the circuit? Probably not. It is estimated that The 2014 Red Bull a lot of development and spending a lot of money there even if it were possible and then of course there is the driver I have only experienced the heady heights of the 8G in a crash that doesn't hold up through a sequence of corners. like or Rouge and yes, fighter pilots experience up to 8 or 9g for sustained periods, but that's GeForce through and through, not sideways, so it can be combed with a git, but I think it's safe to say that. the driver would have difficulty driving a full stroke D with a height of 8G.

By the way, when I researched this, I discovered that you sneeze at 2.9 G, so next time you eat a Cod like mine, remember that you are experiencing the same thing. GeForce as Hamilton as he turns towards Brooklyn at Silverstone. How much faster would our car be without rules? I honestly don't know, it would require a lot more work and simulation to find out, but for now the closest thing we have is a lap around the nurbo gring in the 2014 X in Gran Turismo, so what do you think, how much faster this car could be ? Are there any ideas I've missed?

Let me know in the comments. This car may be hypothetical, but fans have made it. It has been used in the car to accelerate from 0 to 100 kmph in less than a second. I spoke to the leader of the AMZ racing team and made a video about it here. Thank you very much for watching and we'll see you next time.