Great video, but there is another fine point you did not mention - earliest and modern wings are mounted on the chassis so they require stiffer springs and dampers which reduce mechanical grip. Lotus 49 and IIRC Chaparral had them mounted on suspension uprights so aerodynamic loads acted only on tyres, and springs and dampers could remain softer. FIA soon banned it (in early '69).
It also depends on the Series, on Formula SAE you can (or at least could till few years ago) have the rear wing with 4 flexible mounting points, 2 on the chassis for balance and 2 directly on the wheel hubs. I'm not sure if there's another series that would allow such things, but there might be.
@@TrolledBy Safety- Graham Hill had a massive shunt at Spanish GP because of wing failure IIRC. The spars they had wings mounted on were tiny, and I mean tiny, and unbraced- something like that was bound to happen. Link to the image: www.mrof1engineering.co.uk/images/cars/big%20cars/feb11/Lotus49B_69.5.jpg
@@TrolledBy Oh, if you're still curious, it's likely because it was a dangerous arrangement. When cars have wings attached to the chassis, they can have sturdy and fixed supports in order to keep the wing safely attached, and the suspension has to be hard to take the load (so the body doesn't move as much). That also means you can't add more downforce than the suspension can't handle. While if you mount it directly on the wheels, the supports have to be flexible or have joints (which makes them weak), even more so because the car suspension will be softer. And there's no limit to the amount the car can handle, you keep adding it untill it breaks. That proved deadly because Colin Chapman was willing to do anything to reduce the car's weight, even use weaker supports. One of his cars crashed (I don't remember which) but this was banned shortly after.
Rather than starting with a Lotus F1 car, a minute or so into this video I'm looking at a picture of a trout and hearing a story about a thought experiment conducted by a scientist. Subscribed.
Jim hall had wings on earlier cars including the active aero mechanism although they more closely related to a spoiler when used for cornering. Fun fact on the 2E which is the predecessor to the car you showed in 67. Jim had already started to move the radiators from the nose to the sides to allow for a front duct that channeled air up over the nose sort of like a front diffuser. The active rear spoiler was tied into this by closing the duct with a plate to cut drag and keep balance. You could quite easily do a full video on all the tricks Jim Hall had with automatic transmissions to the first Fan Car
It is documented that, during the construction of his "Golden Submarine" racer, Barney Oldfield suggested to Harry Miller that they might mount an airplane wing to the car "upside down" in order to press the tires harder onto the ground. In 1916! They never tried it, but the idea has been around a LONG time.
Supermodifieds in North America have had some nice wings on them over the years. When you have 800 plus horsepower in an 1800 hundred pound car it's best not to take flight.
Wow. This video was MUCH better than I thought it would be. My favourites are: Rumpier Trophenwagen, and, Germany was NOT allowed to use piston engines, so invented rockets.....NASA should be proud!!!! ...the law of unintended consequences🤦♂
Excellent, as usual. What do you think about the 1938 Auto Union Rekordwagen in which Rosemeyer got killed? I understand that the whole shape of this car was designed to take advantage of the Bernoulli's principle ... Thanks.
I did a video about the Auto Union Type D which was introduced in 1938, but Rosemeyer crashed in a Type C record car. He wasn't killed by the car but lost control because of a gust of wind. I will visit the crash site in 3 weeks and will do a video about it to explain all the details. The car had a drag optimised bodywork which unfortunately increased the side wind sensitivity. You can find more info on the topic in these videos: ruclips.net/video/0FJ3AQk2vwQ/видео.html ruclips.net/video/iqb0KxD16Rw/видео.html ruclips.net/video/oE_ybQOE02k/видео.html
@@BSport320 Great! Thanks. Yes, it was a Type C. www.vanderbiltcupraces.com/images/made/images/blog/Scan-684_edited-2dddd_620_390.jpg; i.imgur.com/Qbnul5c.jpg
I can't believe how little about Michael May is known...I mean, I never heard from him 'till today, and even when some prewar cars had a form of wings, I think theirs was the "true" beggining of today's world of aerodynamics, right?
