Thread by @JunaidSamodien_

#AMuS The Red Bull RB18 is the best car of the 2022 Formula 1 season. Because it has become an all-rounder over the course of the year. And because it hardly has any weak points. And because head of technology Adrian Newey was the first to understand bouncing.

Until the summer break, the World Cup was a duel. The Red Bull RB18 and the Ferrari F1-75 drove at eye level. The racetrack determined who had the edge. After the summer break, Red Bull stepped on the gas. Ferrari is only an opponent on a fast lap on Saturday.

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What was once the strength of red cars has turned into its opposite. Now the Red Bull is functioning in a large working window and Ferrari is walking a fine line with the setup of its car.

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Red Bull already had a few jokers up their sleeve when the season started, but they were only able to be played many months later. For example the weight. Red Bull started the year ten kilograms heavier than Ferrari. Now there is a tie. That's three and a half tenths.

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For example, the top speed: The deficit on the straights drove Ferrari so hard that they looked for downforce in the floor, no matter what, to reduce the drag of the wings.

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But that was at the expense of aerodynamic stability. Since the new floor came in France, the worm has been in there.

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Red Bull was also the first team to get the bouncing problem under control. With the first big upgrade on the last day of testing in Bahrain, the rocking in the fast passages had practically disappeared. That gave the engineers the freedom to work on the car.

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The competition first had to get rid of the bouncing in order to recognize the strengths and weaknesses of their cars. At Mercedes, that lasted until the Spanish GP. It's a luxury to have someone like Adrian Newey in the ranks.

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The 63-year-old star designer still has the most comprehensive understanding of a racing car. He is obsessed and has been in the business for 42 years. So he wasn't surprised that the Ground Effect cars carry a birth defect in their DNA that the engineers had been thinking...

[....] about four decades ago. They attach themselves to the road with increasing speed and let go again when they hit the ground. This creates an up and down movement, as if the cars were driving on a mogul track.

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Newey was already confronted with bouncing at his first Formula 1 station. Actually a bit before that, as he reveals: "I studied ground effect aerodynamics and my last project during my studies was the application in sports cars."

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"I was looking for an internship and wrote to the teams that drove in the 1980 season. Most of them didn't respond. Harvey Postlethwaite, who was working at Fittipaldi at the time, then offered me a job as an apprentice in his aerodynamics department."

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"As it turned out, I was the head of the department that day. It was just me."

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The man who is responsible for twelve world champion cars remembers the Fittipaldi days and the lessons he learned from bouncing: "I had a basic understanding of the ground effect principle and also the phenomenon that we saw 40 years as "porpoising" or "bouncing".

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"So I guessed what was in store for us. At most I was surprised by the extent. Actually, everyone should have known. It's a phenomenon that's in the genes of these cars."

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Bouncing is one of those cases where brainwork and experience could still help. "It's difficult to translate this problem into a model. The model is fixed in the wind tunnel so you can't simulate it. But there were ways to predict it and we got a handle on it relatively quickly."

" With our upgrade on the last day By the time the Bahrain test was over, we had contained it to the point where it wasn't bothersome."

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First of all, rocking is an aerodynamically generated problem, as Newey explains: "The problem with ground effect cars is that it encourages you to drive at the limit of aerodynamic stability. If you push that limit, you get bouncing."

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"The right one Finding a compromise between downforce and bouncing is not easy. Our first attempt was not stable enough." But it's not just the aerodynamics that are to blame for the bouncing. What many of his colleagues only recognized much later, Newey already knew from his...

[....] own experience. "Back at Fittipaldi, we experimented with rubber springs. Harvey loved those things, but that only made the bouncing worse."

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"The car rocked so hard on the home straight that the front wheels lifted off. It was a good lesson for that, too the mechanics of the car play a role." The lesson from bouncing is that ground effect cars can never be driven in the theoretically best configuration.

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"These cars demand too many compromises. The trick is to find the best between vehicle height, downforce and bouncing. 40 years ago, of course, we didn't have the simulation tools we have today. We had to use our understanding more."

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"On the other hand, the rules offered more freedom. The Aprons and the design of the tunnels under the car gave us more efficient ways to solve the problem at the time."

STORY IN GERMAN auto-motor-und-sport.de/formel-1/red-b…