The very fact that bodywork cannot be totally rigid means that some flexibility has to be allowed for – and it is this grey area of what that margin is that has been the focus of toing and froing between the competitors and the governing body for years.
What makes the situation even more difficult to police is the fact that the bodywork is designed to flex at high speed, so cannot be physically measured when it is behaving the way that teams want it to.
Static load and push tests can only go so far in identifying such flexion, as the forces imposed on the car when it is in motion will always create more dynamic behaviour.
Teams know this and therefore build margin into the components in order to ensure that they pass the requisite tests in the garage, but still flex appropriately for the aerodynamic effect when they are blasting down straights at 200mph.
Occasionally, however, the teams push the boundaries too far and prompt the FIA to take action in tightening what they believe are acceptable limits for bodywork flexibility.
And that is exactly what has happened right now, with the FIA notifying the teams in a draft technical directive last week that a clampdown is coming for the Singapore Grand Prix.
The TD is based on an original bodywork flexibility advisory that was previously limited to rear wings, but this has now been expanded to include front wings too.
It appears that there are two clear avenues of exploitation going on up and down the grid.
The main concerns, it would seem, that the FIA has when it comes to the rear wing is in the design of the endplates and the mounting pillar(s), with teams now required to submit “assembly drawings or images and cross sections showing the fixation of the rear wing elements to the rear wing endplates, the rear impact structure and the pylon(s)” and “assembly drawings or images and cross sections showing the fixation of the rear wing pylon(s) to the rear impact structure.”
There’s obviously a number of ways in which flexion could be used here, with the main objective for the teams being to reduce drag. This has the double benefit of allowing a higher downforce arrangement to be used also, in order that the gain can be levelled out at either end of the spectrum.
Source: Autosport