Michael May was later an F1 driver for a brief period of time, then worked as an engineer for Porsche and Ferrari in the engine department. He's sometimes credited with inspiring Ferrari to use a wing in F1 for the first time in the late 60s, although others were the inspiration for the other constructors to do so.
that's a good video. Engines illegal but rocket are fine. Kind of reminds me of the 1960's land speed when they finally allowed rocket and jet powered entries.
As he said in the video they gave it a large negative angle of attack to try and get downforce. This method is obviously not the best and I wouldn't be surprised if the flow separated on the bottom of the wing and it made pretty minimal downforce.
@@alexanderklenk2195 ah, now I get it thinking about it some more, didn't make sense at first because that's literally the worst possible way to generate downforce with that wing. Interesting nonetheless.
@@BSport320 Was the downforce figure you mentioned theoretical or as-measured? Because from the images, it seems the driver's helmet would wreck most of the downforce!
Interesting, although it doesn't answer my main question - and that is: why did it take them so long to put wings on early F1 cars? It seems like the obvious thing to do in retrospect and yet it still took them almost 20 years! I wonder what the reasons for that were.
If I had to guess, it's because the thought process of the time was more power = more speed. Even Lotus' light racecars were thought to be revolutionary even though in retrospect it seems so obvious. Could even be possible that people like Enzo Ferrari were lobbying against aero because their pride and joy was having the most powerful engines. Imagine that one dude rolling up in qualifying with a wing and doing 2 seconds faster than everyone else so he gets lobbied out of the race by other competitors.
@@TrolledBy Ironically Ferrari and Brabham beat Lotus to the wing game. Everybody uses the 49 as a reference as the Gold Leaf car looked so outrageous, but they weren't the first. Oh, and this excellent video skips that the high wing(s) were banned in the middle of the Monaco GP weekend, so you'll see images of both high winged, and the 'spoiler' 49 car from the same weekend.
@@peterf1 Brabham were the first to bring wings to F1 in 1967. A year later they were joined by Ferrari and Lotus all sporting wings and aero stubs at the Spa circuit. The real irony being that in 1960 Enzo Ferrari had actually told one of his race drivers at Le Mans, "Aerodynamics are for people who can’t build engines."
Interesting video! It seems like, overall, downforce were quickly understood by engineers, yet aero is so much more complex nowadays and somehow nobody looked at underfloor effects until relatively recently. I wonder what f1 engineers would make today if 2007/8 crazy aero regulations were back
Also for me as F1 aero designer, 2007-2008 were the most complex cars and shapes by far. In my time at McLaren I frequently went down to the hall to have a close look at the 2008 car and tried to redesign these complex shapes to train myself. Today's cars are quite simple compared to that, but of course today there is more knowledge about complex flow structures.
@@BSport320 I've been thinking for a while that eventually F1 regulations will have covered almost every possible style of aero package you could conceive of, and at that point there would never be "new" regulations, just a cycle between different formats. F1 should curtail the problem of long term dominance of a single team with yearly swapping between significantly different racing formats across a four year cycle. "Theoretcially" you'd never allow one team have the advantage more than once every four years. In my opinion F1 also needs to add the possibility of refueling back to really accomplish that, the intense driving style of Senna requires frequent tire changes, so that would have to be included as part of the format, for that matter just swapping between refueling and non-refueling would almost guarantee you'd never have the same champion two years in a row because they're almost complete opposite driving styles.
Colin Chapman wasn't even the first in F1 with a wing. Also he didn't invent the ground effects car. He's more like Steve Jobs, not so much the world's best engineer, but the best in recognizing other's ideas and implementing them. Who am I to criticize that? But it's simply a different kind of genius.
He wasn't even the first to put a wing on a Lotus! Jim Clark needed some extra cornering speed in a Tasman Series race once, remembered the Chaparral, and so he and a mechanic chucked a helicopter propeller onto the back of the car before reporting it to Colin.
Good history, but skipped over wings being applied to oval track sprint cars at the end of the '50s and subsequent adoption by short track stock cars in the early '60s, well before any appeared on the Chaparral.
