Paul,

    Whaddayathink about this McLaren thingie that supposedly "stalls" the
rear wing on
demand from the driver?  Here's an explanation of it:

http://www.wired.com/autopia/2010/03/mclaren-rear-wing/

Ron Grable

I am glad you brought that up Ron. Very brilliant. There needs to be one
racing venue in the world where innovation is allowed.

That idea has applications in air craft. It is called a blowing wing flap.
Basically one is taking high energy air from one place on the
vehicle and ducting it to a location where it is needed. The slot position
in any Fowler flap wing situation is critical. As you recalled back
in your Formula A days I added slotted flaps to the Formula A wings
I was selling to increase the down force. The precise position of the
flap relative to the main wing trailing edge was critical.

High energy air directed to that location can drastically increase the
effectiveness of the flap. Any time you add down force you add
drag. So killing the down force kills some of the drag. The drag
comes from the huge dual vortices's off the ends of the wing.
That is the turbulence you feel when following in another race car.                
        
The current Formula One wing restrictions as to span are particularly dumb
as that adds turbulence and not decreases turbulence. In addition
the high drag to down force ratio due to the limited span drastically
increases fuel burn during the race. Since the new rules require the
car to carry all the fuel for the entire race (150 liters) the weight of
that excess fuel has a drastic wide ranging effects on the cornering,
handling and durability of the tires to name just a few.

BTW I notice Oooobs (Hobbs) is always wining about inside front wheel lock
up :) Since the lateral weight transfer of any optimally tuned chassis
is 100% at the front while cornering, inside wheel lockup is inevitable
without an anti lock system. If you are not locking the inside front
wheel you are not going fast enough. Hamilton knows this.
You need to brake up to the apex and then immediately transition to
some acceleration.

I spelled it all out in my AIAA paper republished in Race Car Engineering
in 2008.

Aerodynamics & The Group Seven Racing Car by  Paul Lamar
Presented at the AIAA Symposium on The Aerodynamics
of Sports & Competition Automobiles
(Research I did while at Chaparral Cars.)
April 20 1968

http://www.rotaryeng.net/who.html/AIAA-Paper.pdf

I first noticed this back in 1960's when we had telemetry on
the Chaparral at Rattle Snake race way. The fastest laps always had
the tell tail V shaped velocity verses time curves in the corners.

Paul Lamar


Time attack is relatively open to innovation. Not exactly a 'racing'
venue, but close.

Vlad