Racecar Engineering – September 2019

SEPTEMBER 2019 http://www.racecar-engineering.com 17

‘The wind tunnel hardware development

was ongoing anyway ahead of 2019, but we

changed some methodologies,’ says Egginton.

‘Without giving too many details away there

are a number of metrics you look at when

developing the Formula 1 car, for example you

might look at the amount of load you have,

and that has a set of metrics which quantify

whether a new part is working. It lets you see

what parts of the aero map are influenced in

terms of load and drag. Well we totally revised

all of that, asking ourselves how do we want to

change the way we look at things in the wind

tunnel so that those metrics better reflect what

we are seeing on the race track.

‘We developed a number of new metrics

which allow specific areas of the car’s

aerodynamic performance to be tracked and

evaluated,’ Egginton adds. ‘Doing this has meant

that we have lost our direct comparison with

last year. That reference was gone because the

way you are capturing the numbers is different,

and so not directly comparable.

‘Despite this we felt that this approach

gave us a better opportunity to develop the

car,’ Egginton says. ‘It is specifically effective on

certain circuits, so rather than just aiming at just

putting more load on the car we would be able

to focus on a specific scenario, like low speed

and high yaw, for example, and we made a lot

of changes in the background to do that.’

Metric measures

Like every major racing team in the current

era Toro Rosso is not solely reliant on its wind

tunnel for its aerodynamic testing, and it also

utilises a very advanced CFD cluster, as well

as full scale track testing, and these areas

have both also been influenced by this new

development methodology.

‘From the changes we made to how we

work in the tunnel, we came up with a new

set of metrics on the way we look at CFD, and

in turn we can use those metrics to develop

certain parts of the aero map,’ Egginton says.

‘Aligned to that, in testing we have done a lot

more running of pressure tap rakes on the car

and that is feeding back a lot more into the

aero development process. This all allows us

to identify an issue and then get something

on the car to resolve it as opposed to building

up a package of parts and introducing them

all at once. Doing it this way means that we

know where we are the whole time. It’s great

if you can bring a big update package, but if it

does not work it can be quite challenging to

work out what the issue is. This sort of rolling

update philosophy avoids that and allows our

aerodynamic updates to be better targeted

against specific identified needs. The belief

is that these changes will have reduced the

probability of any updates not delivering what

we expect. But, of course, that is the target of

‘We have to avoid the

peaks and troughs in

performance that we had

with the STR13, especially

with the midfield battle

so tight this season’

The rear wing on the STR14. Toro Rosso has changed its aerodynamic development methodology this year

The STR14 chassis is all Toro Rosso but

there are a number of other parts that have

been bought in from sister team Red Bull