CarlosFerreira wrote:RejectSteve wrote:mario wrote:perhaps Wirth was a little overconfident in his abilities following the success of the Acura's in the American Le Mans series, where all of the Acura entries have been designed with CFD?
I don't know if the ARX-01 cars were CFD'ed but they were built upon Courage LC75 monocoques but the ARX-02a LMP1 car was an entirely CFD design. However, while it was a successful car in its class, it didn't actually have any competiton so how good it was has to be questioned. Wirth is keen on his CFD, but didn't Sauber use it too? What Sauber did, however, was use the wind tunnel to confirm what the computer said. Wirth seems so overconfident, as you say, that CFD is as good as anything that he refuses to use a tunnel to refine his design.
Is Wirth worth it?
Mind you, the smallish fuel capacity seems to have nothing to do with the CFD. As far as I can tell, the fact that just using computers has produced a car that is roughly in the same ball park as a Lotus and an HRT and not far away of the leaders' raw pace pretty much confirms the process is worth it. If we were suddenly to find out the Virgin suffers buffeting at speed or something like that, than we could all criticize the CFD.
Mind you, I am a bit of an anorak for these things and I am mightily with the idea that car works without ever seeing the inside of a wind tunnel.
I didn't want to imply that CFD was at fault (although, having studied a course on fluid dynamics, I do harbour a slight reservation of CFD when used in areas such as highly turbulent flows, or dealing with unusual geometries and flow conditions, due to the limitations of CFD models). And from the onboard footage of Glock during the Bahrein free practise sessions, the car does seem to be unstable at the rear, particularly through fast corners and under braking (they were really struggling in the old Turn 12 (or Turn 18, as it now is) although whether that is down to weight transfer issues or aero problems, I cannot say).
What I was trying to imply was that Wirth was probably over confident in his abilities as a designer, following his success in ALMS, and decided to push for a more radical design, when he should have held back a little. After all, this is the first time that he has tried to produce an open wheeled car. The comments about CFD were meant to be more about the fact that he could well have prioritised the aerodynamic design, and thought about the packaging and mechanical components afterwards - the fact that they are having problems with picking up all of their fuel seems to indicate that they might have neglected some mechanical issues.
