The 1982 Grand Prix season: A bibliography

Autocourse 1982 (Maurice Hamilton).

Decent race reports from Maurice Hamilton, old-style lapcharts, and an excellent technical survey from Doug Nye. Photography, however, is mainly black-and-white, and fairly average.

1982: The inside story of a sensational Grand Prix season (Christopher Hilton, Haynes 2007).

A desert-island book, this one. A superb account of the season, full of insight from the major players. Good selection of photographic images as well.

Autosport 1982 (Nigel Roebuck, available on Autosport.com).

The best race reports from 1982. Roebuck at his peak: pithy, judgemental, and on occasion, devastatingly sarcastic. Although there's a somewhat curious over-use of ellipsis...Only disappointment of the downloadable versions is the photography, which consists of some very bland images from the LAT archive.

When F1 Ran Wild (Autosport, August 16th 2012).

Interesting Mark Hughes profile of Keke Rosberg, and Frank Dernie annotated cutaway of FW08, but the latter is less informative than one would have wished (compare and contrast with Frank's guide to the FW07 in Motorsport, November 2004, pp75-77).

Formula One's Wildest Year, (Motorsport Magazine, February 2002).

Short insights into a particular facet of each race from various authors, but accompanied by Keke Rosberg's race-by-race recollection of the season. For this reason alone, indispensable.

Autosport and 1982

A 1982 extravaganza is promised this week, both in Autosport magazine, and on Autosport.com. The latter, in particular, are undertaking to publish all of Nigel Roebuck's 1982 race reports, and this will be a real treat.

Back in the 1980s, there seemed to be an understanding that the entire race weekend provided a captivating story, replete with numerous strands, which could be followed from practice on Friday all the way through to the end of the race. Each report duly began with an 'Entry and Qualifying' section, in which the context for the weekend was established, the main plot-lines drawn, and the technical innovations were explained, all tied together via anecdotes and conversations with the drivers. 

To some degree, things have changed irreversibly in the years since: the drivers are no longer directly accessible to journalists, and practice no longer features the mechanical dramas it once did. The engineers, however, continue to be reasonably open to enquiry, and there is still very much a weekend-long story to be charted. Thus, whilst the quality of the technical information these days is incomparably superior, and whilst the writers themselves are not to blame, something important has been lost from motorsport journalism.

Anyway, as some recompense, enjoy the video above of Keke demonstrating the art of overtaking at Zandvoort. Pay particular attention to how close he's able to sit behind Tambay going through Bos Uit, the fast corner onto the main straight. 

And watch out for Warwick's rear wing flying off in the corner of the picture as Rosberg overtakes Lauda!

Experimental British Nuclear Reactors

The book featured here was published by the Atomic Energy Research Establishment in 1960. It contains cutaway drawings of several British reactors. All the experimental reactors featured have now been shut-down. Replacements have not been commissioned.

Suffice to say, there are no plans for a second edition of the book.

Publications you can look forward to, however, include the following:




Indian Nuclear Reactors
Iranian Nuclear Reactors
The Occidental power crisis of 2025
The technological decline of the West
The Triumph of the Thickos

The Grid Girls' Guide to Wind-tunnel/CFD Correlation

A number of grid girls have contacted me recently, complaining that the F1 Show on SkySports fails to provide the level of informative technical discussion they seek in a programme nominally targeted at the motorsport enthusiast.

In particular, they've asked to understand a little more about the correlation issues which crop up between Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), wind-tunnel testing, and full-scale track testing. 

Perhaps the best way to begin such an explanation is to introduce the concept of a commutative diagram, familiar to all mathematically inclined grid girls.

The idea here is that two operations can be applied to object A. One operation is depicted as a horizontal path, the other as a vertical path. If the same result is obtained irrespective of the order in which the operations are applied, then the operations are commutative. In terms of the labelling in this particular version of the diagram, it is written that:



Now, in the motorsport arena, aerodynamic data can be acquired by four distinct means: (A) Scale-model CFD simulation; (B) Scale-model testing in the wind-tunnel; (C) Full-scale CFD simulation; and (D) Full-scale track testing. 

