Two top technical directors, Williams’ Pat Symonds and Ferrari’s James Allison stand against a proposed ban on wind tunnels.
Aerodynamic forces play a crucial role in motorsport, and especially in Formula 1. To reduce costs, there’s been a lot of talk recently about banning wind tunnels, in order to concentre on CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics). Force India’s Bob Fernley also said something like wind tunnels were almost the dinosaur technology and that we needed to be more revolutionary and take more forward steps. “I don’t think it’s the best direction for us to take as a sport,” said James Allison during Friday’s press conference at the Chinese Grand Prix in Shanghai. “Aerodynamics are a huge part of the performance of your car and you need to be confident when you’re spending that budget that you’re going to deliver to your investors and your team the performance that you hoped you would do. At the moment, you wouldn’t find too many engineers who work in aerodynamics of any hue, who would recommend developing the type of thing we’ve got, using just CFD. It’s just too error-prone and it doesn’t really save any money,” Allison explained. Williams’ tech director Pat Symonds totally agrees with Allison but not with Fernley's comments. “Maybe Bob ought to come and have a look at a decent wind tunnel and just see how technically advanced they are,” Symonds replied. “I disagree with the proposal to ban wind tunnels. I think some of the restrictions we’ve put in place over the last few years have been quite sensible in terms of saving money and actually forcing us into being more efficient,” he declared. “I think that F1 has contributed an awful lot to the improvements we’ve seen in CFD and I think that’s something that has gone on and benefitted a lot of different areas of society. “I was doing some work with one of the top major motor manufacturers, showing them how they could use their wind tunnels better on production road cars to decrease drag, increase fuel economy etc. It’s techniques that I think we develop in F1 that are actually quite useful in other areas. We’ve invested a lot of money in wind tunnels, we’ve invested a lot of money in CFD – it’s not as cheap as some people might think. I think we have quite a good balance at the moment and I’m pretty happy with the way things are”, Pat Symonds explained.
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