NSSN Correspondent

Renault

PARIS — Renault and Honda spent a lot of time refining the aerodynamics of their 2008 cars. After shakedown tests, both teams held official launches to show their new cars to the media.
Last year’s Renault R27 was slow because the team had fundamental flaws in its wind tunnel program.
“A lot of pieces that we were developing and putting on the car were actually not performing on the track the way they would perform in the wind tunnel,” Technical Director Bob Bell said after the ING Renault R28 was officially unveiled at Renault’s exhibition center in Paris Thursday. “So we had to rectify the techniques that we used to better simulate in the wind tunnel what was happening on the track.”
The team recognized the faults a year ago in the first tests of the R27 and eventually traced them back to the 2006 car.
Bell said that some of the tricks used to make the air think that it is passing over a real car as opposed to a sub-scale model in the wind tunnel turned out to be no longer valid for the extent to which Renault had pushed the performance of the car.
“We made the decision that we would put the majority of our effort into understanding what our problems were,” Bell said of the 2007 season. “And that had to be done and dealt with long before we decided which bits we should design for the ’07 or the ’08 car. By about midyear, we had a pretty good idea what the issues were, and at that point it was pretty obvious that we had to put all our effort into the ’08 car and much less on the ’07 car.”

Honda

BRACKLEY, Great Britain — Honda has focused intensely on aerodynamics to make its new RA108 aerodynamically friendly.
“The difficulty with last year’s car was that it produced a lot of downforce but it was in a very aggressive way,” team principal Ross Brawn explained at the launch of the RA108 at Honda’s F1 factory Tuesday.
“The focus on this car has been to make sure we produce the aero downforce in a more friendly way, a more usable way. We have also slimmed down the chassis, and changed some of the layout for the car to give it more potential, particularly with aero development in the future, because it is going to be a very intensive season of development for us.”
CEO Nick Fry said that the design concept is entirely formed around the aerodynamic shape.
“The cars that we have designed in the past, certainly in 2007, have been probably a not very good compromise between all the different engineering factors,” he explained.
“For this year’s car, we told the aero team to tell us what they wanted in terms of shape, and then we made sure that the mechanical and structural sides work within that.”
Thus the RA108 is a dedicated aero design because that is where the vast majority of the performance comes from.
“That does not mean that we have compromised in other areas to any great extent,” Fry said. “But what it does mean is that we have had to try harder and work harder, and we have had to wait longer for the first car to be completed.”