Radials and cross-plies in racing

"The higher mileage and better handling of a radial tyre does not come from a lower running temperature...Tyres are discarded when the treads are worn. If temperature were the culprit they would fail due to reversion of the carcass rubber [reversion is the process by which vulcanized rubber reverts back to its pre-vulcanized state] and/or loss of adhesion between textile [carcass] and rubber due to thermal degradation of the interface polymer. A radial tyre wears better because the tread is braced onto the road and does not squirm or distort as it does in a cross ply, whose tread is deflected by the movement of undertread plies as they move in concert with the total tyre reinforcement. Distortion in a radial tyre is almost wholly accommodated in the side walls. As a consequence of this, the tyre runs cooler.

"The road holding of a radial is superior, but once breakaway point is reached you lose adhesion very rapidly. Where controlled adhesion loss is required, as in a racing car tyre, then a cross ply tyre is used. This problem can be mitigated in a radial by fitting an asymetric tread, with progressive breakaway characteristics." (Nicholas M Doak, Rubber Journal. New Scientist 29 Jun 1972, p772).

Truly, the origins of the modern world can be found in the 1970s. However, Nicholas Doak's letter to New Scientist poses several important questions:

(1) If radial tyres suffer from a sudden loss of adhesion, then does the universal adoption of radial tyres in Formula 1 since 1983 explain why the cars are so rarely held in a controlled slide (Sebastien Vettel, Variante Ascari, Monza 2011 notwithstanding).

(2) How was Gilles Villeneuve able to hold his Michelin-shod Ferrari in so many controlled slides?

(3) Now that Formula 1 has a control tyre formula, why don't we introduce an asymmetric tread, or something similar, to make it easier for the drivers to slide the cars?

Wind-tunnel nozzles and televisions

The power consumption of a wind-tunnel cubes with the velocity, hence an efficient tunnel design keeps the velocity as low as possible in all sections other than the working section. A nozzle is used to increase the velocity in the working section, and then a diffuser (or two) is used to reduce the velocity after the working section.

A typical wind-tunnel nozzle consists of two profiles, the first of which is concave, the second convex. It is important to avoid boundary layer separation in both parts of the nozzle, but in the case of a turbulent boundary layer, convex curvature reduces turbulent kinetic energy and skin friction, whilst concave curvature has the opposite effect (relative to a flat plate). The boundary layer over the concave surface is thicker than that over a flat plate, whilst the boundary layer over a convex surface is thinner, and therefore less prone to separation. The concave section is therefore more elongated than the convex section.

Note that the coke-bottle section on a Formula 1 car also features a convex-concave transition, although in this case the airflow is external and the convex section comes first as the sidepods taper inwards.

Meanwhile, for a wind-tunnel with a rectangular cross-section, the nozzle design is a curious echo of the external case of a late 1990s Cathode-Ray-Tube television.

An approximate macroscopic geometrical isomorphism, which was only implicate in the laws of physics, until the world of engineering made it explicate.

The Brain is Wider than the Sky: A Review

As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it, "the concept of the aesthetic descends from the concept of taste."

This book is a sustained complaint against what writer and journalist Bryan Appleyard terms the "simplifying forces of the new machine age and reductive accounts of the human mind," (p228). These things, we discover, are not to Bryan's taste.

Whilst Appleyard's attack on the utopianism of cyber-technocracy is well justified, he also dislikes what he refers to as the materialism and reductionism of much of modern science. This criticism, however, stems from an inadequate understanding of the scientific method.

"Modern science," writes Appleyard in the first chapter, "is the exploration of the physical world through observation, experimentation and, latterly, through computer modelling," (p3). Tellingly, Bryan neglects to mention here one of the crucial components of modern science: theory.

The defining characteristic of modern science is that it unifies the empirical with the theoretical. If Appleyard has failed to absorb this fact, then he has grasped nothing of the modern scientific method. It is a failure of understanding which he repeats later in the book when the discussion turns to financial modelling: "Computer modelling is the first new way of doing science since Galileo. It adds a third method to experiment and observation," (p183).

Throughout the book, Appleyard puts great importance on the notion of complexity, and places it in opposition to reductionistic science:

"If a system like a human body produces something more than its parts, where does that 'more' come from and what is it? The question is fundamental and threatening to reductionism and simple-minded materialism.

