458 Design and Ferrari's wind tunnel issues

Wow, I was blown away by the article.

Interesting, who would think a wind tunnel could be wrong?

 

I can't see it making any difference on a 458. The physical style of a road car far outweighs the aerodymanics. They just use the wind tunnel to do the final tuning. On an F1 car, the entire car's shape is defined by the wind tunnel. The design process in complete opposite. The error difference on a F1 car of be less than 1% to make a second of lost time on track. Multiplied one second by 90 minutes of race time and you are in 15th place.

The relationship between F1 performance and street car performance is nill when it comes to aerodynamics.

Still, it's interesting they found the error. However, it doesn't explain why they were so strong in pre-season testing and then have been so poor in actual racing. If they had bad data when the car was so good, it should have the same bad data when the car went poorly.

 

Physical style for road cars is often dictated by wind tunnel results. Even the lowly C6 Corvette had more than 400 hours of design development time in the wind tunnel.
However for the 458 it depends whether Ferrari designed the car with the help of their wind tunnel or it was designed by Pininfarina and they used their own wind tunnel instead.
CH

 

Yes, but the designer starts first with the design and then it's tuned for optimization in the tunnel -- often with the designer involved in proposed revisions.

Life is a myriad of compromises. When it comes to car design, style wins out over function 99% of the time. In an F1 car, style loses to function 100% of the time. That's the difference.

 

When Luca saw the first version of the new 458 he didn't like the design. It looked too much like the old 430. He told the designers to re-engineer the car so that the side vents by the door would be eliminated. This caused a number of technical problems but the engineering solutions cleaned up the design considerably and allowed some unique characteristic features for the new Italia. The final result was designed to handle more power coming for the revised model.
CH

 

Exactly. Style first, function second when it comes to exotics. Even the McLaren suffers from this.

If you design a car strickly for efficiently and not style, you get something like the Gumpert. Purposeful but not very pretty.

Car styling is always a case of compromises. Looks, the market place, cost, manufacturing, engineering, packaging, strength, safety, driveability, visibility, weight, materials, world regulations, repair considerations, etc. Most people don't understand this and just look at the shape.

I'll give you the perfect example of design compromise on the 458. It's the cutline in the body on the front fenders. This cut is there so that they can have the front be more plastic parts in the front than the F430. This lowers the weight, reduces drag, and cuts the cost. It also lowers the replacement cost in the event of an accident.

The negative is that you have a rather ugly parting line in the fender at an unusual place. The designer's best solution was to try to integrate it with the headlights. It's better, but the line still interrupts the curve of the fender. In short: a design compromise.
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Out in the real world the 458 design even with a compromise here and there still easily eclipses the competition. The 458 may be the last great Ferrari.
CH

 

Totally agree with the first statement. Hope the second statement isn't true!


I was a track a few weeks ago with one 458 in a sea of 430's, Lambo gallardo's, Audi R8's and 10's, Porsche 911 GT3's, etc. The 458 looks even better when in that environment.

 

By reading the autosport article alone, I find it difficult to infer that the 458 design might have been affected by those wind tunnel problems, equally there is no mention either about last year's F1 design being affected. Oh well, they said something abnout the tunnel architecture itself, but vaguely enough as to draw worrying conclusions.

As per the little argument between bdelp and of2worlds, I must agree 100% with bdelp, road cars are "hand" designed, then fine-tuned in the wind tunnel, just the opposite to F1 cars which are virtually born in the wind tunnel.

 

Actually, these days they start first with a set of golf clubs.

 

The problem has nothing to do with an 458.

The problem has to do with the testing ban in F1. So without testing, the F1 teams have to do development with simulators (software) and emulators (scale models* in wind tunnels). It ends up that in order to get reality to agree with simulators and emulators, a team needs to calibrate the software such that it produces the same answers as one would find in real life.

Ferrari's simulators (3D CFD) were not well calibrated, and lead the team down an unproductive aerodynamic development path. Without testing the team did not know how slow they were until the other teams go together for the first race.

(*) a full sized model is still a model in 1:1 scale.

 

To put a finer point on that, the problem was explained as errors in the scaling algorithms. They had used a 50% model last year and changed to a 60% model for 2011. The revisions in the scaling algorithms weren't correct.

 

Thats strange.. my 458 doesn't have these lines.







































Just joking.