But America invented down-force on cars.... Americans told me so ;) I honestly wish i could have been alive in the days or travel back to see some of the advancements. I do hope we see such a boom in human development once more in my life time, Yes we had computer technology, but cars, planes, trains, ships! It was so very cool. :)
Totally flawed theory. The bird doesn't need 1 horsepower of its own as its the wind on the underside of the wing that lifts it. I kite surf but don't posses 1hp of strength. The curved top does not create the lift but bleeds the stalled, drag, air off the back of the wing. Curving the underside simply creates a scoop like flaps on a modern plane. Its the angle of incidence that lifts the plane, or bird, and the profile reduces drag increasing efficiency. Thicker section for lower speeds as they have a very steep angle of incidence thinner or laminar flow for high speeds.
We are talking about almost 100 year old cars here. These were quick projects within a couple of weeks and months. They didn't start all rockets at once, instead they started them in groups. And even then not all of them worked. So it was quite an achievement to set a new land speed record only by presenting a car which was built in 6 weeks.
Reminds me of a dirt hill climb event I watched on one of the ESPN channels about 20 years. They had a truck class where at least the bodies had to be as purchased. One of the trucks to show up was the 2nd Gen Ford Explorer (had a proper IFS, but still roll over prone) and another was a Chevy S10 pick up……with a bit of a spoiler on the back, which should have been illegal for the class. Well, the Explorer driver protested it and the S10 was allowed to keep it‘s spoiler, which understandably pissed off the guy with the Explorer. One hand feature the Explorers had for multiple generations is a window in the rear hatch that could be opened separately from the hatch……it also happed to open up fully at the right angle so that it could make a pretty decent spoiler in it’s own right all while being OEM equipment on all Explorers! Well the Explorer’s Driver opened the hatch glass and put down a better time than the S10 with the technically illegal spoiler. Since that did not set well with the S10’s driver, he protested and won🤬
Wings destroyed motor racing They are simply mobile advertising that cost massive amounts of money and are very dangerous. Just ask Roland Ratzenberger
A video at 1 am. Very nice before sleeping
Never knew about the Opel rocket cars! Enjoyed every minute. :)
What a machine!
I just learned about them yesterday :)
But have you already heard about Opel rocket motorcycle?
Great video, but there is another fine point you did not mention - earliest and modern wings are mounted on the chassis so they require stiffer springs and dampers which reduce mechanical grip. Lotus 49 and IIRC Chaparral had them mounted on suspension uprights so aerodynamic loads acted only on tyres, and springs and dampers could remain softer. FIA soon banned it (in early '69).
Yes, very true. This was more a general overview about wing profiles and how they got onto cars.
Wing mountings on cars could be a separate video.
It also depends on the Series, on Formula SAE you can (or at least could till few years ago) have the rear wing with 4 flexible mounting points, 2 on the chassis for balance and 2 directly on the wheel hubs. I'm not sure if there's another series that would allow such things, but there might be.
What was the reasoning form banning suspension mounted spoilers? Was there a safety concern or was it just too good to be allowed?
@@TrolledBy Safety- Graham Hill had a massive shunt at Spanish GP because of wing failure IIRC. The spars they had wings mounted on were tiny, and I mean tiny, and unbraced- something like that was bound to happen. Link to the image: www.mrof1engineering.co.uk/images/cars/big%20cars/feb11/Lotus49B_69.5.jpg
@@TrolledBy Oh, if you're still curious, it's likely because it was a dangerous arrangement.
When cars have wings attached to the chassis, they can have sturdy and fixed supports in order to keep the wing safely attached, and the suspension has to be hard to take the load (so the body doesn't move as much). That also means you can't add more downforce than the suspension can't handle.
While if you mount it directly on the wheels, the supports have to be flexible or have joints (which makes them weak), even more so because the car suspension will be softer. And there's no limit to the amount the car can handle, you keep adding it untill it breaks.
That proved deadly because Colin Chapman was willing to do anything to reduce the car's weight, even use weaker supports. One of his cars crashed (I don't remember which) but this was banned shortly after.
Came for motorsports, stayed for the history lesson.
GJ, i liked it a lot.
Glad you enjoyed it!
The wings on the Rak 2 being cambered the wrong way is quite funny to me
They knew what they were doing back then ngl, but they also didn't
Yes, they were no aircraft engineers but had heard of something.