"In complex systems 'more' is defined as 'emergent properties'. There are things the system can do which are not predictable from the constituents of the system, because they do not arise simply as a sum of all the properties of the parts of the system," (p14).

Appleyard's simplistic understanding of reductionism is inadequate here because it fails to acknowledge three crucial concepts: (i) the scientific understanding of microscopic interactions; (ii) the recovery of macroscopic systems by coarse-graining over microscopic systems; and (iii) the distinction between epistemological and ontological reductionism.

Firstly, scientists explain the properties of macroscopic, composite systems not only in terms of the properties of their parts, but also in terms of the way in which those parts are organised and interact. The 'more' which makes a composite entity more than its parts, are the relationships between the parts. Scientists understand this very well: it is, for example, why diamond has different characteristics than graphite; both substances consist merely of carbon atoms, but what gives diamond its hardness is the manner in which those carbon atoms are organised.

Secondly, scientists understand that the higher level properties of composite systems only arise after coarse-graining over the lower-level properties and relational states. Coarse-graining is the result of reducing the resolving power of a theoretical representation.

The representation of the natural world provided by scientific theory becomes more accurate and informative the greater the ability of theory to discriminate between different states of a system; this is the resolving power of a theory. Increasing the resolving power of a theory has therefore typically involved identifying the increasingly smaller components of physical systems, their properties, and the relationships between them.

The flip-side of resolving power is that a macroscopic theory can only be recovered from a microscopic theory after some coarse-graining has taken place. As the resolving power of a theory is reduced, microscopic entities and classes of similar microstates merge and become indistinguishable to the macroscopic theory. As the lower-level entities merge, it is the properties and relational structure of the merged entities which the macroscopic theory characterises.

The third point is that Appleyard neglects the distinction between ontological reductionism and epistemological reductionism. Ontological reductionism merely proposes that the parts of a system, and the way in which those parts are organised and interact, uniquely determine the higher-level states and properties of the system. Epistemological reductionism, in contrast, proposes that we can always explain and predict the higher-level states and properties of a system from the parts of the system.

The latter is a much stronger claim, and due to the conceptual incompatibilities between different theories, and simple limitations in the tractability of equations when dealing with systems containing billions of particles, there's good reason to believe that epistemological reductionism is false. This, however, is consistent with the truth of ontological reductionism.

Up to this point, Appleyard's attack on reductionism and materialism is fairly conventional. In Chapters 11 and 12, however, things take a bizarre turn. Appleyard considers human creativity, and the manner in which ideas and solutions can occur to the conscious mind only when its attention has relaxed, and been directed elsewhere:

"Both the scientist and the artist are struck by the moment of inspiration...that seems to come from nowhere and to happen to them rather than being achieved by deliberate effort. The new thing pre-exists but not, perhaps, in this world," (p216).

Now, most psychologists would suggest that what happens here is that the unconscious mind is processing information while the attention of the conscious mind is directed elsewhere, and it is the unconscious mind, and its capacity for making unusual connections, which is responsible for generating such ideas and solutions. Strangely, Appleyard doesn't even consider the possibility of unconscious information processing. Instead, there is an eager leap to the suggestion that novel ideas have a supernatural source.

It is as if our minds, then, are such ontologically sharp systems that they have punctured the fabric which separates the physical world from the transcendent, and original ideas are leaking into our world like rainwater through a badly bituminised roof.

But what could this other world be? The astral plane? The spirit world? Or is it perhaps just a bog-standard supernatural deity, like one of those invented by some tribes in the Middle East a couple of thousand years ago, but now dressed-up in pseudo-intellectual aesthetic garments?

Appleyard continues: "Creative novelty is dangerous for the prevailing materialist account of the world and the mind. If reality is a chain of cause and effect going back all the way to the Big Bang and, for all we know, beyond, then newness is an impossibility, everything that happens must, somehow, be embedded in what previously happened," (p220).

Newness is inconsistent with causality? This almost seems to confuse causality with constancy. A causally closed material universe is not a universe in which everything stays the same. On the contrary, it is precisely the unfolding of those causal processes which produces the novelty in our universe. In particular, as a civilisation evolves, new patterns of brain activity evolve, and these correspond to new ideas.

Appleyard claims at the outset that "Art has always been the best guide to what we most profoundly are and what we are becoming. Writers, architects, visual artists and musicians define our species and our predicament," (p17). This attitude is problematic, however, when we recall the origin of aesthetics as a question of taste. In fact, two problems become apparent, one of which is epistemological, the other moral.

