Red Bull’s chief technology officer, Adrian Nyey, said if the team’s 2023 minimum aerodynamic growth rate is met “it won’t make much of a difference”.
The team was awarded the minimum aerodynamic development allocation for the following year by winning the Constructors’ Championship. This was further cut after it was confirmed that they were over the budget ceiling in 2021.
In addition to the $7 million fine for that violation, Red Bull’s time and usage figures for wind tunnel and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) testing were also reduced by 10 percent. So 63% of the initial aerodynamic test allocation is allowed, just below 70%, with the 2022 racer Ferrari next lowest at 75%.
“Reducing wind tunnel testing means we can therefore evaluate fewer different parts and different ideas,” Newey said in a video released by the team. If we’re really smart and always wear the right things on the model, it really doesn’t matter much.
The speed at which Red Bull can take new parts from CFD modeling to wind tunnel modeling and then to the actual race car, and how accurately the gains they make will be crucial to how the team copes with the reduced damage. Test assignment. Rival teams have pointed to Red Bull’s fast and responsive development pace as their strength.
The baseline figures provided by F1 are 400 hours of wind tunnel time over 320 races, with no more than two races per day. Red Bull 2023’s limit is 50.4 hours, with the tunnel running at 54 km/h or more, which should result in a development time of less than 202 hours. The tunnel can only be used twice a day above 18 km/h, and each time it does is counted as a classification of runs.
CFD usage is measured in mega-assignment unit hours (MAUh), and the starting point is six of the 2000 different three-dimensional units given to test the scope. A full F1 car can be considered one component, but changes to that design become a new component (called limited aerodynamic test geometry in F1 regulations). Following their penalty, Red Bull will be limited to 1,260 units over 3.78 MAUh CFD hours.
Newey, whose design has taken Red Bull to five constructors’ championships since 2010, predicts their 2022 rivals will provide stiff competition next year.
“Ferrari doesn’t rest,” he said. “They’ll be the type to fix their weak areas. They had a couple of reliability issues, they definitely made a couple of pit wall mistakes. So they will return immediately.
“Obviously, you’ve seen Mercedes start with a car that’s far from the pack and only get to the win in the last race. So we know they’re going to be there. So it’s definitely going to be a tough year.”
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