Tuesday 30 November 2010

HQ Wallpappers - Red Bull

New download available on Downloads page - High Quality Wallpappers (RedBull F1 2010)

2010 Champion, Vettel - In Berlin with his Formula 1 car

Set up your F1 car V3: Height, Brakes, Gearbox

Height - When a car travels close to the ground, the air rushing between the underside and the road creates a vacuum effect that helps to suck the car onto the tarmac. The step reduces the amount of undercar area that is situated close to the track, thus reducing overall downforce. The actual thickness of this gap must be closely controlled - of the order of millimetres - and the suspension and tyre squash must be taken into account. As the car pitches and rolls under braking, acceleration and cornering, the ride height - and therefore downforce - at the four corners of the car varies. Cars are nowadays set very stiff to take account of this and help prevent any rotation of the car. A formula 1 car starts with 170kg of fuel and burn it off over the course of the entire race.  With F1 cars dry weight just 610Kg this is now a substantial proportion of the cars weight.  This extra weight will press down on the cars suspension pushing it closer to the ground.  Thus the cars ride height will alter considerably from the start of the through to the end.  Ride height is critical for two reasons; the overriding issue is aerodynamic.  Firstly the front wing and diffuser work in ground effect, so they work better the closer to the ground they get.  Thus the wings will work better at the start of the race and diminish as the fuel load lightens. Secondly ground clearance, the plank and titanium skid blocks will be prone to wearing when the car is heavy, excessive wear on the skid blocks will render the car illegal in post race scrutineering.

Brakes - The Braking option allows you to determine the balance between your front and rear brakes. In a F1 car, the brakes are usually balanced towards the front, as weight transfer under braking places additional demands on them. Changing the brake presure will alter the responsinevess of your brakes, making them brake softer/harder. This is useful for wet races when you use softer brake pressure setting and that helps to stop the brakes from locking up. Brake size determine how quickly your brakes heat up and become more efficient. The smaller the brakes, the faster they heat up and the earlier they become efficient. However, smaller brakes will overheat faster and become less effective towards the end of a long session.

Gearbox - Altering a car’s shift mode allows you to change how quick your car changes gear. Changing the shift mode to fast will allow you to change through the gears quickly but will result in more engine wear. Using a slower shift mode is beneficial in low grip conditions, especially wet weather, as it will cause the wheels to spin less violently as you change through the gears. You can also set the gears to change at specific speeds. 
              

Saturday 27 November 2010

Set up your F1 car V2: Tyres, Suspensions, Aerodynamcs

Tyres - Tyres are larger on an F1 car than on a standard car and have no tread. The reason for them being slick is to maximise the surface area of the tyre and, therefore, prevent overheating. Of course, when it rains there would be no grip, since the tyres would be running on a cushion of water. Wet tyres therefore have a deep tread to disperse the water. The requirement of the tyres is to provide a contact patch between the car and the road. This contact patch must be as large as possible. The engineers can alter the size of this contact patch by altering the tyre pressure. A modern Formula One car's tyres are run at around 100oC for optimum grip. Any higher, and the tyre is being worked too hard: any less, and the full grip potential of the tyre is not being used. If the contact patch is ideally sized, then the three measurements should be fairly equal. If the central temperature is too high, the centre of the tyre is working too hard and needs to be deflated slightly. If the extremities of the tyre are too high, the tyre needs to be inflated slightly. The front tyres usually operate at a pressure of 23-24 psi and the rears at a pressure of 19-20 psi. If one side of the tyre is working harder than the other, then the angle of the tyre can also be adjusted. This phenomenon is due to the tyres being pressed into the ground whilst being driven. The contact patch of the tyre alters as all the other aspects of the car are adjusted and, consequently, the tyres are often one of the last parameters to be adjusted. (info from atlasF1 site)



Suspension - The most important elements of an F1 car suspension are the pushrods. The pushrods are the diagonal bars that link the car's chassis to the wheels.(more...)
Suspension influences  the power of the engine, the downforce created by the wings and aerodynamic pack and the grip of the tyres, and allows them all to be combined effectively and translated into a fast on-track package.




Aerodynamics - The most important  difference between a standard road car and a Formula One car is the large wings at the front and the back. These are shaped in a similar way to airplane wings, but inverted to generate downforce rather than uplift. As the angle of these is increased, the downforce increases. This is fine, but for one problem - drag. In fact, a Formula One car's drag coefficient (a measure of a car's effectiveness at reducing drag, the higher the value the less effective) is usually around 1.0 - your standard road car probably has a value around 0.3. This drag effect limits a car’s top speed. At tracks with long straights, where time can be gained by having a faster top speed, the wing angle is minimised. This results in less downforce - a problem when it comes to cornering. The compromise is hard to find for a driver, but see how the wing angle varies massively on a car between a tracks with very different natures such as Hockenheim and Monaco. There also must be a balance between the front and back wings to prevent oversteer and understeer. Sorting out the difference between aerodynamic and suspension handling is the often mark of a great driver(edit from atlasF1 site).
Example for how aerodynamics works on a F1 car explained by Martin Brundle:

Monday 22 November 2010

Set up your F1 car V1: Oversteer and Understeer

A car is oversteering when it feels as though the back is going round faster than the front. It is caused by a lack of traction at the rear either through lack of mechanical grip or too much acceleration. A car is understeering when the front doesn’t want to grip the road, and prefers to head to the outside of the corner at a narrower angle than the driver would wish. It is caused by a lack of grip at the front or too much speed through the corner.



We'll see how to set up a F1 car, but first we'll learn some basic craps: understanding oversteer and understeer




When you set up a F1 car you got to pay attention of every circuit characteristics, every particular details of it and last but not least youre driving style.

Thursday 18 November 2010

My first blog post is

http://setbyspeed.blogspot.com/2010/03/true-skilled-master-of-driving.html



So Vettel is the real deal :)

back!!!!!!!

finally we are back!!!!!!!!