Firstly, because aesthetic judgements boil down to nothing more than embellished expressions of personal taste, they are irreducibly subjective. As a consequence, there are as many conceptions of art and aesthetics as there are aesthetically-inclined individuals. Art and aesthetics therefore fail to provide any contribution to the corpus of objective knowledge. There can be no artistic knowledge, only artistic belief.

Secondly, because aesthetic judgement is a matter of taste, the sociodynamics of human society entail that it rapidly becomes little more than a communication channel for inter-personal expressions of superiority. The aesthetically-inclined wish to express the superiority of their taste over that possessed by others, and it is here that we find the psychological root of Appleyard's belief in the "autonomy and importance of art against the claims of science," (p216).

This is the moral problem with art, and history has demonstrated that under certain circumstances, the sense of superiority engendered by the aesthetic condition can be a source of great evil.

Like Appleyard, 19th century Germany considered art to afford a superior form of knowledge to that provided by science. As Donna Cassidy writes in her biography of Marsden Hartley:

"The right-wing writer Julius Langbehn railed against the materialism of modern urban life...in his popular book Rembrandt as Educator (1890). Considered the 'Bible of a new, reformed Germany', this text, which condemned intellectualism, science, technology and modern society, participated in the larger Western critique of positivism at this time...He wanted to recover what he considered lost German virtues - simplicity, subjectivity, individuality - which he located in the volk...Langbehn placed Rembrandt and art at the center of his vision of social change: an Age of Art should replace an Age of Science," (Cassidy, p181).

In a not totally dissimilar fashion, Appleyard writes that "Art, the highest expression of the human mind, is the complex solution to the complex problem of our existence," (p247) and that "the old age of the short-term, simple solution is dying to be replaced with something much finer - the Long Now of the complex system,"(p263).

There are warnings from history about such aesthetically-motivated future visions. In Toward the Final Solution, historian G.L. Mosse attributed the provenance of anti-semitism to "the European tendency to regard humanity from an aesthetic point of view and to classify human beings according to their closeness or distance from Greek ideals of beauty." Mosse also traced the intellectual origins of the Third Reich and National Socialism back to the anti-rationalism of Langbehn et al in 19th century Germany:

"Though it is well known that Nietzsche and Wagner were among the predecessors of the movement, the intensity of German national feeling was held to be sufficient explanation for the rise of National Socialist ideology. Today we are forced to realise that a more complex cultural development gave its impress to that movement long before it crystallized into a political party. At the very center of this movement were ideas not so much of a national as of a romantic and mystical nature, part of the revolt against positivism which swept Europe at the end of the XIXth century. In Germany this revolt took a special turn, perhaps because romanticism struck deeper roots there than elsewhere. This German reaction to positivism became intimately bound up with a belief in nature's cosmic life-force, a dark force whose mysteries could be understood, not through science, but through the occult. An ideology based upon such premises was fused with the glories of an Aryan past, and in turn, that past received a thoroughly romantic and mystical interpretation." (G.L. Mosse, The Mystical Origins of National Socialism, Journal of the History of Ideas, 22(1), pp. 81-9).

Why Health and Safety costs lives

The local level crossing comes down 4 minutes before a train arrives. It does this whether it's expecting an Intercity to charge through the station unhindered, in futile chase of the vanishing point at the horizon, or whether a dual-carriage local station-hopper is chugging slowly down the line.

About 40 cars are held during this time on each side of the crossing, so even assuming that there's only one occupant in each car, it follows that 320 minutes of dead-time are created in people's lives every time the crossing comes down. The crossing comes down on average 4 times every hour for at least 12 hours of every day, so that's about 5,606,400 minutes of dead time created by just one level crossing every year.

There's only 525600 minutes in a year, so this single level crossing creates the equivalent of more than 10 person-years of dead time, and it does this every year. That's the equivalent of going out and randomly slaughtering ten people.

Not only that, but the reason why so many people try to jump these level crossings when the barriers begin to descend, is precisely because they've experienced the ridiculously excessive safety margins endemic in modern bureaucratic culture. If the barriers came down 30 seconds before each train arrives, and people could transparently perceive that this was consistently the case, then there would be no incentive for jumping the barrier. It's the excessive safety margins which create both the incentive, and the low perceived risk for jumping a descending barrier.

For these reasons, then, modern Health and Safety is a killer.

