Originally Posted by Assa2:
“If you go back to the 70's and early 80's the cars were much simpler in terms of aerodynamics and driver aids and were largely about the engine and driver. As engine technology was largely homogenised after the turbo era and aerodynamics and driver aids become king the driver has become largely irrelevant and it's now impossible for cars to race nose-to-tail for any distance.”
Been saying the same thing for years.
If I was in charge of the FIA, the first thing I'd do would be to get all the championship-winning cars from the 70's, 80's and 90's out of storage, bung 'em in a wind tunnel and find a way of quantifying how much turbulence they cause.
I'd then test modern F1 cars in the same way in order to determine how the turbulence
they cause has changed or increased over the years.
Once I'd done that I could create some kind of rule to limit the amount of turbulence caused by an F1 car.
It'd probably be quite tricky to measure turbulence in any
meaningful way but, fortunately, we don't actually need to do that.
All we need is some kind of arbitrary system whereby anything more than a certain amount of turbulence is unacceptable.
It might be as simple as, possibly, setting up a bunch of ribbons 10ft behind the car in the wind tunnel and ensuring the ribbons aren't disturbed by the air-flow over the car.
More technically, you could build a simple electronic device with a lightweight solid arm which pivots at one end and is attached to a couple of potentiometers to measure X and Y deflection.
In laminar air flow it should just get blown straight backwards but in turbulent air it'd flap around and the potentiometer would tell you how much it's flapping around and you could create a rule which says "No car shall cause an FIA turbulence sensor to deflect by more than 10° in any direction from any position a distance of 3m behind the car".
Thing is, the current mindset seems to be to limit the size of aero' devices in the hope of limiting turbulence but, of course, teams are slippery so they always find more downforce from wherever they can find it but that can't help a following driver who's in turbulent air and who's aero' devices are compromised.
If you could actually measure
turbulence then you could allow teams to build cars with as much downforce as they liked
as long as it didn't create excessive turbulence.
*EDIT*
FWIW, the biggest opposition to this would probably be that fans wouldn't want to see F1 cars, the pinnacle of motorsport, suddenly going significantly slower.
The beauty of measuring turbulence, of course, is that you don't
have to insist that teams switch it off completely or straight away.
If you started measuring turbulence you could, for example, tell teams that they need to reduce it by, say, 10% year on year so the effects of the rule wouldn't be obviously detrimental to the speed of the cars.
Also, of course, if you
were controlling turbulence you could allow the teams to add extra aero' devices which might, hopefully, go a long way to offsetting any reduction in performance.