I see it as a small flap that opens up and it speeds up the cars by a large margin. How does something so small like a flap provide that much of a boost?
In: Engineering
Generally down force on a car equals drag. So the teams have to find the right balance for the track. But when they open the rear wing with DRS, they reduce a lot of the drag on the car. Combine that with the slipstream of the car in front and you can go a lot faster thanks to the reduced drag.
It reduces drag. At those speeds less drag is significant and can allow the car to go 6+ mph faster.
The higher the speed the more effective an aero gain is.
In corners the down force provided by the rear wing allows it to corner faster than if the rear wing was not there.
on straights the car does not need as much down force and the air pushes against the rear wing slowing the car down as it blocks the air flow. DRS opens the rear wing and allows the air to pass through without hitting the rear wing and allows the car to go faster
On top of all the other great answers, air resistance increases as the square of the speed. If you drive twice as fast you have four times the air resistance. These cars are driving 200mph, so they generate 16 times the air resistance as when they are going normal driving speed of 50 mph. That small flap has a major effect
Can you provide an example of what “such a large margin” means to you?
A typical F1 car can do over 200 mph on a straightaway. The use of the DRS increases top speed by maybe 10 mph at most – which is a 5% increase.
In any case, the reason it can provide even that much of a benefit is just that it’s impossible for the wing to produce downforce without producing drag. The limitation on F1 cars’ top speed is aerodynamics — which is true for pretty much everything that goes fast. You need the downforce from the wing during maneuvering, not on straightaways, so the ability to modify the aerodynamics to reduce drag when you don’t need the downforce to corner is a huge benefit.
One reason it might look like a bigger boost in absolute terms than it actually is, is that F1 cars are at most 5.63 meters long. If you get a 10 mph boost from deploying DRS, and you were already right behind another driver, that allows you to travel their entire car length in 1.26 seconds (10 mph = 4.47 m/s). So to go from right behind them to right in front of them only takes twice that – 2.5 seconds.
Put your hand out your car window while driving on the highway with your palm facing forward. The resistance you feel is drag, and at 60mph/100kmh it’s pretty significant. Now turn your palm flat to the ground, and feel how much easier it is to hold your hand there. Now imaging the same thing with 10x the surface area designed to *maximize* drag (more or less) while closed and minimize drag when open, triple your speed, which makes it 8x more dramatic, and that’s DRS.
Imagine holding out a board or sheet of metal the size of that flap, outside of a moving car, flat side into the wind. At 50kph/30mph, it won’t be too bad; you’ll be able to hang on to it. At 100kph/60mph, it will be 4x as difficult; probably getting to the point where you aren’t going to be able to hold it anymore.
At 300kph/180mph, the force on that board is experiencing 36x as much force as it did at 50kph/30mph. That is a lot of force from drag. If you then turn the sheet so that the narrow edge is in the wind, you’ll still have a lot of drag, but it’ll be far less than it was.
it’s wild how a tiny flap can make such a big diffrence. it’s all about aerodynamics man. when it opens it reduces drag and allows the car to cut through air better. basically turning it into a supercharged bullet for that moment. kinda like having a turbo on your bike or something. small changes can make huge impacts in racing
F1 cars are a balance between top speed and downforce. If you look at the stats for many of the races you’ll notice that the fastest cars often have the slowest top-speed. This is because they have sacrificed top speed for downforce.
Downforce glues the car to the track and helps breaking an accelerating, so the cars are better in the corners.
Wings though come with a drag penalty. The more wing you have on the car the more drag and the cars gets slower.
As an F1 car gets faster the wings produce more downforce as there’s more air moving over the wings. Because of this once an F1 car is at top speed the rear wing isn’t as necessary anymore.
So if you could deactivate it you would get more top speed. That is what DRS does, it neutralizes the rear wing which reduces drag and increases the cars top speed by around 5-10km/h.
I’m not sure if this is ELI5 enough and also I go over the surrounding topics as well but I numbered each area if you want me to explain a part better or simpler
1. it’s important to understand how much downforce the cars produce first. Basically the cars are designed like upside down airplanes. We don’t want them to fly in the air as they speed up, we want them to be sucked to the ground so they go as fast as possible around corners and such.
2. Whats theorized but very difficult to actually produce due to engine engineering, is that the cars produce enough downforce that if they were upside down (and that downforce was now keeping them in the air instead of on the ground), they could basically drive up side down at around 120 mph.
3. If you think about this it’s actually very simple in a way at least to explain. All they have to do is create more downforce than their weight. If the total weight of car and driver is 1500 lbs, then all they need to produce is 1500lbs of downforce. And then flip that upside down.
4. That was a little bit of a side-track but I think it helps to show just how much downforce the cars generate with their aerodynamics.
5. Think of air as water instead. As you move something quickly through water, there starts to become a resistance on the object because of how much water it’s displacing.
6. This is the same with air. The more air they displace with their aero, the more resistance there is on the car.
7. Most of the aero on those cars is designed to allow the car to go fast through the corners. Well you don’t need that on a straight, but you can’t just take something off the car on the straights and put it back on in the corners. So they created a way to kind of do that with the rear wing. They lose downforce when they use DRS but also lose the resistance that it caused as well. They still have enough downforce that it makes them move quicker until they get to a corner.
Latest Answers