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Differential Settings in Formula 1 Cars
April 1, 2008It is not totally uncommon to see drivers fiddling with small buttons on their steering wheel during the course of a race or qualifying session. More often, they do adjustments before some corners. One of the things that they try to do is adjust the differential settings to suit the corner that’s coming up. These settings go a long way in determining the handling of the car. Drivers use the diff, as it is popularly called, to compensate for excess understeer or oversteer that keep varying as the tyre wears out and the track characteristics change.
Basically, it is the amount of ‘lock’ that is changed electronically from the steering wheel. You might know that a differential allows the inside and outside rear wheels to spin at different speeds. This is crucial to the turning of the car into corners. The ‘lock’ determines the speed differential between the inside and outside wheels.
To put it all in a simple way, for more ‘oversteery’ situations, less lock is dialled in. This allows for an increase in the speed differential between the wheels, which in turn allows the outside rear wheel to rotate at a speed which is significantly higher than that of the inside wheel. So, the car will tend to spin out which is what we refer to as oversteer. More amount of lock dialled in, on the other hand, will make the car prone to understeer due to the fact that the car will ‘struggle’ to turn into corners if both of the rear wheels spin at around the same speed.
So, drivers constantly try to arrive at the degree of lock that best suites the condition of the car, track and their driving style.
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Posted by Sriram
Lewis In Malaysia
March 30, 2008It was really nice to see Lewis driving as he did in Sepang. His charge from the middle of the pack showed to me that he is not intimidated by his hugely complex and powerful machinery. The way he hustled his McLaren on to the kerbs, opposite locking it, out braking and then recovering to get the car going was all a treat to watch. It’s really something special to see such an young man having total control of his car at those speeds.
I could very often see Lewis giving a tinge of opposite lock to the steering wheel when he was hard on the power with his outside rear wheel on the kerb. It was purely on the limit correction and driving and was really fascinating to watch. It was so much on the edge that even a split second of missed corrective action would have spun him around leaving him beached.
I think having traction control around would’ve been an injustice to the likes of Lewis or Kimi who have stunning levels of car control. Car control is not just about bringing your car home safely without making any mistakes. Many other drivers on the grid can do that. It’s about taking your car beyond its limits and then stepping back to exactly on the limit when it bites back. And doing this for the whole race distance. That’s what differentiates a champion driver from a good driver. In the process, you will have extracted a lap time that the car simply doesn’t deserve and at the same time would’ve provide a spectacle to the spectators.
A little bit more technical brief on why Lewis did so many opposite locks in Malaysia on the kerbs:
The kerbs have lesser grip levels than the tarmac. Also, the outside rear wheel, which is accelerating on the kerb, will have extra burden in the form of the car’s weight in addition to the accelerating force. Naturally, the tyre will tend to slide away as a reaction to these two loads. One effective corrective action that can be given by the driver is to take some of the car’s weight away from that tyre. This is done by turning the steering wheel in a direction opposite to that of what is required to negotiate the corner and this is what we call as the opposite lock. When this is done, the weight starts transferring to the inside wheels and the car starts to get stabilised. This prevents the car from spinning.
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6 Comments | F1 Circuits and Drivers, F1 VIEWS | Permalink
Posted by Sriram
Why Renault Doesn’t Win
March 29, 2008Flavio Briatore and the Renault team do not fail to blow their trumpets on them being the team that uses one of the lowest budgets yet managing to win races and championships. But we must ask them, “for how long”. With their so called low budgets, they won two titles and then? Promptly became also-rans. For the 2007 season and again this season, they’re, at best, lower mid-fielders. What about the highest spenders, Ferrari and McLaren? They’re the two title contenders. This despite the two teams having had a dog-fight for the championship until the last race of the last season. In contrast, Renault stopped the development of last year’s car well and truly before the final few races and instead concentrated all their resources on their new car. The result? Two fortunate-points finishes this season. I’m not belittling in anyway the expertise of the Renault engineers. They’re the ones who won two titles on the trot. But I would like to emphasise the point that budgets DO matter in F1.
I believe, only because Ferrari spend what they spend every year, are they able to be at the highest level of competitiveness year on year (they’ve always been in the fight for the titles continuously since 1997!). When their form suddenly slumped in 2005, they just got back to their usual self the following year. That was no fluke. They had one of the best resources–lot of team personnel and budgets and they put all of them to effective use. The result was a massive performance gain. Renault’s strategy of trying to ‘sip’ resources will work only for a short stint and will have its phases. That is, it’ll take a few years’ culmination of work to get them back to the top, where they’ll remain for only a relatively short period, until the other teams start flexing their muscles.
If anyone wants to dominate F1 (like Ferrari), they’ll need to be both efficient in using whatever resources they have and also have huge resources. They must be prepared to spend like top teams and not just like mid-fielders.
An analogy: when you super-charge a 1.5 litre engine, you get 300 bhp. When you supercharge a 6 litre engine, you get 700 bhp. Supercharging is like efficient use of resources. 1.5 or 6 litre is the amount of resources you spend. The 1.5 litre engine will wow you with its power only until the 6 litre doesn’t come around. When it arrives, the 1.5 litre is no more. That’s the case with Renault.
Be efficient. Be huge. Follow neither, you’re not gonna be on top.
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Technical Debrief :: Massa Spin
March 28, 2008What could’ve been an easy 1-2 for Ferrari, was thrown away by Massa. He reportedly lost his rear-end due to hitting a kerb on the entry into a corner. But on seeing the video myself, I cannot convince myself of that reason. I couldn’t see him hitting anything in the corner where he spun.
And the engine note was such that it clearly showed a sudden loss of traction, which can’t be attributed to anything other than too much throttle.
He went in with a definite amount of constant throttle. In the midst of the corner, the rear suddenly snapped away and he lost control of his car. Who else can take the blame for this?
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Posted by Sriram
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