Why Mercedes Should Really Be Worried About Red Bull's 'Flexiwing' at Baku
And why Azerbaijan's street circuit is the perfect place for this controversial innovation...
It's all getting a bit feisty, isn't it?
For the first time since 2018, Mercedes aren't in control of either World Championship and for the first time since 2013, Red Bull are back in the driving seat. The Austrian outfit is creating its own engine and stealing Mercedes personnel along with it, and the Hamilton/Verstappen rivalry is beginning to really take shape.
Add to that a good-old technical controversy (we all love one, don't we?), and you have a flammable recipe for an explosive season.
So what exactly are Red Bull up to, why is it genius and why should Mercedes be worried about it; especially in Baku?
Via Google Search
Azerbaijan's street circuit is an incredible hybrid of a track. It's the most brilliantly contrasting on the calendar, and is both a unique challenge for the drivers and a spectacle to watch for us - it's essentially Monaco with a huge 1.6 mile straight plastered onto the back of it.
Ideally, this would require both Monaco-spec wings for the slow, twisty, rotation-dependent middle section, and Monza-spec wings for the extremely high speed section; the two opposite ends of the downforce spectrum.
For this reason that the so-called ‘flexiwings’ controversy could be at its most heavily-loaded (a terrible pun, I know) this weekend. This race is the final one before the FIA introduce the new measuring protocol which is set to kill off Red Bull's new wing concept, but also the track where the biggest advantage can be gained.
Baku and flexible aerodynamic furniture are a match made in an engineer's heaven.
Drawn by Giorgio Piola, via F1.com
During the Spanish GP weekend, Red Bull switched to a lower-concept 'spoon' rear wing, with shallower outboard edges (which produce the most drag-inducing vortices) that increased their straight-line speed. Not that it helped them much, with Lewis winning the race, but crucially this wing also had another hidden drag-reducing mechanism. The onboards showed that on the straights, where the air passes fastest over the car, produces the most downforce and therefore load, the wing moved down and was shaking more than is normal.
If you want to know why exactly this 'aeroelasticity' provides such huge benefits, then you might want to read this article below:
But essentially what it does is stall the rear wing, cutting off large amounts of downforce where downforce isn't needed and making the air do less 'work' (a term physicians love) to get around the car; therefore creating less drag.
At Baku this wing would work normally in the low-speed sections, producing necessarily-large amounts of downforce, but compress when under high loads on the two straights and reduce drag. Which is the perfect mix.
This would allow Red Bull to run an even higher downforce wing than ordinarily, as the downsides to a larger angle of attack would be cancelled out, giving better performance on all parts of the circuit whereas its competitors have more of a compromise to deal with.
Via F1.com
Additionally, more downforce means the car is kinder to its tyres as it slides and scrubs the tread off less, allowing them to run for longer and more aggressively.
Watch out for Red Bull - this is going to be tasty.
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Comments (5)
Have you seen Merc’s front and back wing at Baku? They’re both worse than Red Bull by a long margin.
I have indeed! I posted this before Merc started finding how to do it too, so apologies for that. They’re all at it.
They’ll disappear by France so this is the last weekend of this madness anyway.
Yeh, I think Christian Horner suggested that even Haas and Williams were at it to an extent. The war of words between Wolf and Horner continues...
I was really annoyed when Hamilton complained about flex-gate and the FIA came and banned the technique. Hopefully RedBull can keep Mercedes on their toes this year