Sports psychology and neuroscience

This week's Autosport contains a purported explanation from sports psychologist Don Macpherson, of why Sauber's cautionary radio call cost Sergio Perez victory in Malaysia:

"Racing drivers must drive with their subconscious, the right hemisphere of the brain. The [voice in your head] lives in the left hemisphere (conscious) - for words, numbers and technical stuff.

In Malaysia, Sergio Perez was driving with his right-side brain - automatically, instinctively - when he was closing on Fernando Alonso."

This is only wrong in two respects: there is no reason to believe in the simple lateralization of brain function, and the distinction between conscious and subconscious processes is not correlated with the left and right sides of the brain.

On the general issue of brain lateralization, the current state of neuroscientific knowledge is nicely summarised on Wikipedia:

"Broad generalizations are often made in popular psychology about one side or the other having characteristic labels such as 'logical' or 'creative'. These labels need to be treated carefully; although a lateral dominance is measurable, these characteristics are in fact existent in both sides, and experimental evidence provides little support for correlating the structural differences between the sides with functional differences."

Secondly, the conscious mind is generally associated with the cortex, while the unconscious mind is associated with the cerebellum, hypothalamus and brain stem. In other words, the distinction between conscious and unconscious has nothing to do with brain lateralization.

It seems that an ability to grasp fundamental concepts and absorb simple facts is superfluous to the role of sports psychologist.

Massey University and the nuclear test veterans

The supreme court recently ruled that surviving veterans of the United Kingdom's nuclear test series, conducted in Australia and the Pacific during the 1950s, will not be permitted to sue the Ministry of Defence for alleged ill-health caused by the tests.

The story, however, raises a number of interesting issues. Firstly, there is the question of the reliability of unverified personal testimony. Rose Clark, widow of Michael, is reported by The Guardian as stating that her late husband "was so close he could see the bones of the people on the beach beside him. It was like an x-ray."

This is a telling claim because x-rays are actually invisible. As a consequence, x-rays cannot be directly used to see the bones in a human body. In a medical x-ray, the x-rays pass through soft tissue, to be captured on a photographic plate. Human bones partially attenuate the x-rays, hence the bones can be seen as a shadow on the photographic image.

The second issue, not reported by The Guardian, is that the health of the nuclear test veterans has already been rigorously assessed by successive epidemiological studies conducted by what was then the National Radiological Protection Board, now part of the Health Protection Agency:

"Based on this work the HPA conclude that nuclear weapons test participants had, in general, a better life expectancy than members of the general UK population. When compared with the control group, the test participant group had similar overall patterns of mortality and cancer incidence indicating no significant cause for concern.

"The statistical analyses also provided a slight indication that test participation may have caused a very small increased risk of leukaemia but there was not enough evidence to confirm this as a fact and there was evidence to suggest that this finding should be treated with caution."

The third issue is the question of new research. According to The Guardian, "the veterans had contended that they did not have proper knowledge that their illnesses were connected to the atomic tests until medical research was published in 2007."

Now, this new research transpires to be a study, conducted by the Institute of Molecular Biosciences at Massey University, of so-called chromosome abberrations amongst New Zealand veterans who attended the British tests. There are several different types of chromosome abberration, but the primary result obtained by the Massey University team analysed a type of abberration called a translocation, in which parts of different chromosomes are swapped.

The technique involves taking blood samples from the subjects of the study, and counting the number of abberrations. To infer a dose, it is then necessary to calibrate the method by exposing blood samples in vitro to known doses of radiation to obtain a dose-response curve, such as that seen above here.

Everyone's DNA is subject to a continuous barrage of intrinsic damage, so any attempt to infer a radiation dose from DNA damage will need to distinguish radiogenic damage from intrinsic damage. This means that each method of counting chromosome abberrations will have a detection limit associated with it. In other words, each technique will only be able to detect radiation doses above a certain minimum level.

In the case of translocation frequencies, various estimates of the detection limit can be found in the literature. Writing in 1997, A.A.Edwards claimed that "the scoring of translocations...results in reduced sensitivity at low doses so that acute X-ray doses of about 0.3 Gy and chronic doses of about 0.4 Gy are at the limit of measurement...a final limit to these approaches exists because of the higher level of spontaneous translocations...in cells of unirradiated persons."