Whilst the data acquired from full-scale track testing can be treated as veridical, it has increasingly been considered to be an expensive means of generating such information, and has therefore become a severely limited form of data acquisition. This has placed greater emphasis on CFD and wind-tunnel testing. However, both of the latter techniques have systematic errors associated with them, and to go from one data set to another requires the application of correction factors and more general mathematical transformations. For example, scale-model testing in the wind-tunnel can only be mapped to full-scale data if correction factors are applied for the blockage imposed by the walls of the wind-tunnel. Moreover, it is impossible to replicate both the Reynolds number and the Mach number of the full-scale flow with a scale model, hence Reynolds number corrections must be introduced.

Given any pair of data-sets, if one of them can be treated as veridical, then a regression analysis can establish the corrections which must be applied to compensate for the bias of the non-veridical data-set. One might, for example, have CFD and wind-tunnel coefficient-of-lift (C_L) values for each combination of ride-height and angle-of-attack. By allowing a single parameter to vary (e.g. angle of attack), a particular set of paired C_L-values can be isolated and represented as a scatter-plot, the x-coordinate of each data-point being the wind-tunnel C_L-value, the y-coordinate being the CFD C_L-value. A regression analysis then establishes a functional relationship between the CFD coefficients and the wind-tunnel coefficients.

A vital test to ensure that one has a self-consistent scheme of correctional transformations is to test for the commutativity of these relationships. Thus, for example, if one begins with a set of half-scale wind-tunnel data, one should be able to: (i) map the half-scale wind-tunnel data to scale-model CFD data, then map the scale-model CFD data to full-scale CFD data, and then map the full-scale CFD data to full-scale track testing data;  (ii) map the half-scale wind-tunnel data directly to full-scale track testing data; and (iii) the results of these two transformations should be in agreement, within some reasonable approximation. If there is any doubt, the results should be statistically tested with something like Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) to determine if the variation is simply the result of random sampling error.

Similarly, one should be able to start with half-scale CFD data, and map the results to full-scale track testing data by the two possible routes, without getting different results. In terms of the commutative diagram we started off with, there actually needs to be a bi-directional arrow between objects A and B.

As ever, the generalities are simple, the implementation difficult and messy.

A query about the BT42/44

Gordon Murray's place in the F1 design pantheon is assured, but a question arises over the aerodynamics of the iconic BT42 and BT44.

Speaking to David Tremayne some years ago, Murray explained his rationale as follows:

"I knew a lot about aerodynamics from practical experience. With any moving form you have a stagnation point where air meets it and decides how much is going to flow over, below or around it...I decided, instead of presenting some sort of parabolic-shaped bluff body to the air, I wouldn't give the air a chance." He sketches a triangular shape. "That way the stagnation point was there," he says, pointing to the leading edge of the triangle's base, which is very low to the ground. "So all the air had to go over the top and you had the minimum coming under the car," (F1 Magazine, May 2001, p140-141).

Murray spoke about this issue more recently on the BBC4 documentary, 'How to go faster and influence people':

"The BT42 was like an upturned saucer...so very little air went underneath the car and most of it went over the top, because all the air that goes under the car produces lift, which counteracts the downforce you're getting from the wings."

This leaves me slightly confused, for a couple of reasons: (i) my understanding is that air going over the top of the car will be accelerated by the curvature, and will therefore produce lift; and (ii) the best way to generate downforce is to turn the region between the ground plane and the floor of the car into a mobile nozzle.

The greater the mass-flow beneath the car, the better; hence the presence of a diffuser, whose 'pumping effect' is maximised by increasing the ratio between the outlet area and the area of minimum cross-section at the leading edge of the floor. The raised nose on a contemporary F1 car also presumably contributes to increasing mass-flow under the car, although it's also designed to minimise the turbulent intensity of the air feeding the underbody.

But Gordon Murray is clearly no mug, so why does he think that it's important to minimise the air going under the car? My best guess is that Murray's idea was specific to cars from the 1970s, which lacked diffusers and raised noses. If there's no diffuser pumping air under the car, then perhaps excess underbody flow can be detrimental.

Gordon Murray's future F1 vision

This month's Motorsport Magazine revisits Gordon Murray's year 2000 vision for the future of Formula 1 (pictured above): a largely wingless, gas-turbine powered car, with wheel fairings, surface cooling, and a driver in a g-suit under a canopy.

One thing I would disagree with is the gas turbine; the 21st century should be about liberating nuclear energy, not chemical energy. I would therefore propose instead a mini nuclear reactor, a slightly smaller version of the US Hyperion reactor design suggested several years ago. The core of this reactor employs low-enriched uranium-hydride UH₃ to obtain a negative coefficient of reactivity.