That Opel Rak 2 is a gorgeous thing
It really is!
Thanks, Lilienthal's work seems underappreciated.
Rather than starting with a Lotus F1 car, a minute or so into this video I'm looking at a picture of a trout and hearing a story about a thought experiment conducted by a scientist. Subscribed.
Welcome onboard!
Jim hall had wings on earlier cars including the active aero mechanism although they more closely related to a spoiler when used for cornering. Fun fact on the 2E which is the predecessor to the car you showed in 67. Jim had already started to move the radiators from the nose to the sides to allow for a front duct that channeled air up over the nose sort of like a front diffuser. The active rear spoiler was tied into this by closing the duct with a plate to cut drag and keep balance. You could quite easily do a full video on all the tricks Jim Hall had with automatic transmissions to the first Fan Car
True, Jim Hall is enough content for a separate video.
Great old cars with first wings! Nice presentation...thanks!
Excellent video! I enjoyed it very much.
The Rak 2 must have been an absolutely incredible sight
Thanks a lot!
Great little story with a lot of funny stories 😄👍🏁 Great job! 👏
Glad you liked it!
Great knollege, great research, exceptionell qualiry. Thank you!
Glad you enjoyed it!
9:40 active aero AND protection from the rain. No wonder the Porsche works team got envious.
I was thinking that the wing would have been great for keeping the sun off the driver!
all the development is amazing. 😊
What an informative little presentation, thank you
Glad it was helpful!
Great insights, well researched and presented. Thank you.
Glad you enjoyed it!
Very well done, thanks!
Glad you liked it!
Great little channel. You earned another subscriber.
Awesome, thank you!
@@BSport320 thank you for the history lessons!
Great presentation. Thank you.
Glad it was helpful!
Fascinating and really informative.
Glad you enjoyed it
Excellent video, well done! : )
Thank you! Cheers!
Your channel is a wonder to motorsport fans like me!
Thanks!
It is documented that, during the construction of his "Golden Submarine" racer, Barney Oldfield suggested to Harry Miller that they might mount an airplane wing to the car "upside down" in order to press the tires harder onto the ground. In 1916! They never tried it, but the idea has been around a LONG time.
Thanks for sharing! The Opel guys just didn't get the upside down thing right....
Great Vid! :)
Supermodifieds in North America have had some nice wings on them over the years. When you have 800 plus horsepower in an 1800 hundred pound car it's best not to take flight.
Wow. This video was MUCH better than I thought it would be.
My favourites are:
Rumpier Trophenwagen,
and,
Germany was NOT allowed to use piston engines, so invented rockets.....NASA should be proud!!!!
...the law of unintended consequences🤦♂
Excellent, as usual. What do you think about the 1938 Auto Union Rekordwagen in which Rosemeyer got killed? I understand that the whole shape of this car was designed to take advantage of the Bernoulli's principle ... Thanks.
I'm pretty sure he's already made a video about this
I did a video about the Auto Union Type D which was introduced in 1938, but Rosemeyer crashed in a Type C record car.
He wasn't killed by the car but lost control because of a gust of wind. I will visit the crash site in 3 weeks and will do a video about it to explain all the details.
The car had a drag optimised bodywork which unfortunately increased the side wind sensitivity.
You can find more info on the topic in these videos:
ruclips.net/video/0FJ3AQk2vwQ/видео.html
ruclips.net/video/iqb0KxD16Rw/видео.html
ruclips.net/video/oE_ybQOE02k/видео.html
@@BSport320 Great! Thanks. Yes, it was a Type C.
www.vanderbiltcupraces.com/images/made/images/blog/Scan-684_edited-2dddd_620_390.jpg; i.imgur.com/Qbnul5c.jpg
Great vid!
I can't believe how little about Michael May is known...I mean, I never heard from him 'till today, and even when some prewar cars had a form of wings, I think theirs was the "true" beggining of today's world of aerodynamics, right?
Michael May was also involved in the creation of the Ferrari 250 GTO spoiler.