The unit of dose referred to here is the Gray (Gy). A Gray is a large unit of radiation: most people receive an annual background radiation dose comparable to only about 0.002 Gray. So 0.4 Gray is two hundred times or so the background dose, and that's possibly the detection limit for this technique; if the dose is any lower, it may be impossible to distinguish it from the random level of DNA damage.

But let's have a look and see what the team from Massey University claimed to have found. They published two papers, one in 2007, 'New Zealand Nuclear Test Veterans' Study – a Cytogenetic Analysis', presented to the New Zealand Nuclear Test Veterans’ Association, and a second in 2008, 'Elevated chromosome translocation frequencies in New Zealand nuclear test veterans', published in an academic journal, Cytogenetic and Genome Research 121:79–87.

In their 2007 report they calculate (p31) that there were 37 individuals who received a dose in the range 0 – 0.49 Gy, 6 individuals in the range 0.5 – 0.99 Gy, and 5 individuals who received greater than 1 Gy. The highest dose estimates here are above the range in which the detection limit for this technique might lie. But as a consequence, they're also very large doses; doses so large that, were they to be delivered all at once, could lead to symptoms of radiation sickness!

These dose estimates, we learn, were obtained by comparing the abberrations counted in the veterans with those in "Blood samples from 3 healthy donors (mean age 40.5) [which] were irradiated with 60 Co at a dose rate 0.835Gy/min to different doses (0, 0.2, 0.5, 0.75, 1, 2 Gy)," (p15).

Something strange now happens when we turn to the 2008 paper, published, let us recall, in a peer-reviewed journal. We now find that "Dose estimates ranged from 0 to 0.431 Gy in the veterans (mean = 0.170 Gy)," (p85).

All of a sudden, the mean dose is down to 0.170 Gy, which lies beneath what might well be the detection limit for this technique. And how are these new doses estimates inferred? Well, the blood-samples from the forty-year olds have been discreetly disposed of, and in their stead we find "in vitro exposures of a blood sample of a normal donor of age 60."

There's no explanation of why the blood samples used to calibrate the technique have changed. Which is strange, because if the Massey University team discovered that something was wrong with their initial approach, one would expect them to explain and report this fact, so that the rest of the scientific community could learn from their research.

The Massey University team emphasise the difference between the number of translocations found amongst the veterans, and the number found amongst a control group (whose mean dose was inferred to be 0.037 Gy), but given that both dose estimates are below the detection limit for the technique, it is unclear why this should be considered of dosimetric significance.

Why were samples from several 40-year olds used in the first paper to calibrate the technique, and then a single sample from a single 60-year old used in the second paper? How sensitive are the dose estimates to the choice of calibration sample? Detection limits are not so much as mentioned in either the 2007 paper, or the 2008 paper; why do the team from Massey University not even discuss this issue?

All these questions remain unanswered. Which is disappointing if you're a scientist rather than a lawyer.

Artesian aquifers and Sauber's nose-slot

Sauber have an interesting slot which ducts air from the underside of the nose, and discharges it behind the step on the top surface. Craig Scarborough has a diagram of the slot, and Giorgio Piola also has an elegant drawing of the feature in this week's Autosport.

The best explanation of the slot is that it removes a portion of the boundary layer from the underside of the nose, using the low pressure created on the top surface when the air accelerates over the step. The thinner a boundary layer is, the less liable it is to detach, hence a thinner boundary layer beneath the nose could potentially enhance the quality of the airflow fed to the underbody of the car.

What Sauber have done, then, is to carve the aerodynamic equivalent of a flowing artesian well, using the pressure gradient between the lower and upper surface of the nose. It is yet another ingenious example of the karstification of Formula 1's aerodynamic landscape.

Ferrari's new sidepods

Ferrari have admitted that they need to re-design the sidepods on their 2012 Formula 1 car to take full advantage of the exhaust-blown effects still available within the current regulations. In fact, the re-design will be sufficiently radical to require a new side-impact crash-test.

So why exactly can't Ferrari just modify their existing sidepods? Mark Hughes explains in this week's Autosport that Ferrari need to move their exhaust exits further forward, thereby requiring a re-arrangement of the sidepod internals.

However, there's perhaps something else here which hasn't received much attention. Ferrari's original sidepods combined the radiator cooling exits with the exhaust outlets, whereas the trend on other cars such as the Red Bull and McLaren, is to separate the two, with a single cooling exit placed at base of the engine cover in the centre of the car.