Whilst the neutrons released in fission have a mean energy around 1 MeV, the uranium-235 fission cross-section is highest at thermal neutron energies, at or below 0.025eV. Hence, to maintain a fission chain-reaction, it is necessary to moderate the energy of the neutrons, and elastic collisions between the neutrons and hydrogen nuclei are an efficient means to achieve this. "If the uranium hydride gets too hot, the hydrogen is driven out of the uranium metal and the chain reaction stops. But as the system is sealed, the hydrogen flows back into the uranium when it has cooled, allowing the reaction to restart." This provides an intrinsically safe, negative coefficient of reactivity.

I'm also worried that Gordon's future vision might generate lift rather than downforce, so I might add a diffuser or a couple of venturi tunnels under the car in the style of Ben Bowlby's recent DeltaWing design. But that's another story...

The Great Interregnum

A large collection of dullards have recently assembled in London, and appear to be generating more than a modicum of media attention. Normally, this would just signal the opening of the annual Police Federation conference, but on this occasion it seems the fuss concerns a bunch of masochistic minority sports, many of which suffer an apparent absence of technological development.

If, however, you find this all rather tiresome, then just try to look upon it as an arms-race, by proxy, between underworld pharmaceutical purveyors and accredited analytical chemists. Seen from this perspective, it's almost as interesting as Formula One.

Oh, and watch out for the Red Bull sponsored pole vaulters, who've devised a means of manually lowering the bar, against the regulations, but are permitted to continue competing because they say they haven't actually used it. It's a non-issue, apparently.

The pain engendered by the Anabolics, however, is as nothing compared to that caused by the five-week break before the next Grand Prix. There may have been comparable in-season gaps before, but perhaps they occurred when the racing was a little less interesting than it has been this year. Going back several decades, there was a similarly interminable five-week break in 1983 between the Canadian and British Grands Prix, but on that occasion the latter race was still being held on a Saturday, so strictly speaking the break was only 34 days in length.

So, how to bridge this gap? Well, here's a thought experiment for starters: What would happen if diffusers were completely banned? Would it still be advantageous to have a raised nose, or does the latter depend upon the so-called 'pumping effect' of the diffuser? Without a diffuser, would a raised nose increase the mass-flow rate under the car?

Secondly, suppose that the underbody regulations were completely opened up, so that anything was permitted. If you designed a car with underbody venturi tunnels and sliding skirts, would it still be advantageous to have a raised nose and diffuser? Would a car with a raised nose, sliding skirts, venturi tunnels, and a diffuser, corner so fast that the drivers would need g-suits? What sort of lap-time would be achieved around Brands Hatch by such a car equipped with a 1.5 litre V6 twin-turbo engine, pumping out over 1,000bhp?

Red Bull's engine maps

Mark Hughes has a revealing explanation on the Sky F1 website of the engine map loophole exploited by Red Bull last weekend. As the regulations are written, the torque demand at full-throttle, at any engine speed, can be reduced from the maximum possible torque demand at those revs by retarding/advancing the ignition.

In fact, on the basis of the regulations quoted here, it would even be permissible for the full-throttle torque demand to decrease as the engine speed increases. There seem to be three relevant regulations in this respect, 5.5.3, 5.5.5 and 5.5.6:

5.5.3  The maximum accelerator pedal travel position must correspond to an engine torque demand equal to or greater than the maximum engine torque at the measured engine speed.

5.5.5 At any given engine speed the driver torque demand map must be monotonically increasing for an increase in accelerator pedal position.

5.5.6 At any given accelerator pedal position and above 5,000rpm, the driver torque demand map must not have a gradient of less than – (minus) 0.030Nm / rpm.

Now, 5.5.5 is a condition which applies at 'any given engine speed'. Thus, at any fixed engine speed, the torque demand must be a monotonically increasing function of accelerator pedal position. This does not entail that the maximum torque demand must be a monotonically increasing function of engine revs; 5.5.5 quite specifically applies to a function at a fixed engine speed.

Similarly, 5.5.3 requires that at each fixed engine speed, the maximum accelerator pedal position generates a torque demand greater than or equal to the maximum torque demand at that fixed engine speed. Once again, this condition applies to a function at a fixed engine speed, not to a function of engine speed. In fact, 5.5.3 is entailed by 5.5.5, and is, strictly speaking, logically redundant.

