Quote:
Originally Posted by F87source
If you watched fp2 during the interview horner said they weren't worried about mercs suspension because they didn't think it was illegal.
And technically it's not illegal, because f1 cars are allowed to have suspension. This means if you smartly tune the damper settings it's progressive until it hits a certain load - the down force you would only see under high speeds that only occur during the straights, at which point the damper completely gives out and bottoms out allowing the rear to squat and stall the diffuser dropping off all the drag characteristics a high rake car would have. So essentially it's just how the damper is tuned not actually active suspension because nothing is active. This is actually insanely hard to do (tuning the dampers alone is hard as hell), and alot of suspension geometry needs to be taken into account when the car squats. So that's probably where they spent their development tokens - so smart... Not going to be easy to copy because the squat F's up suspension geometry alot, and it must be taken into consideration. I'm not sure if you can even implement it properly without alot of suspension changes and that needs a token. But we shall see, it's also gonna take alot of development time so aka sacrificing next year's car so let's see how many teams are gonna copy.
So what Mercedes is doing is in essense it's the reverse of what a street car spring does (if you have a good spring setup - I had this style of spring and damper on my frs so when it was lowered it would still have suspension compliance but it wouldn't compress enough to cause rub) where the street springs start super soft and get firmer as you go through it's travel. And this is stupid hard to achieve, especially if you have to calculate the exact loads that are needed.
Overall this is an engineers wet dream, like wow this is insanely clever and absolutely amazing. Me personally I'm geeking the heck out over this design. Like holy crap it's awesome, almost as awesome as das. So simple yet so ingenious.
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Interesting how merc is using variable rate heave springs and matching preload to aero load on the straights. It explains why they have been running such large rear wings for the last few races. I have no doubt Newey would have identified this pretty quickly, his absence certainly had an impact on RBR. I’m curious how weather/elevation dependent this is. High speed corners would negate some of the advantage and they probably have to max the PU and adjust gearing but it’s working so far.
Merc got the math correct on this, I can see other teams attempting to emulate this with spectacular failure.