What's the purpose of the front wing? It's hard for me to judge good/bad if I don't know what they're trying to accomplish.

As a guess, the purpose is to control airflow over the front tires in order to minimize turbulence and drag. Is that it?

Alternatively, the purpose is to produce down-force so that the front tires have better traction for steering.

Good analysis of the nose types.  I think I prefer the Brawn nose for the highly technical reason that it looks nicer.  Red Bull, for instance, looks like it's attached with paper clips, although that may have been the angle of the picture or the lighting or something.

Looking forward to race day!

I find your post confusing in a couple of ways. For one thing, to my uneducated eye, the front fin mounting looks exactly the same, and I don't get the sense that you're being snide.

For another, I can't figure out why the team's longevity would be a function of the paint color.

Interesting looking car and thanks for explaining the significance of the colors.  It ought to be easy to spot on the track.

:-)

The front stabilizers this year just look weird to me, like they're only barely held on and just looking for any opportunity to fall off and go under the front wheels.

It seems like they could rock side-to-side, and touch down, for example. As soon as one end hits the pavement, it gets pulled back right into, and under, the wheel.

Presumably the designers recognize the danger and have made them plenty stiff, but it still looks strange to my engineer's esthetic.

In the first picture (the head-on view), I thought the new car had a mean look.  But compared to last year's Tchotchkemobile, it looks pretty tame.

Thanks for the photo comparison with last year's car.  It is much sleeker.  Still, Ferrari gets my award for purdiest 2009 so far.  :-)

I agree that the new cars look a lot cleaner.

Are they permitted to charge the KERS before the race begins? So that they can use it at the start?

Well, then, that should make the starts even more exciting, eh?

If it takes a lot of braking to charge it up during those two laps, I wonder if we'll get accidents when people rear-end others who are aggressively charging?

Another sleek look, although it's hard to look much sleeker than the new Ferrari.

Can't wait to see the new McLaren.

The way that front wing is placed, if anything goes wrong with it, it's going under the front tires. It seems more accident prone than the previous ones were, and the piece that's going under the tires is gonna be bigger. But yeah, it looks a lot cleaner, overall.

Seems they changed the front suspension quite a lot. And it looks to me like the wheelbase is wider. Is that just an optical illusion?

In a word:  SLEEEEEEK!

(Sorry, I'm a diehard Ferrari fan.)

I caught a glimpse of the McLaren, and it looked awfully red.  Can't wait to see what it really looks like.

I agree.  Those front and rear wings look weird.  Maybe if they find a different way to attach them they'll look better.

And a big YAY! for Sato!

LOL!!!

I didn't realize F1 had a line of compact cars, too.  ;-)

I love this paint job!  It looks elegant (which, I guess, is an odd word for a race car).  Less than a week to go until we can see it on the race course.

YAY!!!!

*snort*  You have a point there.

(Unless, of course, you're serious, Steven, in which case I direct you to the Bridgestone logo on the nose.)

That was photoshopped in. Notice that it isn't in color in the last picture.

Also note that your closeup isn't in black-and-white.

What they did with most of those pictures was to drop the saturation to zero, and in the case of the two with the colored logo those parts were either excluded using a mask, or (my opinion) recolored afterwards.

I wonder why they did that only for the Bridgestone logo? The AT&T logo should be blue, not black.

I won't believe that the paint job really is black-and-white unless I see a picture of the car in a colored setting.

Is it me or does that front wing look like a recipe for decapitation?

I suppose it's okay, but I loved that earlier paint job.  Why two paint schemes in one season, I wonder? 

Eh.  The first one wasn't the official paintjob, just something they had while they were doing tests.

It's like Honda's all black car from testing in 2006, or McLaren's safety orange from the same year.

Too bad, though.

"If it looks fast, it is fast." It's a nice idea, but it's a crock.

Remember the P-51 Mustang? Gorgeous plane, wasn't it? Looks like it'd scream?

When the first ones were built, they didn't scream. That's because the Allison engine originally installed wasn't as powerful as you'd like. The Brits got some of the original version for flight testing and their conclusion was emphatic: it's a magnificent airframe, but it needs the Rolls Royce Merlin engine.

And once they changed the engine, then it screamed.

I would mention the F-117, but apparently that files about as well as a bucket of bricks.  Though they managed to get the stealth part right by eyeballing it.

There's an interesting story behind that. The science behind the shape is based on the work of a Soviet radio engineer. The Skunk Works used his method for calculating the reflective properties of a geometric shape to design the worlds worst radio antenna. Then they just had to figure out how to make it fly.

That story starts on page 19 of this book. It's a great read.

This is for you. (Via)

Those older cars look more aerodynamic to me. The modern ones have all kinds of bars and fluff sticking out, which should cause turbulence vortices out the wazoo. The older ones were fully covered with a skin designed to create smooth air flow.

And I like the one that has four front wheels.

Presumably all that cool stuff was made illegal by the governors, right? (I know they're no longer permitted to have skirts that brush the pavement.)

It's a shame they're such fuddy-duddies. The sport would be a lot more fun if the engineers were given more leeway to experiment.

If someone comes up with a radical innovation (e.g. 6 wheels) that works really well, why not let them use it? Next season a lot of other people will adopt the same thing, so it's only a temporary advantage at best. Sigh.

(Seems to me we had this discussion once already.)

If I had to hazard a guess why they've introduced extra vortex-inducing sawcuts into the front aero package, I'd say they're distributing the energy loss across the front end while putting the turbulence of those vortices to use.

Turbulent air is terrible for friction drag, but great for form drag. The free-stream flowing over blunt bodies (and for all their sweeping lines, F1 cars are still quite blunt) in turbulent air separates far later than a smooth free-stream. If you can shift a bit of the turbulence produced by the front wing out in front of the suspension, you may see a significant reduction in the stagnant/turbulent (form-drag producing) region behind each suspension member. Or those vortices may be meant to interact with some other part of the car farther back. The longer you can get the free-stream to hug the body of the car, the less form drag you have to deal with.

That was at the 2007 European Grand Prix, during the ridiculous downpour at the beginning of the race.  Adrian Sutil just lost control in the rain, with nobody bumping him or anything... he could have had a rotating spotlight on a trailer behind him and he still would have ended up in the kittylitter that day. 

Hm... a F1 pulling a mobilehome... heh.

The A-10 and SR-71 are also great examples of the beauty of  pure function.

I think they should have used some black trim around the "vodafone" and 23. The small bits of black trim between the silver and orange make the orange really stand out.

Back when I worked at a local hobby shop, we held weekly R/C car races. I was always amazed at how wound up some kids (and adults too) could get into, what was to my mind, over-blown toy racing. That being said, some of those guys turned out awesome paint jobs. There was one car in particular that had a silver base with black/orange trim scheme, like the McLaren, but it also had a bit of royal blue trim mixed in. It looked amazing.

Guess that explains the pit limited mystery--oventimers.

You're absolutely right--Ferrari does, indeed, build purty cars.

I don't think the new car's shorter so much as the 2008 pics (both top and side) seem to be taken from farther away. The tires in the overhead shots look like completely different sizes.