Perhaps the FIA had something else in mind...

A solution to Silverstone's parking problems?

Following the quagmire-induced congestion at Silverstone last week, the circuit has discounted the possibility of transforming the grass car parks into asphalt, Autosport reporting that "it would be hugely expensive and it's unlikely that Silverstone would get planning permission...It's also deeply questionable whether it's right to coat fields in asphalt for parking for three days a year," (p12, July 12th, 2012) .

But why not erect temporary upper storeys on all the existing asphalt car parks? One purveyor of these solutions is Another Level:

Another Level Pioneered the development of the concept of the Portable, Modular Multi-Storey Car park. The company invented, designed and developed this pioneering concept of a solid, safe and portable modular deck structure that simply sits over you existing car park allowing you to nearly double its capacity. The benefit of the demountable nature is apparent on both multi storey, and single story applications.

Another Level has both the experience and capability with nearly 30 installations and by far the largest fleet of decks available for nationwide installation.

Our experienced team coupled with world-class purpose built equipment are able to assemble a 124 space modular deck car park in 3 1/2 days.

With every installation to date the existing car park’s surface has been adequate to support the structure without the need for traditional foundations. This eliminates the risk of disturbing contaminated land, underground services and archaeological remains.

Given that Silverstone need to accommodate tens of thousands of cars, it wouldn't solve all their problems, but combined with extra park-and-ride, it might be part of the solution.

Aerodynamic wheel-wing interaction

In 2007 Martinus van den Berg published a PhD thesis on the interaction between a rotating wheel and an inverted wing. The research was sponsored by the Honda F1 team, which has, of course, evolved into the Mercedes F1 team; the same team responsible for the 2012 front-wing F-duct.

The most interesting conclusion of van den Berg's research was that the front-wheel drag is greater at high front-wing ride-heights than it is at low ride-heights.

Figure 1: High ride-height, high wheel drag

Previous research conducted by James McManus (who was snapped up by McLaren before completing his PhD) had identified that the flow field of an isolated rotating wheel contains an arch vortex in the upper region of the near wake (E and F in Figure 1), and a pair of counter-rotating vortices in the lower, ground-level region of the near wake (H and I). There is also a bow wave (D) created by the upstream side of the contact patch. 

When an inverted wing equipped with an endplate is placed in front of such a rotating wheel, van den Berg identified three further primary flow features: a vortex from the upper edge of the endplate (A); a vortex from the junction between the trailing edge of the flap and the endplate (B); and a vortex from the lower edge of the endplate (C).

With a 50% scale 580mm front wing-span (relevant to pre-2009 F1 regulations), van den Berg identified that the top edge front-wing vortex passes over the crown of the wheel at high ride-heights (Figure 1), but passes inside the wheel at low ride-heights (Figure 2). At high ride-heights this vortex over the crown keeps the flow attached for longer, increasing the lift of the wheel, and creating a zone of re-circulation (G) behind the wheel, which increases the wheel drag:

"When this vortex...passes over the wheel it starts a strong interaction with the wheel vortex originating from the top of the wheel (feature “F”), the vortex originating from the flap trailing edge (TE) junction (feature “B”) and the lower edge vortex (feature “C”), accumulating in a strong circulation," (Journal of Fluids Engineering, October 2009, Vol. 131).

Figure 2 shows the flow field at a lower front-wing ride-height, where the top-edge vortex goes inside the wheel. In addition, it can be seen that both the bow wave to the inboard side of the wheel, and the inside leg of the counter-rotating vortex pair in the wheel wake, have been replaced by the vortex generated by the bottom-edge of the front-wing, which is strengthened in ground-effect.



Figure 2: Low ride-height, low wheel drag

At first sight, this might seem to be inconsistent with the concept of the 2012 F-duct, which stalls the front-wing, and permits the front ride-height to increase, with the intention of reducing drag (and balancing front-rear downforce when the DRS is operated). One presumes, however, that the reason for this discrepancy is that the research was conducted with a narrow, pre-2009 front-wing, the endplates of which were on the inboard side of the wheel. Post-2009, with 1800mm wide front-wings, the endplates and the vortices they generate, lie upstream of the outer shoulder of the wheel. It may be that the top-edge vortex now goes outside the front-wheel at all front-wing ride-heights, and certainly the outward curvature of the front-wing endplates would achieve this.