Michael May was later an F1 driver for a brief period of time, then worked as an engineer for Porsche and Ferrari in the engine department. He's sometimes credited with inspiring Ferrari to use a wing in F1 for the first time in the late 60s, although others were the inspiration for the other constructors to do so.
that's a good video. Engines illegal but rocket are fine. Kind of reminds me of the 1960's land speed when they finally allowed rocket and jet powered entries.
6:59 - Wouldn't this wing produce lift instead of downforce?
As he said in the video they gave it a large negative angle of attack to try and get downforce. This method is obviously not the best and I wouldn't be surprised if the flow separated on the bottom of the wing and it made pretty minimal downforce.
@@alexanderklenk2195 ah, now I get it thinking about it some more, didn't make sense at first because that's literally the worst possible way to generate downforce with that wing. Interesting nonetheless.
Yo, the dude had DRS in 1956?!?
Yes, you could also call it active aero.
@@BSport320 Impressive stuff.
@@BSport320 Was the downforce figure you mentioned theoretical or as-measured? Because from the images, it seems the driver's helmet would wreck most of the downforce!
3:21 you mention downforce during the invention of the curved wing. I think you mean lift.
History FTW
scottish man. porsche badge. bavarian blood and soil. ❤
Interesting, although it doesn't answer my main question - and that is: why did it take them so long to put wings on early F1 cars? It seems like the obvious thing to do in retrospect and yet it still took them almost 20 years! I wonder what the reasons for that were.
I was wondering why they didn’t use them on the Grand Prix cars in the 1930s. There were quite some modern aero solutions... still researching
If I had to guess, it's because the thought process of the time was more power = more speed. Even Lotus' light racecars were thought to be revolutionary even though in retrospect it seems so obvious. Could even be possible that people like Enzo Ferrari were lobbying against aero because their pride and joy was having the most powerful engines. Imagine that one dude rolling up in qualifying with a wing and doing 2 seconds faster than everyone else so he gets lobbied out of the race by other competitors.
@@TrolledBy Ironically Ferrari and Brabham beat Lotus to the wing game. Everybody uses the 49 as a reference as the Gold Leaf car looked so outrageous, but they weren't the first. Oh, and this excellent video skips that the high wing(s) were banned in the middle of the Monaco GP weekend, so you'll see images of both high winged, and the 'spoiler' 49 car from the same weekend.
@@peterf1 Brabham were the first to bring wings to F1 in 1967. A year later they were joined by Ferrari and Lotus all sporting wings and aero stubs at the Spa circuit. The real irony being that in 1960 Enzo Ferrari had actually told one of his race drivers at Le Mans, "Aerodynamics are for people who can’t build engines."
@@BSport320 "Aerodynamics are for people who can’t build engines." - Enzo Ferrari
The dude who put a wing on top of that Porsche basically created DRS system, that wing was udjustable.
Happened 95 years ago today!
Good job lads i cam fae buchan
Interesting video! It seems like, overall, downforce were quickly understood by engineers, yet aero is so much more complex nowadays and somehow nobody looked at underfloor effects until relatively recently. I wonder what f1 engineers would make today if 2007/8 crazy aero regulations were back
👍
It is really weird that the Opel guys did not invert that wing. One just thinks: ???!!!
I still consider 2007-2008 the height of F1 aerodynamics.
Do you think they’re somehow progressing backwards since then? The height of f1 aerodynamics is today
@@uninsulatedshrimp5518 The entire point of the 2022 regulations was to hinder downforce.
Also for me as F1 aero designer, 2007-2008 were the most complex cars and shapes by far.
In my time at McLaren I frequently went down to the hall to have a close look at the 2008 car and tried to redesign these complex shapes to train myself.
Today's cars are quite simple compared to that, but of course today there is more knowledge about complex flow structures.
@@BSport320 I've been thinking for a while that eventually F1 regulations will have covered almost every possible style of aero package you could conceive of, and at that point there would never be "new" regulations, just a cycle between different formats.
F1 should curtail the problem of long term dominance of a single team with yearly swapping between significantly different racing formats across a four year cycle. "Theoretcially" you'd never allow one team have the advantage more than once every four years.
In my opinion F1 also needs to add the possibility of refueling back to really accomplish that, the intense driving style of Senna requires frequent tire changes, so that would have to be included as part of the format, for that matter just swapping between refueling and non-refueling would almost guarantee you'd never have the same champion two years in a row because they're almost complete opposite driving styles.
