Formula 1 2022 Winter Testing In Barcelona

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This season of F1 may be the most eagerly anticipated season of all time.

Will we see the usual crowd at the forefront or will there be any surprises this season?

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll know there’s been a massive overhaul of the car regulations. The 2022 regulations which were originally slated for 2021 but were delayed due to the Covid-19 pandemic and have one major principle to allow cars to race closer.

With previous regulations, a following car would lose 35% of their downforce when racing within 20 metres of the car ahead. That loss of downforce could increase to 47% if the following car got within 10 metres of the car ahead.

The new regulations are meant to reduce the downforce lost, but F1 teams and engineers can be crafty. There’s not a single team that will design their car with this guiding principle in mind, they want their cars to be difficult to follow. So whilst they will have designed their cars within the 2022 guidelines and parameters, they will be looking for ways to disturb the air leaving the car as much as possible.

Over the past few weeks we’ve had many cars revealed, and let’s be honest most of these car reveals have been livery reveals at best. But today we are seeing the first images from winter testing, and these cars might be a closer representation of what we will see on track at Bahrain in March.

Here are a few stand out tweets from this morning, make sure to post any photos or news in the comments.

What do you think about the 2022 cars? Are there any surprises?

About author
Damian Reed
PC geek, gamer, content creator, and passionate sim racer.
I live life a 1/4 mile at a time, it takes me ages to get anywhere!

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The Ferrari has 'gills' down the sides. I don't think I've seen these on any of the other cars. I imagine these are cooling the engine.. or perhaps there's more to it?
 
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I think all teams (most) will have achieved something special.. The guess is who did it the best. I like the curves of the Ferrari very much...
 
I was a bit worried about the potential for super ugly hub caps but so far they seem to blend in nicely. Probably because everyone has them in black color.

At this point I don't really care about anything else. I just really hope this is not yet another mercedes season. Even domination by ferrari or red bull would be better than yet another mercedes fallout. Even better, I hope it is 2 or 3 teams that could really win it.
 
It's aerodynamic, to lower the pressure at the bottom. creating a extra sort of wingshape.
Not really. Implemented to direct hot air out in a way (hence the curvey dish sidepods) that doesn't disturb the aero in the back of the car, hot dirty air doesn't make ideal air for df. And a lot of teams are leaning on the beam wing for df on the back of the car.
 
I'll leave to the experts the technical side of things. But I really love the new look of the cars, they are much more pleasing to the eye than previously. The Ferrari, in particular, is simply stunning and it's nice to see a proper shade of red on it. The 2020-2021 Ferraris looked like crap.

The Aston Martin and the Mercedes (silver again, thankfully) look great too. And Williams now have a proper livery instead of the horror show of 2021.

Motorsports slowly coming out of hibernation... Formula E & the Daytona 24h in late January, the Daytona 500 last week, Indycar this week and the F1 winter tests. Always a nice time of the year, when I feel like Spring is coming in a few weeks.
 
This channel has done a series of analyses of the new cars from an aerodynamics perspective. It's been quite interesting. Obviously one can only judge so much from a distance, but dude is a professional with recent F1 experience. Good stuff IMO. Here's the one for Ferrari, you can find the rest yourself from there. :thumbsup:

 
Mercedes is already complaining that the competitors have better cars. They said their tyres are already gone.
 
Every time I hear about F1 changing the regs to produce "closer racing" I think about NASCAR's "closer racing". Smashfest.
 
It'd be very interesting to see a few snapshots of these engines un-cowled.
Quite frankly, I am very surprised that none of the teams have exploited or explored mixing that hot under-cowl air with the plenum supply.
If you could somehow get that down through a series of outlet at the bottom of the chassis, the resulting gains would be two-fold.
You'd be better able to cool the ICE through scavenging, since the flow coming through the front of the chassis would create a low pressure area effectively 'sucking' it from under the engine cover.
The other benefit, the diffuser would be even more effective through additional volume.
I love playing around with airflow.
It is just fun to see how it works and what you can do with it.
 

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