One note of caution should be sounded here: the Figures reproduced above are obtained from steady-state simulations, whereas the actual flow in the wheel-wake tends to flap about in an unsteady manner, as close observation of the water droplets shed by the wheel in wet-weather conditions reveals. Flow features which appear to exist in a steady simulation are sometimes completely absent in the instantaneous flow fields of an unsteady simulation.

A guide to the Higgs boson for the perplexed

Mass and the Higgs field

The standard model of particle physics is an application of quantum field theory, and the latter holds that the fundamental structure of the physical world consists of quantum fields on space-time. Within quantum field theory, particles are represented as localised excitation states of the underlying quantum fields.

One of the fields postulated by the standard model is the Higgs field. The excitation states of the Higgs field are Higgs bosons. Whilst the Higgs field permeates all of space, Higgs bosons are localised excitations of that field, and at the energy levels available in a universe 14 billion years old, these are difficult to produce.

According to modern cosmology, the Higgs field dropped into its 'vacuum' state (i.e., its lowest energy state) when the universe was only 10^-11 s old. However, the potential energy function of the Higgs field is such that its lowest energy state corresponds to a non-zero value of the Higgs field. This value is referred to as the vacuum expectation value of the Higgs field.

The Higgs field is represented to interact with all the quarks and all the leptons (e.g. electrons) in the universe. When the universe was younger than 10^-11 s, the quarks and leptons were believed to be massless. Since the time at which the Higgs field dropped into its vacuum state, the non-zero vacuum expectation value of the Higgs field is considered to be responsible for the masses of the quarks and leptons.

The Higgs field is also a self-interacting field, so the Higgs field is considered to be responsible for the mass of the Higgs boson itself.

The statistics of Higgs detection

Figure 1

The Higgs boson has not been directly detected at CERN. Instead, the Higgs decays into various different particles which can be detected. For example, sometimes the Higgs decays into a pair of gamma-ray photons, and sometimes it decays into a pair of Z particles. These are referred to as detection ‘channels’.

For example, Figure 1 depicts the number of gamma-gamma detection events as a function of their energy. The red dotted line plots the ‘background’, which in this context is the number of expected gamma-gamma events, as a function of energy, if the Higgs boson hadn’t been produced.

Assuming there is no Higgs production, at each energy level there is a normal (‘Gaussian’) distribution over the number of detection events (see Figure 2). This distribution has a standard deviation (‘sigma’), and by taking integer multiples of sigma, confidence bars can be plotted either side of the red dotted line in Figure 1.

This approach enables one to estimate the probability of a false positive. Thus, if the number of detection events at a particular energy is outside the 3sigma bars, it means that the probability of that result being produced by the play of chance alone is less than 0.3%. By requiring a result to be established at the 5sigma level, this means that the probability of it being a false positive is less than 0.0001%.

Figure 2

In the case of Figure 1, the result from the CMS detector, there appears to be a particle which has decayed into pairs of gamma-ray photons with an energy of 125 GeV, at the 5sigma level of confidence.

A couple of other points should be noted from Figure 1. Firstly, particle physicists use the term ‘luminosity’ to refer to the flux, and 'integrated luminosity' to refer to the ‘fluence’. The latter is the total number of incident particles per unit area over the course of the experiment.

The standard unit of integrated luminosity in use at CERN is the inverse femtobarn (fb^-1). A barn (b) is 10^-24 cm², and a femtobarn is 10^-15 b. Thus, an integrated luminosity of 5.3 fb^-1 means that there was a fluence of 5.3 particles per femtobarn of area.

The number of detected events, (in the case of Figure 1 the bump at 125 GeV), is dubbed the ‘signal strength’. Now, in general, the number of reactions per unit fluence is called the ‘cross-section’ of a reaction, and is specified in units of area. Thus, by multiplying the fluence (integrated luminosity) with the cross-section for Higgs production, the number of Higgs particle production events can be estimated.

However, only a fraction of the Higgs particles will decay into pairs of gamma-rays, and this fraction is specified by the so-called ‘branching ratio’. Thus, the number of detection events N in a particular channel will be the product of the fluence F with the Higgs production cross-section C and the branching ratio R for that channel:

N = F x C x R

Given the experimentally ascertained signal strength, and the known fluence, the quantum field theory for the Higgs field must supply a consistent Higgs production cross-section and branching ratio.