@@uninsulatedshrimp5518 They have gone backwards because of FIA changing regulations every few years.
Good luck hearing from English F1 presenters that wings on cars were not invented by Colin Chapman :D
I’ve been banging on about it for years
Collin Chapman invented the wheel you know...
Colin Chapman wasn't even the first in F1 with a wing. Also he didn't invent the ground effects car. He's more like Steve Jobs, not so much the world's best engineer, but the best in recognizing other's ideas and implementing them. Who am I to criticize that? But it's simply a different kind of genius.
He wasn't even the first to put a wing on a Lotus! Jim Clark needed some extra cornering speed in a Tasman Series race once, remembered the Chaparral, and so he and a mechanic chucked a helicopter propeller onto the back of the car before reporting it to Colin.
The Opel Rak looks silly and cool at the same time.
OUTLAWS, using Air! Been there, done that, on my Streetluge.
Rocket Man
Good history, but skipped over wings being applied to oval track sprint cars at the end of the '50s and subsequent adoption by short track stock cars in the early '60s, well before any appeared on the Chaparral.
10:01 that's probably by Porsche people are considered snobby.
But America invented down-force on cars.... Americans told me so ;)
I honestly wish i could have been alive in the days or travel back to see some of the advancements. I do hope we see such a boom in human development once more in my life time, Yes we had computer technology, but cars, planes, trains, ships! It was so very cool. :)
👌🏻👌🏻👌🏻
I always thought Jim Hall was the first, in fact as you say the story goes way back.
I just added a comment about this above.
Americans are brainwashed by their education system to believe they invented everything. not your fault, just the way it's always been.
1 horse produces 1.7hp I think, that’s what was wrong with that equation 🐴
Can't they reach 4 hp?
Flight and aerodynamics heavily connected which have rise to our current world. Although, drones use non of that.
Thanks for the bed time story...Zzzzzzz "flying on a wing and a prayer"...Zzzzzzz
One horse can produce a lot more than one horsepower.....indeed I can produce more than one horsepower
Farman a6a super sport had "wings" in 1922
Totally flawed theory. The bird doesn't need 1 horsepower of its own as its the wind on the underside of the wing that lifts it. I kite surf but don't posses 1hp of strength. The curved top does not create the lift but bleeds the stalled, drag, air off the back of the wing. Curving the underside simply creates a scoop like flaps on a modern plane. Its the angle of incidence that lifts the plane, or bird, and the profile reduces drag increasing efficiency. Thicker section for lower speeds as they have a very steep angle of incidence thinner or laminar flow for high speeds.
It's insane to think that even those rocket cars don't reach the top speed of F1 cars. And certainly have nowhere near the same corver capabilities
We are talking about almost 100 year old cars here. These were quick projects within a couple of weeks and months. They didn't start all rockets at once, instead they started them in groups. And even then not all of them worked. So it was quite an achievement to set a new land speed record only by presenting a car which was built in 6 weeks.
10:01 politics ruled in racing, even then...
Reminds me of a dirt hill climb event I watched on one of the ESPN channels about 20 years. They had a truck class where at least the bodies had to be as purchased. One of the trucks to show up was the 2nd Gen Ford Explorer (had a proper IFS, but still roll over prone) and another was a Chevy S10 pick up……with a bit of a spoiler on the back, which should have been illegal for the class. Well, the Explorer driver protested it and the S10 was allowed to keep it‘s spoiler, which understandably pissed off the guy with the Explorer. One hand feature the Explorers had for multiple generations is a window in the rear hatch that could be opened separately from the hatch……it also happed to open up fully at the right angle so that it could make a pretty decent spoiler in it’s own right all while being OEM equipment on all Explorers! Well the Explorer’s Driver opened the hatch glass and put down a better time than the S10 with the technically illegal spoiler. Since that did not set well with the S10’s driver, he protested and won🤬
The voice over is not a match
Nah. Red Bull actually gives you wiiiiings 😉😉
Wings destroyed motor racing
They are simply mobile advertising that cost massive amounts of money and are very dangerous. Just ask Roland Ratzenberger