The idea of having the cooling exit duct co-axial with the exhaust outlet was very popular in the early 2000s, and the reason is that the flow of exhaust gases can be used the increase the mass-flow rate through the cooling system, a phenomenon sometimes referred to as 'aspiration'. If you pull the flow out of the cooling system more quickly, you can get the same mass-flow rate for a smaller inlet area, and a smaller inlet provides aerodynamic benefits. This concept was studied by Parra and Kontis in their 2006 paper, Aerodynamic effectiveness of the flow of exhaust gases in a generic formula one car configuration, published in the The Aeronautical Journal:

"Due to the characteristic configuration of a Formula One car, the exhaust pipes pass through the chamber located directly behind the radiators. This chamber is normally shaped so that it enhances the outflow of gases. However, an extra outflow could be generated by inserting the exhaust pipe into a bigger diameter duct to create a mixing stream. Such mixing is believed to generate an aspiration along the outer duct, based on the same principles of operation as an ejector pump. Because this enveloping duct connects the chamber behind the radiator with the atmosphere, an outflow of gases through this passage would increase the efficiency of the radiator," (p574).

The exhaust outlet on Ferrari's original 2012 sidepod was inside the cooling exit duct, which in turn, was inside a downwardly-inclined funnel at the rear of the sidepods. Thus, Ferrari's original 2012 solution was perhaps a very neat idea: they might have been trying to use the exhaust gas to aspirate the cooling flow, and simultaneously use both the internal cooling flow and the external sidepod flow to pull the exhaust jet downwards.

However, once this failed to achieve the desired exhaust-blown effect, it became necessary to separate the exhaust outlet from the cooling outlet, as seen in testing at Barcelona (pictured). Once the exhaust outlet is separated from the cooling outlet, the mass-flow through the cooling system is no longer aspirated by the exhaust, and it may now be necessary for Ferrari to design a sidepod with a larger cooling inlet, as well as one which brings the exhaust outlet further forwards.

Moreover, with a reduced mass-flow through the radiators, it may be necessary in the interim for Ferrari to turn their engines down slightly, and Stefano Domenicali confirmed in Melbourne that "the car at the moment is slow in a straight line."

Adrian Newey and the chromatic conditions for creativity

"On joining McLaren in 1996, [Adrian Newey] immediately had his drawing office repainted in duck egg blue, a dramatic counterpoint to the muted grey decor that dominated the building.

"Dennis strode in unannounced, took a good long look at his technical director's revisionist taste of colour, and walked out without making a comment. The matter was never raised again," (Alan Henry, Autocourse 2009-2010, p33).

"Researchers...have observed so-called alpha waves, produced when the brain is relaxed but awake...suddenly flood the right brain roughly eight seconds before an idea pops into mind...[Creativity can be encouraged by, amongst other things] the colour blue (working in a blue room tricks the brain into releasing alpha waves)," (Stephen Armstrong, The Sunday Times 18/03/2012, previewing 'How Creativity Works', by Jonah Lehrer).

Mercedes' DRS-activated F-duct

Despite the prohibition on driver-activated aerodynamics other than the DRS, Mercedes have themselves a DRS-activated F-duct ('fluidic switch'). It seems that if a fluidic switch is activated by driver-activated DRS, then that fluidic switch does not constitute driver-activated aerodynamics. Curious.

Speculation continues, however, about the exact purpose of Mercedes' F-duct. There are slots in the undersurface of the front-wing, and Craig Scarborough suggests that the purpose of the system is to blow the front-wing.

Here's another possibility, however. One of the advantages of the active-ride Williams FW14B was that it reduced drag in a straight-line. Here's how:

"We realised in the wind-tunnel that if we lowered the rear and raised the front, you could stall the diffuser and that reduced the drag of the car significantly...I can't remember the figure but that would give them something like an extra 10 kph," (Adrian Newey, p233-234 in Williams, Maurice Hamilton, 2009).

So could Mercedes be stalling the diffuser somehow? The diffuser downforce depends upon the vortices which peel off its lateral edges, hence if one could blow these edges, one might be able to stall the diffuser.

Smallest racing car ever

Jan Torgersen and colleagues from the Vienna University of Technology have created a racing car four times the width of a human hair.

Such small scales are low Reynolds-number environments, where viscosity dominates inertial forces, and turbulence is of diminishing significance. It is difficult to avoid concluding that the quality of the racing will be intrinsically better in follicular Formula One.