According to the website Espanyol on December 18, 2021, the ending of the 2021 Formula One World Championship, while exciting, has sparked controversy – Max Verstappen overtook seven-time champion Lewis Hamilton on the final lap of the final leg of the season to win the title. At the end of the 2021 season, the F1 race is ready to usher in major changes, which will be introduced by artificial intelligence.
Rob Smedley is a veteran racing engineer who has been in charge of F1's data systems for nearly three years. He briefed a group of journalists on the major novel changes that will take place in F1 racing in 2022, especially in terms of aerodynamics.
The rear spoiler of the new car must be modified. The tail fins help them stick more closely to the ground, but they also "create a lot of backward turbulence," which in turn directly affects any approaching chasers.
The new spoiler and racing chassis must meet certain specifications, based on prototypes designed by artificial intelligence and machine learning, in order to deflect the airflow upwards and avoid hindering chasers who may approach.
"This is the first time F1 has designed a car as an organization." Smedley said. During the Amazon Web Services (AWS) World Congress in Las Vegas, Smedley showed off a prototype behind him. "We designed it at a macro level to provide specifications for individual teams," he said. ”
With these specifications, drivers must follow certain rules during the race, but the engineer responded that teams would have full freedom to complete their design work.
The design that is not allowed is to spray air into the ground, which affects the riders behind and prevents fans from seeing "classic scenes like mansell and Piquet's close chase (at Silverstone in 1987), which is exactly what the majority of fans want to see".
The consequence of this downward jet stream, Smedley said, is that "when the follow-up time difference is about 0.5 seconds, the rear car loses 40 percent of the downforce, which is the force that presses it against the ground and is good for its performance." As a result, this creates a vicious circle that makes it difficult for the rear car to catch up with the front car."
That's why it's hard for two drivers to overtake when driving a vehicle at similar speeds. This forced the rear car to try to overtake only at specific points on the track to avoid following the car in front of it for a long time and close.
The engineer explains: "That's why we wanted to redesign the car. We enhance the grip at the bottom. ”
"To do this, we created a virtual wind tunnel based on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) that has very high demands on computing power," smedley said, "In general, all F1 teams use virtual wind tunnels and CFDs to design their cars, but they tend to use half a car because it takes super computing power to do this job, and it can take four or five hours to do a simulation test." ”
Smedley recalls: "We were not only using a full car, but two full cars because we would love to see the test in the rear car. Our first mock test took 40 hours because the data was super large. ”
Then, they made heavy use of the resources of their partner AWS. AWS has formed an alliance with F1 to analyze and provide technical data for F1.
Smedley is satisfied: "They helped us build cloud services with Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2), and we reduced the testing time from 40 hours to six to seven hours. This enhances flexibility. Designers can schedule two or three tests at a time and complete the work of redesigning the car in about four to five weeks. It could have taken us 10 years to make this progress, and that's what discourages many. ”
Source: Reference News Network
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