Liberty Media and the FIA together unveiled the new 2022 commissioned design for the F1 race car for the first time at Silverstone ahead of the British GP race weekend which will also feature a sprint race for the first time. The new cars feature a flat nose, wheel aero covers, a large front wing with integrated endplates and a very unique rear wing design that harkens back to the end of the 2000s. The sole aim of this new type of car is to improve the racing and to make sure the pack is more closely stacked.
Formula One reintroduces ground effect aerodynamics which had been outlawed in the 80s. The bargeboards have been simplified while Venturi tunnels make a return to F1 cars. These cars seem to be more futuristic also in terms of design motif. The idea is to reduce the aerodynamic wake which a car following faces that can eliminate downforce by as much as 50 per cent which is one of the primary reasons why cars can't follow that closely and overtaking in modern-day F1 is super hard. To achieve this even the front wing concept has been simplified.
The new cars feature a lower and simpler nose and venturi tunnels
The car which was a collaboration between FIA chief technical officer Nikola's Tombazis and Liberty Media and Formula One technical director Ross Brawn, notably two ex-Ferrari alumni, had been in development for over 4 years.
"We want to make it more possible for cars to race each and follow each other and to have more exciting battles. We want to have tyres that enable people to fight each other without degrading or only giving a short interval for the person attacking to attack," said Nikolas Tombazis.
"They are simpler than the current cars because a lot of the small components have been removed, especially in front of the side-pods, the front wings are simpler. There is a diffuser going right under the car - a venturi channel type manner. There are tunnels under the side-pods from the front to the back," he added.
The end design is remarkably similar to the wind tunnel design that was showcased in 2019. Though the cars that end up on the track, in various avatars from the 10 teams could be different as teams look to exploit the regulations and optimise the design in accordance with various aerodynamic concepts and what power unit they have.
What's interesting is that this car was supposed to debut in 2021. The power units are going to be based on the same technological concept as 2021. All teams are going to be adapting their power units for the 10 per cent biofuel element. However, Ferrari and Renault are expected to deploy revamped power units which would open up more performance. Mercedes and Honda are also working on upgrades but the bigger ones are coming from Ferrari and Renault. Overall, all the manufactures would want an advantage on the power unit side as there will be a development freeze till the end of 2024.
The new cars have a bold rear wing but a simpler front wing
The 2022 car has been put through over 7,500 simulations on the AWS cloud for CFD germinating around a petabyte of data. The CFD or computational fluid dynamics project used over 1,159 AWS compute cores to run simulations of over 550 million data points. Amazon's ARM-based Graviton2 -- C6g instances and Amazon EC2 C5n instances were deployed by Formula One to design what is being called the car of the future.
"The recent release of AWS Graviton2 has allowed us to really optimize other jobs and has achieved about a 30% cost savings for us at the moment. And I actually see that going further. I'm sure we can move towards 40% cost savings compared to our old methods of doing things. By working with AWS, we really have access to a huge environment, and I'm not just talking about the physical environment of compute power, but some really, really great people to work with. Some people who push us just as much as we push them," revealed Formula One chief technical officer Pat Symonds.
In fact, Symonds revealed that AWS was instrumental in the completion of the development of this car. Development time was brought down by a whopping 80 per cent. The 7,500 simulations leveraged the use of 16.5 million CPU cores and if the same task was done on a modern Intel-based quad-core Core i9 laptop, it would've taken 471 years from now.
